Annus Horribilis

© 30 December 2005, The Griot Poet

Where to begin…
Tsunami wipes out Asia…
Hurricanes made super by nature and global warming…
“Our economy's on the mend,” the “our” meaning CEOs, CFOs, and the lot of his corporate friends…
Then, came Katrina, Rita, Wilma and a record breaking twenty-seven
And the world watched in horror as
The freest nation in the world
Had a third world visitation
With cameras filming the plethora of misery on its own soil in black communities in New Orleans (and un-filmed elsewhere)…
The boy-king-candidate promised we’d do no nation building,
Yet, that is exactly what we’ve cared doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa for natural gas and oil…
And now forced to by Gulf coast embarrassment to do after photo ops on American soil.
Foiled by Kanye’s declared salvo that shattered his very cold soul.
His popularity below 50 percent,
His gained political capital well spent
Now, he’s spying on us domestically without FISA court consent,
Protecting us from boogey-men and civil liberties stoking Reichstag fires
Patriot Acts resemble Article 48 of the Weimar constitution abrogating:
-Free expression of opinion
-Freedom of the press
-Right of assembly and association -Right to privacy of postal and electronic communications
-Protection against unlawful searches and seizures
-Individual property rights
-States' right of self-government
Supplementing this, the creation of the Storm Troopers and SS agencies.
Even he quipped, “If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator!”

The phrase “by no other name can men be saved”
Was first printed on Roman coins for the adopted son of Julius,
Named Caesar,
Then the son of Caesar, born Octavius, made himself Augustus: “worthy of reverence and worship”
Both faces graced an empire with the inspired words on both sides: “Divine Caesar and the Son of God.”

Power corrupts,
And absolute power corrupts absolutely
Until the moment transforms the mediocre into the megalomaniac;
Until lack of cerebral thought becomes strongly delusional;
Until he forgets that he’s a recovering alcoholic,
Until he talks of answering to a “higher father”;
Until his walk is that of a strutting peacock between vacations decrying terrorist killers and private golf course drives.
Until we live to see the abomination of desolation walk into the holy of holies and he and his followers follow the course of all Caesars and dictators… self-proclaimed divinity.

If he was a true believer of the Palestinian prophet he says he follows,
Does he hear “blessed are the peacemakers”?
When Yeshua said, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,”
Greater things would His followers’ do
As they defied the empire that crushed every Palestinian, Roman and Jew
And proclaimed Him as the “Son of God” and “King of Kings.”
Such a thing caused men imprisoned, crucified and hacked by the earliest SS.

For me, personally
I am one of the fading middle classes.
Squeezed between the availability of cheap labor within the US by Vicente Fox’s devalued Peso
(Wire transfers go back to their native Mexico)
And cheaper labor still overseas.
Jobs added are low wage, low or no medical benefits and degrading to citizens born here.
Yet, a man that has never had a hungered day in his life or career states “our economy is sound.”

I can see the madness of declaring a recession when there was none to be found.
He literally talked the markets down in 2000: a feat of mass hypnosis, neuro-linguistic programming, crony favors and the blackest of magic’s.

What was depressing was his rich friends that had the most wanted it ALL:
All the wealth,
All the gold,
All the monies,
All without spending in the highest category: wages.

When sages write about this,
I hope it will be on papyrus
And the wealth and resources they tried to hoard is more than well spent,
And the fears of Socialists, Communists, Compassionate Capitalists
Devolve
To a feudal society
Without technology...
That is our destiny
If we do not adhere
To the terrible lessons
Of this horrible year!

For Josephine and Other Queens

Ean Wood: The Josephine Baker Story

© 18 December 2005, The Griot Poet

Josephine Carson Baker was just dancing…
From dancing in the streets to
Prancing in bananas
From the ghetto of East St. Louis to the Ziegfeld Follies
Probably more sensual and revealing than the smut that masks as art
Presented on 24-hour soft-porn cable TV
Or music videos that celebrate our sisters’ posteriors,
She was also a civil rights pioneer, adopting 10 more of the earth’s dear children than Angelina Jolie, her “rainbow tribe”
Yet, I never heard anyone except racists in this new world or the last in English or French
Describe her as a bitch...

Dorothy Dandridge was a star before her time,
Carmen, Porgy and Bess
Got an Oscar nod
When the best job a black person could get was janitor in the theater coming in from the back...

Lena Horne
Was my forlorn father’s pin-up gal in the Navy,
And, even though it’s crazy,
There’s a picture on the Internet of Lena signing autographs among
Naval men of color…
The guy on the far right looks like my father’s twin brother (he didn’t have one)...

Perhaps I am amiss,
But I lament the days of
Old when we treated our women like gold
And would slap on a beat down if anyone of any stripe tried to call them out of their names...

Before video
Ruined music and created visual universes that are programmed by directors penetrating the hymen of our minds...

I remember the time when they were our queens
And how some of them – gone or still alive
Must feel when they see their beautiful daughters
Bump and grind
On a video
For a nickel bag pretend GANGSTA who hasn’t spent ten minutes in the ghetto, and
Whose first reference to them is “bitch” followed by “ho”?

I remember
Before Carter G. Woodson’s “Miss Education of the Negro”
Became the flipped script for MTV rap videos
And we in “Step-and-Fetch” followed this jest in our best-burnt cork face
To its Viacom clone: Bankrupt Entertainment Television
Until hip-hop like opera before it
Went from the streets to the board rooms of American aristocracy and became “hip-POP”
So that Gwen Stephanie can make hits on rhymes that make NO sense!

Skeeting our seed with Little John “to the window; to the wall!”
And pimping all our future mothers like those
Whom we pay for the oldest profession in the world...

I remember
When Josephine, Dorothy, Lena, Dianne Carroll, Lola Falana, Rosa Parks, Corretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Lieutenant Uhura (whose name means “freedom”), Ida B. Wells, Sister Soul Ja, your own MOTHER

When we treated our women like precious queens!

I'm Explaining a Few Things

This s a poet I can appreciate: I give you Pablo Neruda

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I'll tell you all the news.

I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.

From there you could look out
over Castille's dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings --
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!

-- Pablo Neruda

12:01 AM (Stanley “Tookie” Williams)

© 12 December 2005, The Griot Poet

We lamented the birth of Margaret Sanger,
Bombing abortion clinics; stopping women from exercising their personal consent...

We compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler,
Bombing his country back to the stone ages in our rage to “kick someone’s assets” for 9-11...

We made Terry Schiavo our poster child,
Years having decayed her brain stem, most actions autonomic; all the while politicians’ manipulated events – “erring on the side of life” – making her husband look selfish, inhuman...

We convicted Scott Peterson
On circumstantial evidence, though he’d personally made his life a mess with premeditations to murder, perjury, adultery and a double life…

We've set double standards
Between the hyphens: birth – abortion; vegetation – euthanasia, imprisonment – death.
We speak of Christian virtues:

“Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are [these]; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness,

“Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,

“Envying, murders, drunkenness, reveling, and such like...”

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith,

“Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.”

We speak with forked tongues
As the natives once said: recidivism versus redemption; straddling fences, going down two paths, splitting our pants as our groins stretch over an infinite chasm called...

Hypocrisy!

Gal 5: 19 – 21; Gal 5: 22 - 23