Ode to the Beatles and John Ono Lennon

Anyone whom I’ve allowed to truly know me knows I love the Beatles and more specifically, John Ono Lennon.

Flashback to December 9, 1980: I was exactly a week shy of my thirteenth birthday when I walked into the classroom to find my teacher crying buckets and pressing rewind on her tape deck. I had no idea what was going on that would make my normally stalwart yet compassionate teacher forgo teacher-student protocol but it made me curious to say the least.

As John himself said, his last album, Double Fantasy, was about him and Yoko and was also oriented to people of his generation, which I, almost thirteen, 27 years younger than him, was not. Still, as an alienated, immigrant teenager struggling to find my way, what I managed to read about him, Yoko and the Beatles in that pre-Internet age, spoke to me in such a way it still resonates to this day, when I am older than he was allowed to be.

Yes, I am in my feelings about the Beatles and John Lennon. So here are videos:

As I wrote above, I am 27 years younger that JOL (John Ono Lennon) which means that I am, partly, of the (real) punk generation.  What does that mean? It means that this is one of my favorite songs of “his”. It means that I not only don’t have a problem with Yoko’s vocals in this song but actually, truly, enjoy it.

 

This.

As someone who has shut a significant amount of doors (aka just had to let them go) in order to raise my son in a way that will allow his black nerd self to thrive in this nation which has consistently refused to respect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, watching the wheels go round and round is devastating and heart-breaking. Yet the fact that the wheels go round and round means that what is up will come down and what is down will come up and in that vein, it doesn’t significantly  matter, that people (family and friends) call me lazy because I, currently, do not work outside the home (folks don’t consider blog posts and writing poetry to be “actual” work).

 

I include this one because JOL could be a perfect asshole lyrically when he was enraged. In other words, he was not perfect and I embrace his imperfections (especially because time has proven “Sir” Paul to be a perfect wanker). I could, possibly, embrace “Sir” Paul’s imperfections except I can’t bear to listen to him. So it goes. I am not perfect, either.

 

This…because I’m a womanist and because JOL “perfect assholeness” includes how he treated women. And also, because he recognized that he needed to acknowledge, publicly, that, yes, he profoundly loved Yoko but also that their relationship broke him out of the prison that was Beatlemania. Before Yoko, he expressed his angst about Beatlemania with semi-trite songs like Help and Nowhere Man. After he met and got involved with Yoko, it was All You Need is Love and Imagine, etc. She was his muse in ways that Beatlemaniacs still don’t acknowledge or respect to this day, 36 years after his death. Kudos to Yoko for staying her path.

 

 

Ross Gay’s Unabashed Gratitude: A Review

I am usually one who avoids reading, let alone reviewing, books until hype had died down. I didn’t change that protocol for Ross Gay and his absolutely sublime Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude even though I had read a poem by him that I absolutely loved in Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Even though I am a poet, it is very rare for me to say that I love a poet’s work because more often than not, I don’t. A poet has to have very special qualities for me to add them to my “love to read” column. I’m sure that they are more academically-educated poets who will wax enthusiastic about Mr. Gay utilizing all the academic terminology at their disposal. This is not that type of review for the simple reason that his poetry makes me happy and yes, grateful.

My feeling (not thought) is dual: he is loved…and he loves those who love him and perhaps fundamentally, loves our planet, Earth. When he writes in “to the mulberry bush” of gobbling berries that a bird has shit on, I feel his joy, his temporal disgust, his delight, his journey from bird to bush to his relationship, I feel the “unabashed gratitude”. As I wrote earlier, he is loved and loves those who love him and our planet and it comes across so clearly, so delightedly, I feel my own unabashed gratitude for his poetry.

That is, essentially, what I wanted to express about this physically slim yet spiritually huge book of poetry: unabashed gratitude.

 

Scrimmaging the Beatles (I’ve Got a Feeling Remixed)

I’ve got a feeling
everyone knows I had a hard year
but they don’t know
I missed the train
yet still managed
to see my son shine.

I’ve got a feeling
that keeps me
on my toes and in throe
but I still missed the train.

I am not alone.

Everybody had a wet dream.
Everybody had a good time.
Everybody had a hard year.
Everybody saw my son shine.

Everyone had a hard year.
Everyone laid our Prince down
and pulled their purple out
but not everyone put Drumpf down.

Flora and Fauna

Flora and Fauna

I wanted to bless my eyes this morning
with flora and fauna
so I came in from the cold
of a dream full of unrelenting rain
and opened my eyes to what is customarily
my second sighting of the day:

My ideological father
shot down in the Audubon ballroom
where the only bird observed in motion
was the misappropriated eagle

until the phoenix rose
from the ash of a murderous minstrel show
and transformed into a panther

which prowled
oakland to wounded knee
philadelphia to palestine
roaring revolution
until every generation
generated an evolution
of the message

thought to be dead forever
by those who are as white as the bones
of the myriad numbers of people
whose deaths they are accountable for.

© 2006 Tichaona M.Chinyelu

Prince

I don’t remember the first time I heard him. I was too young, even though he was only 8 years older than me.

My mother and I had left the 1st household we lived in this country as a result of my aunt’s Imam husband’s directive that my mother stop seeing my stepfather. We moved into a house that my aunt owned and there started my  (as opposed to my mother’s) first introduction to the African diaspora. In my poem Blood Will Tell (My Mother’s Song), I referred to them as “block mothers” but that was poetic license. There were black men there as well. They played whisk, gin rummy, etc but when they played Prince, we children were ordered to leave. Because…Head and Do Me Baby.

Flash forward a few years and there was Chaka Khan and I Feel For You (written by the Purple One Himself, in case you, dear reader, are not old enough to remember/know).  

A few years after that, there was high school: Purple Rain; Sinéad and No One Compares to You (also written by THE Purple One.) Purple Rain was all the rage. We giggled about Dirty Nikki and “masturbating in a magazine”. We knew (and sang) every single word of When Doves Cry.

What I’ve written so far is just to show that Prince has been a mainstay of my music listening life for…forever. There is not a period of my life which is absent of Prince and his influence.

The first college I attended, I became “friends” with a white girl who I remember saying “it takes a real man to wear heels”. She meant Prince. She may (or may not) have been familiar with (or cognizant of)  James Brown wearing heels but regardless, Prince spoke to her enough that she recognized something about HIM that spoke to her and enabled her to speak out when her friends said he was gay (back when that was a “bad” word).

I could write more and probably will but for now, let His Purple Highness speak for himself, as he did so, so well!

Bookshelf Cento (NaPoMo #2)

Sisters mine, beloveds
those bones are not my child.
I am a woman at point zero;
unburnable.
The wind done gone
into a dark alliance
forged from the devil’s pulpit.

Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon
a mercy, please.
Let’s make dust tracks
and leave the dilemma of this ghost
to those who live in a city so grand..
Those bones are not my child.

Word of mouth spread
among the not-so-little women
with no technical difficulties.
The blues people, midwives
to a people’s history,
who believed horses
make a landscape look more beautiful,
shed petals of blood
as they walked on fire
to grieve
in a land without thunder.

 

 

Book titles used in this piece:

Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson

Beloved and A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Those Bones are not my Child by Toni Cade Bambara

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi

Unburnable by Marie-Elena John

The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall

Dark Alliance by Gary Webb

From the Devil’s Pulpit by John Agard

Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon, ed. Ann Wallace

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Dilemma of a Ghost by Ama Ata Aidoo  

A City So Grand by Stephen Puleo

Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Technical Difficulties by June Jordan

Blues People by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Midwives by Chris Bohjalian

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful by Alice Walker

Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance, ed. Beverly Bell

Land without Thunder by Grace Ogot

The Architect’s Tale (NaPoMo #1)

Every year when April approaches, I find myself getting all skittery about it because since I found out about it, I have never been able to write a poem for every single day of the month. But I keep trying. The poet in me demands it. So here I am again, April 1st starting the game all over again.

This is my first piece of the month:

An Architect’s Tale

A dream
held since childhood
to see a building form
from flat paper
to a structure
that houses workers
and the engine
that pushes them.

I set to out wonder the Sphinx.
Cloaked in meekness
low-heeled shoes
and glasses
(clara, not clark, kent)
I battered battalion-like rungs
to get a building
that was mine
all mine.

But the wind and its cohorts
levelled the dream, the building
in a matter of minutes
and sent me, (clara, not clark kent)
scurrying to an ancient cave
where the only thing to build
was a fire.

I built that fire
until it consumed everything
including me.