Take that Govt!

That's Us.

Folks toke
or do their taxes
but we take drives
where the cherry blossoms can make you cry.
Seriously.
Friends fool around
or don't
but we make blue notes
in bed sheets with bodies that
transgress the liminal zones.
The kids in Marin eat
ice cream cones without cognizance
of their invisible culture
but we know better,
know Babylon resides here.
Convertible beamers blaze by
wherein bluetooths occupy the auditory
and we laugh out loud
because janky ass speakers
keep us cleaner and cooled-out,
snapping fingers, clappin hands,
lovin life, lovin love.
That's us.
That's what we do.
That's how we are.
Outdoorsy, jazzy, hippy(ish), horrified, soft-inside, soul splitters, clean-up hitters, believers, beat worshippers, blazing workers, admittedly sinners, die-hard winners, dyadic dynamic, strategic, unapologetic rise-up types, hype hungry, funny fellows, forever chasing, never hating, ever elevating, taking and giving, giving and gushing, going going going, never gone.

Anna

They swarmed around her
with their leather and beards,
their flags and videocameras,
and she being the courageous one
that she is
stepped into the challenge
of twenty grown men crowding around a woman
just to interrogate and mock
because she felt called to stand in that space
unapologetically
as the daughter of former military personnel,
as a chaplain,
as a christian (doing something christ-like),
with her bare-shoulders and berkeley blue
because she being the ever-attentive student
that she is
has learned the art of conversation
and the virtue of confrontation even when
it rips your guts out and leaves you
sobbing in the chest of your best friend.

And I stood fifteen feet away,
watching the one with the video-camera
trying to get a response with his foul mouth,
referencing her breasts and her ass,
as if they had anything to do with the subject matter
at hand. I stood fifteen feet away
between a lunge and a prayer
between a rock and a river
occupying the paradox of peace activism:
wanting to love and protect for the good of the thing
but not compromise the good of all things in the process.

Twenty minutes later a man gets on the podium
to address all these marines and vets and patriotic protestors.
He tells them about his dead son who was a soldier
in Iraq, who died protecting this beloved country,
who died for love of a thing. And I thought back
twenty minutes prior, about the in-between space,
about wanting to take that man's camera and break it on his face
for fucking with my friend,
and something in me shifts--I see I'm not above it
nor below it
nor outside of it
whatever "it" may be.

3 Things

1. Spearhead & Michael Franti bring internal/Eternal sunshine on the cloudiest of days.

2. I will be doing a year-long residency at the VA in Palo Alto next year. It is one of the top 3 trauma centers in the country. My Wade has been there this year (see his blog: http://instawade.blogspot.com/) and I am ever grateful for the opportunities that get passed along in/through our relationship. It is also lovely to now have an answer for "What are you doing when you graduate?"

3. Unfortunately it takes dicey elections and corrupt politicians being 'exposed' in order for issues surrounding prostitution to be raised up in the mainstream US media. However, I'll take anything in the way of attention to this topic, so I am especially grateful to Nicholas Kristof's latest articles in the NY Times. He is bringing the life-threatning reality of pimp-on-prostitution violence to the forefront of the issue which often gets ignored as socio-political-ideological rivals duke it out about meta-material like legalization, wages, sexual liberty, and the global reach of the sex trade. See the article below.


Op-Ed Columnist
The Pimps’ Slaves
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 16, 2008
If the Spitzer affair causes us to lose sight of the broader reality of prostitution, then the biggest loser will be the girls for whom selling sex isn’t a choice but a nightmare.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/opinion/16kristof.html?ex=1363320000&en=245594997e1fc683&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

2 of my Favorites: Zirin on The Wire

"Shit is like a war, ain't it? Easy to get in, hell to get out." -Bunk

Why the Wire

By Dave Zirin

The Wire ended its five season run tonight, in my mind the best use of a camera since Michael told Kay not to ask him about his business. It was a show first and foremost about the city of Baltimore, and the way the banal mechanisms of urban life create its own collateral damage. It was more Charm City than anything ever done by Barry Levinson, but viewers across the country felt that the show transcended mere Baltimore. It was really Any-City, USA, with its drug trade, crumbling schools, feral politicians, and the skeletons of long forgotten factories as tragically impressive – and as picked clean - as the bones of a brontosaurus.

The hypnotic hold of this show always lay in the way it dramatized the futile efforts of individuals that attempt to change the city’s lumbering direction. Lester Freamon tried to do police work a different way. Cedric Daniels tried to run the department in a different way. Stringer Bell tried to sell drugs in a different way.. Stick-up artist Omar Little tried to get paid a different way. (You can bet it’s no coincidence Omar shared a last name with Malcolm X. A different time, a different place, maybe a very different Omar.) He also tried to love a different way, being Gay in at atmosphere where testosterone and false bravado are like currency. They all find out the same truth: the game is the game, and the institution will crush the individual and not even blink long enough to put a notice in the local paper. It’s telling that the last episode finds both the central cop, Jimmy McNulty, and drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield in a hell worse than death: free from this world, cast adrift in purgatory like parasites without a host.

The Wire could have been in Any-City, but it was also Baltimore to the core. I have a close friend who lives in Charm City and can’t bring himself to watch the show. Some things, he tells me, just cut too close. The Wire is Baltimore, in a way that’s far too intimate for comfort, like reading someone’s diary and wishing you could forget what you saw. It’s a city that gets up your nose and in your clothes. This is still the city where the state’s death row is right in the middle of the projects, not to mention a short walk from the ever-encroaching edge of gentrification. This is the city where old factories at the waterfront now sell $5 cups of designer coffee, for that faux-devastation chic. This is the city of the Wire, and it picked at every scab.

It’s why my buddy couldn’t tune in: Why tie yourself to characters doomed to fail? Why force yourself to identify with the same failure? Why not just take an hour and gargle with salt water and razor blades? It’s a decent question, but could only be asked by those who haven’t watched. If one message of the show is that institutions will reward feckless idiocy and crush visionaries, there is another contradictory message, voiced by Omar: “Man’s got to have a code.” In end we can even classify the Wire characters by those who have a code and kept their soul – particularly Kima and Prez- and those who either willingly – Carcetti – or tragically – Dukie–lost it to the city. Every city has people with a code, unrecognized and unrewarded, unorganized and adrift, but there all the same. The Wire celebrated those with a code, no matter how many times they were knocked down. To organize these very people – the ones with a code - is to forgo challenging institutions as individuals, and instead begin to come together and take our cities back. It’s how Omar Littles become giants. And it’s long past time.

[Dave Zirin is the author of "Welcome to the Terrordome:" (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com.]

The Job Market

Once upon a time
there lived a man
in a city where jobs were hard to find.
Consequently the man was broke.
Consequently the man could not feed his family.
Consequently the man was depressed.
Consequently the man found delight in smoking crack with his friends.
No jobs in the city and no money make
purchasing crack difficult.
Consequently he had to get quick money
in order to buy the crack that helped him quickly forget
that he could not get a job
and was not therefore feeding his family
and was consequently depressed.
So the man, knowing the "value" of youngster flesh
in the "street market" quickly sent his daughter to work:
domestic pimping, so to speak.
Like any young girl might,
this girl found the occupation discomforting
and so she, being mighty depressed in her "job," asked her
pimp/dad to help her 'feel better.'
Like father like daughter: he pulled out the cure all.
So, at the age of 12,
this girl hit the pipe for the first time;
the pipe of numbness that would
enable her to work the depressing job
that took away her daddy's depressing inability to get a job.
Years later, with the pipe gone & a needle in her arm,
and her pimp/dad long gone, & those John's still supplying
& demanding, she cannot recall the origination point
of her depression, but when those people in suits walk by
with disgust telling her to 'get a job,' she cannot help
recall her father's sad face as she quickly responds
'i have one.'

Herbert Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?ex=1362286800&en=d00653ea9b2ea682&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Op-Ed Columnist
The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 4, 2008
There has been little public conversation about the consequences of the costs of the Iraq war, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

Ejoye's War Prayer

I read Mark Twain's The War Prayer last semester. If you haven't seen it, I'd highly recommend giving it a look. After reading Twain I began to think, long and hard, about war and prayer, about the role professional religious persons occupy and what responsibility comes with that role in times of social/political crisis. Taking inspiration from Twain, I vowed to write my own short story or poem entitled "The War Prayer" back then. What's interesting, four months later, is that the poem below didn't arise out of my desparation around Iraq which i thought it would, but my feelings of helplessness as I watch my drug-addicted friends go further and further into their own emotional comas. Ultimately I think Iraq continues because someone somewhere needs a nation full of smoked-out 20 somethings to be so wrapped up in getting their next sack, hit, or fix that they don't care about their own government killing families in a land far far away. Maybe i'm just too judgmental and I need to "live and let live," let my hippie friends smoke their weed in peace--that's what people tell me all the time. But I tell you what: if one of my friends saw me put a gun to my head when i was in a foul mood, I hope they would--out of love, not self-righteousness--tell me to put it down because foul moods are temporary. So here's my War Prayer, a cry to/for God, a cry to/for my people--one in the Other and the other in the One.

War Prayer
by Ejoye

it's the slow suicide,
the mental fog, enabling a synthetic transcendence
that's really just reality avoidance,
the 'here somehow but not really,'
the 'i'm gone somehow but not really,'

...the 'really?' question next morning over breakfast.

it's the loss of consciousness, conscience-clarification,
the subtle disappearance of conscious contact that makes conscience and
clarification possible.

the 'i'll put that on hold for a few weeks' when shit gets fucked up
but the 'shit is fucked up' reality that disavows you of putting it on hold.
the 'no i'm okay' excuse in the face of your mess
with your mess being compounded by you thinking you're okay.
but they are all worse than me, so it's okay--okay?

it's the lie
that has me spinning here, wanting to slap you awake,
wanting to hug you back to life,
wanting to strangle the social systems that make your lie seem so true
wanting to band-aid all the bleeding wounds
that hurt so bad you fail to notice
it's even a lie anymore.

you read headlines and get pissed
about the bodies using violence
and the violence using bodies
and so you enter into some illusion
about your body not doing violence that way
or violence not doing you that way,
but it's all the same.

sleeping or dying or denying
it's all the same. the war is the War is the war is the War.
the violence begins
with you undoing yourself: your observations, your relationships,
your talents, your body. the slow suicide is the prescription
you were sold at the pharmacy of fools.
the biggest lie they ever told is that we need it.
the greatest sin of our lives: we labeled them "physician" and believed it.

i wanted to get mad about those guys taking out liquor store owners
and beating them to a pulp. "genocide in our communities they said."
i thought, demand necessitates supply; why kill the middle man?
why not take out the infrastructure
that's causing men to suck bottles like drug-addicted prostitutes suck dick?
...you know the things that cause people to give up
so that getting high
or getting drunk
is the only thing they have to look forward to at the end of the day
...infrastructure like health care and education and povery,
the things politicians seem to understand
and never change.
but this morning, after listening to one more friend talk about the trap,
the deadening, destructive, devilish demand
seeking refuge in someone
who feels just a little too much,
who sees the patterns just a little too clear,
who hears the cries just a little too loud,
and wants to change the shit so bad, but can't,
who wants to change the shit so bad, but can't, so just takes
the lighter to the bowl and inhales toxins just to escape,
escape the very capacity (empathy) that promises freedom---
i too feel like killing something: pulling something out
and beating it over and over and over.

but what would I kill?
you? me?
my ability to feel so much rage and compassion at the same time?
isn't that what I want you to be able to do?
i feel like I want to kill, but what i really want is to hold,
to hold this ground,
to hold this troubled soul,
to hold the lack of pin-points and absolutes that all these
holy rollers and twelve steppers seem to stand on one minute
and get knocked down by the next.

i want the war to end.
the weapons of manufactured weariness,
blindly accepted prescriptions for oblivion,
useless patterns of supply and demand
set in motion by a rhetoric of 'freedom' ("free" markets, "free" spirits)
by people who must control and lie about it in order to live,
the weapons of easy answers and easy-way-outs,
the weapon of self-hatred,
the weapon of other-hatred--
i want them to be placed on the Eucharisitic table,
next to the bread and the wine,
on the day of God's great cease-fire.

because something in me knows,
no matter how much better it gets,
or how much you want to quit on any given day,
this whole cycle is bigger than you,
bigger than me,
and so the solution--whether it manifests in this one body
or the great cosmic stage--must be bigger too.

so hear me, dear God, this morning, through my poetry,
i'm praying to You.