This first bundle of poems were originally published in the NYC Anarchist Black Cross newsletter, which can be accessed here: https://nycabc.wordpress.com/pppow-updates-announcements/
Contents
Prison Mailroom Worker Blues
Economic Disadvantage
Partial Invitation
Chemical Discrepancy
Flexibility
Vertical Fall
Redress
{Untitled}
Petulance
Condemnation
Mother
dead time
January 17, 2015
Prison Existence
Cleveland, i miss ur misery
Futile wanderings in a white abyss
Weeping the world
An opening, darkening
Despicable, calculated, vicious
How can lips possess so much?
The tyranny of distance
Fire
Prison Mailroom Worker Blues
July 16, 2012
every day of my life (sometimes even Sundays)
“the children can’t wait to hear from you. I’ll be waiting every day for your call”
“we both know you’re innocent – just hold in there, God will straighten this out”
“the bills keep stacking up & I don’t know how much longer I can go on feeding the kids. Don’t mean to make it worse.”
“hey sweet thing, hopefully you’ll get transferred to somewhere we can get closer at…”
“you fucked up your life for 8 years but that wasn’t enough – now you’re dragging me & the kids into this?!”
“don’t blame me, and don’t expect to receive another letter. Don’t bother calling”
“I wish I could talk to you right now and be with you”
“do you know what time it is?”
“if you are the dreamer, I am what you dream”
“You’re easily one of the best dudes I’ve ever known. And I mean that. I really do.”
“”I hope you know you are not alone. I have heard from people all over the country who know for a fact you are all innocent and were framed by the FBI… Dare to struggle.”
“I only know you by the way you prayed in the Lodge. I know of your desire for a better world… your heart is good…you have suffered the pain from our collective world…choose that love & courage… make room…”
“The sun just slipped behind a cloud & it makes me wonder if you even have a window…”
“There is a crescent moon that’s almost blood red”
“make them fear the beard”
“Every moment of every day we, everyone, are talking, crying, and thinking of you boys.”
“political prisoners in a country that doesn’t recognize political prisoners… and yet that is exactly what you are.”
“letter from a private prison lead to a Green Revolution, From a Man Who Can’t Stop Laughing”
“…the ‘A’ word is evolving…”
“I never got back to you…you were asking for help, asking for a way out. I could have helped you.”
“you are truly my motivation for getting out of bed…your strength is carrying me…”
“he understands that the men in the shadows are manipulative & power hungry, without any good intentions”
“I believe we have the ability to transcend. By the Grace of God!”
“he ‘cried like a baby for a long time’”
“(your niece) said to tell you “I love you with all my heart just like grandma does”
“he’s smart enough to know what’s going on in this world & it hurts him deeply”
“I hope you get this ASAP and it makes you laugh that goofy little laugh we all love.”
“writing may turn out to be your thin thread through the labyrinth to freedom”
“as you fall through the stone to the Earth itself, there will be an expansive warmth you will sense”
“last time I ran into you, you were handing out meals to needy people”
“you made me a card… written in your own blood”
“you seemed so sad…agitated…down…”
“your mind is free, your heart is free, your soul is free…what else matters”
“a billion stars go spinning through the night”
“blazing high above your head”
“But in you in the presence that will be when all the stars are dead”
and we will never meet, you in the SHU,
me, confined to the solitude of the mail room but once, in passing, you looked into my eyes…
You, shackled… what did you see? I dare not ask, even if I were free to.
I’ve stopped caring. I know what you say, but don’t I have to feed my children? Don’t I have to provide for my house? That those who follow me may be free? Free? . . . So my eyes are cold, they no longer sparkle, that certain twinkle
In the eyes of every little girl, and so I haven’t wept
in fifteen years- in twenty my family has not gone to bed hungry!
The money for their college fund is quickly looking like more than I ever had
They get straight As in grade school and their father hasn’t run out on my
And I only have a few glasses of wine in the evenings
(and even then I don’t come close to tears – sand cannot produce water)
but what more can one expect of me, in the toil of this world?
And who are you to judge me anyway? You’re probably a murderer
Or was found molesting innocent little girls,
or some smack dealer
I never made those mistakes, committed those sins, and yet I still have to work in this miserable job with low pay and no job security, barely any benefits, because there can only be one used car salesman between my husband and I, and the schools in Youngstown are closing as quickly as the prisons are opening, and the prisons are filled as quickly as they’re opened – and my little girls, and my little Joseph aren’t growing up like this, in what this town’s become since the drug dealers took over and the blacks shoot eachother in the streets like animals, along with the spics (they’re even worse!) – they should all be locked-up, then maybe there’d be some more decent jobs for us decent
folks and no one will have to cry again…
So maybe I don’t communicate with people on the level, to the depth,
Of all these in-and-out correspondences I read every day, but my
Husband knows where I stand, and our kids will understand
And I remember a certain rabbit saying something his brother taught him…
You can’t go about blaming “the world” for your problems
The auto industry left – so does that mean morality too?
See, ya’ll simply cannot function like the rest of us
Who follow the rules, and do our jobs, and hold back our tears
Until there are no more to hide
And nothing to say
And there won’t be a college
I’ll settle for a grave.
(The following prose segment were written on September 9, 2013)
Economic Disadvantage
The sun sets and she sits in a small cell, a modest chamber in the stomach of a world that is eating itself. The sun rises and she slowly dresses her body in a khaki uniform, clearly announcing that she is but a mere appendage in a vast and hideous organism. Some call it god, some call it a dream, still others call it progress.
As the sun sits high in the sky she stares out a barred window to a landscape of concrete and concertina wire. She has known this place before, in her childhood, in the form of certain traumas suffered by her soul. A friend commits suicide. The numbness spreads as she discovers that her father is an abusive drunk. There are the boys who taunt her and threaten her with vicious sexual assault.
How can she afford to remain sensitive to the world, she realizes, if it is but a freezing storm without relief?
As the starless night sky still manages, somehow, to conjure memories of better times, she stares out across the gray barbed nihilism of this world, objectified.
She shudders with futility, enveloped by loneliness.
Partial Invitation
He has slept alone every night for the past three years.
Not quite alone, but the only one in his bed.
He curls around his pillow in a tight embrace. Sometimes, as he sleeps, one can hear a faint whimpering, as if the pillow were not enough — as if the vast reservoir of tears refused to burst forth without a warm someone there to receive them.
In three years, he has cried three times.
The world invites him to forget how to weep. A real man whimpers.
Chemical Discrepancy
She cannot understand why, yet she has little choice but to accept what she’s told.
The water is poison — don’t touch it.
That was in kindergarten. In the third grade her mother died of cancer. In the fifth grade her best friend stepped off a very high cliff. Later the same year her uncle stepped in front of a train. In the seventh grade she stopped taking adderal and started taking oxycontin. By the end of the tenth grade she had had one abortion and two miscarriages.
She didn’t care much if the pill was an upper, a downer, a goner.
The world had long since become a gray line.
She had dreams of immense storms roiling through the oceans, as a child.
Around eight years old she thought of the world as an ocean of suffering. When she was twelve a vision came to her, of a beautiful fawn in a forest (had she ever really known a forest before?). The fawn somehow conveyed to her that she should go to a stream at the end of the metro (green line), and listen. That she should always pay attention to her dreams, to the birds, to coyote. Her children would be great warriors. By the time she was eighteen she had forgotten this vision.
She had given up on the idea of love, or children.
She was adrift in a tranquil sea of misery.
She stepped off a chair.
Flexibility
He lays on his back, staring at the ceiling.
What was this overwhelming dream that had swept him up into excruciating ecstasy?
He grins, throbbing, lifting his legs into the air.
Vertical Fall
He became acutely aware that he is an animal.
The crisp cold air floods his nose with purpose, with power.
The bare trees are attempting to blend in with the tall grass surrounding the construction site.
Train tracks and the occasional lightpost perform their duties without hesitation: prophets, harbingers.
The pure air beneath the starless heavens carries its own clear message: resist, smash, burn. But a single coyote stands little chance against the god of progress.
And yet, they don’t stand a chance against our prayers.
Redress
She stares at maps of the future. What is this impression overtaking her?
It has been so long: she feels good about the future.
Yesterday she wept at the thought of so many millions of displaced and drowned children. But today her thoughts are of rejuvenation, of the Earth Mother healing herself.
The situation is one of inevitable defeat, as it currently exists.
Yet things can change so very quickly.
Her dress falls to the floor, exposing bare skin to the refreshing winds of mid-August.
Mother
Mother i have chosen the path of life
Mother i swear to you in this wretched ink that must be waded through like a black swamp
That you will not have to bury me.
The gray skies pull the sorrow
so gracefully condensed into such a short time
to the surface of my face, and in the cold i cough alone
Mother i have forsaken you.
Now i will not shed tears which never comforted me
But where can i go for warmth only found in Mothers?
In this time of sowing cut off from the womb of Mother-earth
i exist on a desolate plain with no fire, no warm embraces
Did we ever know a time of reaping amid all the laughter and lightheartedness of foregone days?
Only by persevering through this darkness can we come to love the flame.
(September 22, 2012)
(Untitled)
I.
The flames enveloping the corpse of the slave
are lapping at the feet of the master.
II.
fleeing from the unsayable warm glow of memory and ash
i am running sideways through things.
III.
the violence inherent in the flesh
beneath his eyes
(February 10, 2015)
Petulance
The feeling of pages in my hands.
This has become my primary reality. That, and the superior transient joys.
The ants crawling across my body. Each one a lesson in patience, in compassion.
The sun summons a flame that rises through my flesh surfacing in blissful golden-brown.
Our bodies dance ’round and come together intertwining all our contradictions.
Words like lust lose their burden.
Loosen yourself inside of me, a rapturous surrender.
Tower over me, a monument of muscle.
(September, 2014)
Condemnation
Condemnation pours forth like magma
Affirmation it seems cannot be found amidst all the bickering in cinder blocks
held by pliers
spat upon by fiends
imitating men.
The most wretched shadows can imitate men. It is nothing special.
But they are, finally, phantasms and incapable of this realness
glimpsed in dreams and sex and prayer
The spit evaporates into nothingness
but here we feel the heat of affirmation
in the breath of a lover
the exchange with a distant being
in a close dream
being cradled by the ancestors
’round that ancient flame
And words do not mean much approaching these lightning bolts burning with realness
and temporality.
i am suffocating because my breath cannot touch your neck.
(October, 2014)
dead time
suicide is on the minds of so many so young
beautiful souls and wretched shells
of former warmth desolate,
to the touch
What kind of space are we passing through?
Were it not for the brevity already ordained in creation’s process
i too would have slipped to such a jagged passing
It’s easy to be pulled in so many frivolous directions
And yet i lose track of my innumerable blessings
What have i done to deserve this?
Why have we come to pass through this space?
January 17, 2015
It would be so much better to crawl into that summer what seems like a lifetime ago
There was the rattle and the thunder the sweat and the tears the hunger and the innocence
The warmth of his companionship, the most intimate i had ever known.
Sitting knee-to-knee eating our soup after soccer, or exercise,
the orange glow of the setting sun spilling through the bars
We talked about everything with our mouths and our hearts and our eyes
We entered into an intimate vulnerability and his beauty overwhelmed me.
i still love him, and am learning to love him more
He walked with me, sat with me, shielded me and set an example for me
and we passed the time together.
What can be said about the love?
It was the greatest i had known and i shiver
at the slightest thought
of those passionate nights
amidst that vast silence.
Prison Existence
Writhing between cinder block, with nowhere to run but into self.
What is it like, being in prison?
Excuses quickly exhaust themselves; tv and worthless entertainment cannot answer the hunger of my soul. In the street, i could flee — or pretend. Now there is no more denial. Nowhere to run. i must change my life. Pain. This is the medium through which i move, the incessant call to action, the catalyst to transformation. Here, i do not attempt to dull it. My flight is limited to forcing memories — of the past as well as the future — from mind, and burying myself in 10,000 intellectual pursuits and sexual fantasies. What do we gain by making it all work, if we lack purpose, and the knowledge of purpose? Take your already outdated toys and your space colonies — they mean nothing by themselves. You will be just as miserable on Mars as you will be in Maryland. What was it those unwitting accomplices uttered? “Marvelous desolation.” You are the marvel, you are the desolation. First we must drink pain, and move through it like a child through water. Learn our lessons in suffering. All of civilization has been a great denial. There is no easy way, no painless panacea. Honor this overflowing pain. The present changes the past. All my memories have been recast. Even the best of them — especially the best of them! — illicit pain. But slowly i learn not to flee. A child, at last, soaking his toes in the frigid waters. What was once a dull uncertainty, roaming the borderlands of the subconscious, becomes illuminated by these flames — from where do these flames spring? They no longer flow from my head, and the once all-consuming fire in my chest has, for now, been reduced to smoldering embers. It is my flesh that is on fire! Or, rather, the flesh i have already shed — all those foregone yesterdays i cannot help but be held captive by, all the way to the womb… For instance, i have many memories, as a child, of riding through Ohio country. Now i become consciously aware of these being some of my first lessons in the ubiquitous tendency of humanity to squander its potential. We cannot, it seems, learn from the experiences of others. But allow me to share the pain of death. A person can get drunk on death. In truth, it seems there is little else worth doing with death. Hence the immense celebrations in so many cultures when faced with death. To be swept up in ecstatic bliss, in this wretched, sacred dance, hurling through some sublime abyss. This seems to be the most sensible, and sensuous, alternative to all that weeping and gnashing of the teeth. But here in prison i no longer embody ecstasy (there was a time, likely never to return), and i am reduced to weeping only. A solitary, silent weeping. And a total condemnation of this reality we have been born into. i often pull away from touch — human touch is no longer sacred or even necessary to me, unless it’s sexual. Ah, but i still enjoy embraces… Who can i mourn this, in the maddening absence of ecstasy? And so my slow death progresses — perhaps the only progress i truly know. Take your gadgets, your stars, your suffocation and your arrogance. All this talk of cradle-to-the-grave — well i was designed in such a way. And it is along that arc that i now progress. But there are many deaths before the end. Nothing i write can tell what i know. You cannot know what it has been like, unless you have passed this way before. i will not let this stop me, for now i am compelled to write. The dead circle ’round me, refusing to quite depart, and in my humble efforts i will flood these pages with this black blood, borne through suffering, a total rejection. What else could really issue forth but blood and flames and misery? i learn to eat it. Everything happens to me now. i am powerless against the world. Yes, i weep, i run, i sweat, i love, i orgasm, i disintegrate. But it is all as though it is happening to another. And it is. Suddenly i realize — or remember — that i am not only writing for the dead, but also for the dying. They envelope me. i hate them and i love them and i wish more than anything to seek repose in the mountains. Why… No, never mind the why. (i am already blind enough) For what purpose… Same question, i suppose… For what purpose am i held here, under such massive pincers, in a cinderblock, squirming to be anywhere but here… To transform my self. But this furnace necessarily produces mutilated men. It is not that i fear i am too weak (frail, obscure, dwarfed, yes). Rather, i am no longer so naive. i have only seen the servants of evil, never the master, if such a master exists. But i have been placed in a furnace which warps souls and mass produces mutilated shadows. i have seen men be destroyed. i have felt my own sanity slip — although i cannot be sure what is slipping, or if i was ever really “sane.” So enough of the foolishness. The reformers, the technofetishists, the futurists, the leftists, the commentators, the eulogizers, the nostalgists, the luddites and the noble scientists forever at the disposal of the defense industry… i am tired of all this.
Cleveland, i miss ur misery
we bury dead gods in unknown soil
grated against the jagged rocks
of sidewalks
pierced by the lying light
shooting off metal
ants swell around soda cans
and intersections
adrift in the police line-ups
of the public buses
yearning for the touch of your breath
of smoke through the snow
dripping sticky down the staircases
and alleys
coagulating blood
lacking ground to stand upon or grass to lay in
The stomach turns to cement in the onslaught
of broken bottles,
elevators gunshots and dog barks,
butts
the dying loved ones
and the thriving fools,
that great inert mass of cold indifference:
The City.
(October 25, 2015)
Futile wanderings in a white abyss
In this intimate space, this darkness between the dumb white of the page
and the blinding light of being i must make a confession.
i hate writing poetry.
It is like a ghetto riot
like a thorough war
like a night of drunkenness
like a wet dream
like some sticky cathartic process that leaves me feeling empty,
drained
robbed
Where have my tears gone? What wretched force has dammed up my weeping?
Perhaps if i abandoned poetry like i have abandoned intoxication
like i have abandoned hopelessness
like i have abandoned godlessness
like i have abandoned self-indulgence
Then i would be able to go on weeping and teeth-gnashing all through the night
until i could all but feel
God bearing down upon me.
(February 19, 2016)
Weeping the World
There are moments so small we are thought crazy for thinking they matter
but their gravity warps our very Being with their passing.
How can I speak to the dead? Why bother speaking to the living?
Here, in this pile of graphite and wood dust I exist suspended between the two.
There is the carcass of a lady bug that left me weeping.
The world within a grain of coffee envelops me entirely.
Do you know what it means to inch along the cold concrete floor through the cobwebs and urine?
Do you think, really, the world is so small?
I have spent years in a single puff of smoke.
It is so easy to get lost where a strand of hair meets the eraser shavings.
Or to wander dazed in the scent of animal musk.
Who encompasses all of this?
It is to the Source that I am falling.
(April 25, 2016)
An opening, darkening
Beauty exists
Between the concrete
and concertina
even here
suspended
by a hair-thin rope of steel,
the finality
of six walls
Beauty endures
but there is a lesson
buried beneath the beast’s boot:
We must learn to make our beauty light,
to feed it only raw essence
For how else can we survive
but to fling our hearts into the vast sky?
Despicable, calculated, vicious
Yesterday they stood grinning over the corpses of black men
with illusions of immunity
Speaking of patience, healing
Today with voices subdued they stumble as though half asleep
with illusions of unity
Speaking of patience, healing
They say how tragic it is that some police were killed in the line of duty
And mumble about patriotism
But this does nothing but amuse us,
the oppressed, for we know
They are the killers
enforcers of white supremacy
enforcers of poverty
enforcers of misery
They speak of a race war
when white supremacy comes under fire
And speak of progress
when black men are gunned down on camera
But we know
All the SWAT teams and propaganda in the whole world cannot stop the onsetting storm.
We will grind this empire into dust
with the names of the slain
still on our tongues.
(July 9, 2016)
How can lips possess so much?
Twenty-four years of lonely nights
Ten thousand gallons of alcohol
Countless moments of inexpressible joy
A hundred suicidal thoughts
A dozen street clashes and unrequited loves
Twenty-four years of waking to the unknown
and drifting through the endless mysteries
To be bound and gagged,
dragged in chains across the final empire,
buried beneath sun and steel
Wandering across a desolate terrain of shattered minds
Lost in so many brown eyes
And caresses
drifting across the faces of a dozen strangers
And all of this so that I may arrive
to receive the light glistening
from your lips.
(July 11, 2016)
The tyranny of distance
A crowded desert
is still a desert
And out of touch
with you
is impossibly distant
My blood
runs wild and loose
and still
i cannot reach you.
i
would trade
every drop
to overcome this tyranny of distance.
(March 17, 2018)
Fire
There is more warmth
in the fire of your eyes
Than any soul can consume
in a lifetime.
There is more
heat
in the truth
than in a burning cop car.
There is more
truth
in a burning cop car
than in all
the news.
There is
a fire
in your chest!