“Blood Runs in the Streets”

That’s the title of the photo that made me start writing today.  Walking slowly through the exhibition space at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Center, inspecting the abundance of photos from Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, this picture grabbed me.  Stopped me still in my stride.  A black-and-white photo, like most in the exhibit–it showed in its foreground, a Black man lying face down on a night-time sidewalk.  A thick trail of blood flows from his head like an accusing river.  Three white policemen in the background.  One, his back turned to the dead man, loosely holds a gun, pointing down, in his right hand.  The caption reads something about calming the riots.

 It is this picture that makes me pull my backpack off my shoulders and drop it quickly to the floor.  I search hurriedly for my notepad and pen.  I begin writing this.

Another photo, Taylor Washington Arrested at Leb's Delicatessen, Atlanta, Georgia/Danny Lyon, American, born 1942, Gelatin silver print, 1964, copyright Danny Lyon

There are several other notable pictures.  One by Gordon Parks of Stokely Carmichael standing in front of a chalkboard at some meeting.  A picture of energy, focus, idealism; the proverbial “young lion.”  Another of protesters marching in Alabama or Mississippi.  What’s powerful about this one is that it’s raining.  I notice in the photo, entitled “Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King Singing in the Rain,” that this is one of the few pictures that I’ve personally seen in which Dr. King isn’t wearing a suit.  He looks like he’s wearing dungarees and a work shirt.  He looks like a laborer.  No pretense here.  And the look of determination is unmistakable.  That expression says, matter-of-factly, “I will not be moved.”  There are several others of protesters facing down water hoses and nightsticks in Birmingham’s Kelly Ingram Park.

I consider what I stand for, today.  What I face down.  What I would die for.

The last time I protested anything?  I think maybe it was when my Comcast internet service went out for a few hours.  I gave the customer service rep a mild tongue lashing.

Note:  I probably would have missed all this as a first time visitor to the National Museum of African Art had it not been for the special guidance of a volunteer staffer named Paulette.  A sharply-dressed, knowledgeable woman with intense eyes and a quick smile, she complimented me on my tastes in headgear (a toboggan) and took me down personally to make sure this exhibit, which goes to March 9th, was the first stop on my visit.

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Last night, between animated tweets and various news stories and blogs about the election, excitement charged me like static electric kisses shared with my love.  There was that hesitancy and anticipation of that small, stinging pop you knew might be coming.  Just not when.

I watched Saul Williams spit lyrics like incantations, got word of Obama’s grandmother passing , read a piece   in the Washington Post toting this election the most exciting since Kennedy-Nixon.  All these things framed today, Tuesday, November 4, 2008, high on the noble wall of history.

This day.  This moment, poised in history.  I imagined myself, 25-30 years from now, crooks of arms and lengths of thighs ladened with jumping bean grandchildren, me regaling them with my best Richard Pryor-cum-Mudbone:  "I remember back in  two thousand and o’ eight, when I took a bus and two trains, walked through the cold rain, and stood in the line for 18 hours to cast my vote to elect the first Black president…"  And I’m sure by that day well in the future, I would have added more to it.

Before I got to my polling place at Bowie State University, fittingly a historically Black school, I had visions of people, Black, White, Latino, running back and forth in line, high-fiving each other.  We would hold hands, stand in a circle and sing "Kumbaya" and "We Shall Overcome."  As some of us grew weak from standing in lines that snaked out of the building and zig-zagged around the parking lot, we would hold one another up heroically and shout encouraging phrases like, "One man, one vote!" and "I am – Somebody!"

So you can imagine my disappointment and disillusionment when I was in and out in less than 30 minutes.  I barely had enough time to catch up on my blog subscriptions.

My voting experience was unremarkably smooth.  No one questioned my right to vote, no one asked me for ID; I didn’t have to recite the Declaration of Independence.  There was no voter suppression to be seen in the small, tan-tiled gym that was my polling area.

Just one friendly, light-skinned brother wearing a sticker on his jacket that informed everyone that he was a VOTING JUDGE.  He laughed and told a guy in front of me about the 5 am tailgaters who cooked pancakes and eggs in the parking lot.

There were a few rows of chairs in the middle of the floor for anyone who needed to sit.  Small children, in twos and threes, quietly chased one another in lazy figure eights, stepping over winter coats discarded like banana peels.

A young brother, probably in his early twenties, oozed enthusiasm so thick I could almost smell it.  The VOTING JUDGE good-naturedly told him to calm down a little.  The young man held himself in check briefly.  Then, seeing a friend standing in another line, he shouted across the room, "Who you wit?!"  He made a "V" with both hands as if he was throwing up gang signs. But there was no malice in him.  He wore a broad smile on face that beamed like the afternoon sun in summertime.

God… The Best Rapper Alive

I just wanted to go running.  I had dressed in all my gear.  New Balance running shoes, two pair of thick athletic socks, smart cotton blend jogging suit with zippered pockets, GORE-TEX hat and gloves to protect me from the nipping cold.  And, of course, the most essential thing, my mp3 player.  Nothing fancy, in fact, it is an off-brand, back up to my Creative Zen that I lost months ago and have yet to replace.  The capacity is a laughable 512MB, but in my present state of economic straits, it has served me well.

So, I stepped out the front door, into the cool, late afternoon wind. Selected Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III and hit play.  “I’m on it, ooh i’m on it, i’m so on it,” and I was on it.  High stepping, I dashed across Kenilworth Ave; I imagined there was a camera crew just out of my line of vision, filming me for the next Nike commercial.  I was poised for a magnificent run.

Then my player just cut off.  Okay, no problem, I figured maybe I just hit a button or something, although I did have a lock feature.  I cut the player back on, found the right song, pressed play again.  I ran and jammed for another 30 seconds, then again silence.  This was repeated a dozen times as I sometimes walked, sometimes ran along the impatient highway.  Finally, losing patience myself, I gave up on the player.

This was an outrage!  I’ve been running off and on since my first year in college which was, ahem!, 17 or 18 years ago, and with rare exception, I’ve always had audio companions spanning from INXS to Public Enemy to Pearl Jam, whether they join me via tape, cd, or mp3.  Now here I was, forced to go solo.  Well, maybe God was trying to tell me something.

I looked up from my pathetic Nextar player.  I had made my way to Annapolis Road in Bladensburg, Maryland.  The sign up ahead read Bladensburg Waterfront Park.  I remembered passing this way before but I had never gone in.  Although the signage was underwhelming, my sense of adventure and serendipity won out.  I strode up the entrance path.

I should probably point out here that I currently reside in a mainly industrial area and I have lamented aloud to anyone who would listen more than a few times about the sad state of the neighborhood, which, I bemoaned, lacked any scenic or cultural redeeming qualities.  My life is hard:  I have to drive no less than 20 minutes to find the nearest Starbucks!

So it was with something akin to awe that I looked out on the scene that lay before me as I mounted the hill that was the entrance to the park.  Even in late fall, there was a sense of lushness that lingered about the multi-acre expanse.  The park was designed around the Anacostia River, which now in this dry, cold season stretched out before me, starved and weak, a bleak muddy memory of itself.  In the distance, to the right of the road and parking areas, I could make out a fishing pier, playground, boathouse, and picnic area.  The thing that called me, however, was the massive bridge that hulked across the riverbed, it’s metal structure looking weathered but hardly beaten, violently red with rust.

I strode across the bridge, caught up in the subtle majesty of the moment.  The luminous sky, the color of blue Easter eggs, the gray clouds that hung in it like angry commuters in bumper-to-bumper traffic.  A batch of seagulls crowded below me on the dark mud of the Anacostia’s back.  One lone bird flew overhead and swooped down.  Whoosshh!  Its wings at full span, riding the wind.  It circled, and circled, and circled.  It made effortless, easy arcs down and down, then it glided to a gentle rest with the others.  Birds of a feather, indeed.

I was startled by an approaching biker and looked up in time to jump wildly out the way, probably looking more than a little foolish.  The late October wind came in gusts and I, bundled up comfortably, turned my face into it.  I let the breeze blow through my clothes and imagined it was a Good Spirit cleansing me.  This same wind rushed past me and spent some time in animated conversation with a group of trees to my rear.  Their leaves, purple, olive, copper, crimson, shimmering in the light of the declining sun with each new phrase.

Suddenly I realized that this is what it meant to be fully present.  Without distractions of past or future.  I was HERE.  I was NOW.  And I realized that everything was just as it should be.

And all this without the musical stylings of Weezy Baby.

honey do list

i want to love so hard I get chest pains

palpitate me, baby

don’t fake it,
lay the real thing on me

brand me with your lips
make bright crimson scars
that tell everyone you own me

make me your plaything
and your truffle too
try to suck all the chocolate off
press my creamy center to the roof of your mouth

interlace your fingers with mine
in desperate sweaty fists that leave happy bruises
melt the stone of my heart
and make my chest transparent

need me
feed me
so that I know just how starved I was

leave it on my mind all day

make me put gold stars and glittery smiley faces next to your name
make my skin feel naked without yours pressed against it
make me smile stupidly on the street among strangers

change my orientation:
make me a you-o-sexual
make me dream in my dreams that I was dreaming of you
batter me with your pugilist hips
make me your whipping boy
dig in until my back bleeds
scour me like a pot of scorched grits

put roots on me

love me like it’s the last time
the first time no time all the time in the world
like time is the man-made construct that it is

love me like we got kids
…just now snoring loudly
give me honeymoon love
leave your pleasure
on my chin my nose my cheeks
let the peach strawberry musk of you be my only cologne

make me bite my tongue
and like it

lean into me fully
let me bear the weight of your world
a few more sacred moments

crowd all the demons of my desire against a throbbing balcony
and push me off into that rainbow abyss of you

Genesis of This Love

As a woolly-headed boy living with my single parent mother, I ran the streets of Atlanta in the era of Wayne Williams, playing hide-and-go-get, sandlot football, and performing nearly fatal bicycle stunts with a fearlessness that dumbfounds me now as an adult; all this on the pumped-up sugar highs of Now and Laters, Jolly Ranchers and Chick-O-Sticks, which my ashy-skinned friends and I got from the neighborhood candy store. When I wasn’t ripping and running, TV shows like “Bugs Bunny,” Tom and Jerry,” “The Little Rascals,” and “The All-New Super Friends Hour” took up most of my time.

Much of that changed in 1982 when I went to live with my dad, stationed in Ramstein, Germany, and his new wife and child. My dad, career Air Force man that he was, had less permissive ideas about parenting. He believed in rules and structure much more than my mom either did or, at least, had the stomach to enforce. Dad, who worked long hours through the week, took as one of his few luxuries, the habit of sleeping in on the weekends with my stepmom. My four-year-old brother and I were imprisoned in our bedrooms until about 10 or 11 o’clock on Saturdays and Sundays. I was always an early riser, but now was gone the sweet joys of morning cartoons as there was only one TV in the house–it sat, black and silent, mocking me from the forbidden living room.

As an act of desperation I started browsing my dad’s bookshelf. I remember distinctly, so distinctly working my way through a collection of Brothers Grimm fairy tales. It took me a few early morning weekends, but within a couple of months I had the jones for reading. At the ripe age of 12 I started my first novels. There was one about an assassin, then I was introduced to Stephen King, I read everything from Carrie to Pet Sematary. This was the beginning of my ongoing love affair with the written word, the very same love affair that gives this blog its name.

I stepped into books and when I read, the words were incantations that smashed the walls of my room, our very apartment, and lifted me up into other realities, places, and identities. Here, under the spell of Firestarter, I was “pushing” people with my powers of telepathic hypnosis. There I was finding the clues with Encyclopedia Brown.

So I was encouraged when I read an article this morning on Newsweek.com, the tagline: “The book business may be flat, but there’s at least one bright spot: the booming sales of books for teens–and no, it’s not all Harry Potter.“

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The article’s author, Jamie Reno, finds that

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Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren’t reading, the surprising truth is they are reading novels in unprecedented numbers. Young-adult fiction (ages 12-18) is enjoying a bona fide boom with sales up more than 25 percent in the past few years, according to a Children’s Book Council sales survey. Virtually every major publishing house now has a teen imprint, many bookstores and libraries have created teen reading groups and an infusion of talented new authors has energized the genre.

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My favorite passage from the article is

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Some parents are just saying no to violent videogames like Grand Theft Auto and yes to books. Steve Hunyar, owner of a software company in Alpine, Calif., says his 12-year-old twins are both voracious readers. But videogames are out. “My son enjoys the fantasy-fiction books while my daughter loves the coming-of-age genre.” he says. “We do not have a PlayStation nor Xbox in our house, and no video in our cars. Academics and sports keep them quite busy. In fact, there have been times on our vacations when we’ve had to tell them to put their books down and look around.”

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It is my hope and prayer that I can transmit a similar aesthetic and passion to my children. News like this invigorates me. I have been quick to bemoan the current state of young America, seemingly more versed in “American Idol” and Lil Wayne, than The Catcher in the Rye and X-Men comics. But, it seems, all is not lost.

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Indeed, there are yet a number of literary cupids fluttering about.

To Be Read While Listening to Maxwell’s “Reunion”

Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man cleanses the palate of my ears and psyche and I lounge in a chair here in the Aderhold Learning Center on the downtown campus of Georgia State University (a gracious friend allows me to use his student wifi account).  I’m a bit tired from my job waiting tables in a local diner next door but overall I feel good.

After a week of training, today was my first chance to make money and I did.  After a couple of years exile working in an economically and culturally depressed county well south of Atlanta, I am back in the heart of the city.  I am optimistic and enlivened.  The City of Atlanta is like a past lover, estranged but often longed for and fondly remembered.  We shared many intense, heart palpitating nights; I’ve both soared in her arms and knelt in abject humiliation at her cruel laughter.

So each day I slide back into the city, hopeful and cautious.  I silently, solemnly swear not to repeat past mistakes, to give her due respect and to temper passion with good judgment.  Sometimes I feel out of sync, like the guy in “I’m Gonna Get You Sucker,” fresh out of jail, pimp strolling down the avenue in fish bowl boots.  A few weeks ago I went to a poetry reading on Marietta at Urban Grind.  Halfway through the event I sent a text message to my Twitter account.  It read:  “At a poetry reading feeling like Michael Jordan past his prime trying to make a comeback with the Washington Wizards.” [SIDE NOTE:  I have been begging, cajoling, imploring a dear friend of mine to sign up for Twitter, because I think she would love it.  Maybe she'll do it soon.  She knows who she is. Hint, hint.]  But above the popcorn bursts of old, unused creative joints cracking, I still hear the call of the muse and an undeniable sense of purpose.  I must explore, I must converge, I must write… I must create!

Now if I can just find an alternate route bypassing that damn rush hour traffic.

Three 5 Minute Timed Writings

It all started innocently enough, one text message sent across the night air: “Want to play a game?” And soon after a dear friend and I were exchanging verses typed hurriedly under the pressure of the clock. Below are the results of my efforts.

Rain

Rain is what I wish for
After this long drought
7 years of famine and
7 years of doubt
My children walk slow with swollen bellies
And when they try to laugh cracked lips bleed
Fresh blood
Mothers’ tears are only muted wails
And ships of dreams sit on parched lands with hanging empty sails
Rain is what I wish for, rain is what I need
To wash away the marks in sand of all my dirty deeds

Distance

There is no distance between us because we defy limited concepts like space and time–Einstein ain’t got nuthin’ on us. I close my eyes everytime the clock strikes me and make the night journey to you.. Your words and orange laughter leap telephone wires, cellular towers and salty oceans, penetrate institutional walls and wrap me up in life-affirming embraces that smell of myrhh, sandlewood and jerk spices. I am closer to you than your own blood vessels because we are born out of the same vessels of spirit. Listen… Listen… Shhh, listen. Do you not hear it?

Don’t Make Me

Don’t make me speak truth
Because late at night under covers
Under cover of night
My skin sweats the tears
I am afraid to cry

Don’t make me see truth
Because my eyes are weak, covered
With scales of misdirection and
Fabricated reality

Don’t make me feel truth
Because the memories of
What I left behind and failed
To grasp might rip
The very the beating heart
From my chest

Don’t make me be truth
Because all the lies I’ve woven
Into hot woolen garments
Will fall away like so much dead skin
And I would be forced to stand in
My own nakedness
Beautiful and frightening

Awakening

Some years ago a friend of mine mentioned, seemingly in passing, that there are no coincidences in life. He had a habit of speaking of things happening “in their time.” Specifically, he had given me a book on one occasion. Then, maybe a week or two later, when we spoke again, he asked me if I had started reading it. The book, Conversations with God, had come with a high recommendation from him, so I reluctantly confessed that, no, I hadn’t gotten to it yet. He didn’t seem too dismayed, though. “When the time is right, you’ll read it.”

I still have that book, and I still haven’t read it yet, save for the first few introductory pages. But I mention the story because I am now reading a book that I feel I have almost been groomed for by recent events. And perhaps, that is the way of life.

Some months ago, I reconnected with a dear friend of mine, a wondrous, bright woman with whom I once had an intense (at least for me), if ultimately doomed, love affair. Without giving away too many details, I was inspired by her current endeavors and intellectual pursuits. It seems she had become absolutely incandescent over the writings of some notable authors.

As for me, I was bogged down… no, drowning in the mire of daily domestic work, drudgery, really, and had all but forgotten the passion of living a life of deep examination. She sparked my imagination again, so much so that I started this blog and began making visits to small, dusty bookstores in search of heady tomes. But being the flake that I am, those burgeoning sparks soon all but flickered out and I fell back into an even deeper psychic and spiritual hole.

Then, maybe a week ago, I saw a film that reinvigorated me like fresh, cold water on my face. It was lnto the Wild, the adaption of the best-selling non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer. The movie reminded me of the young, idealistic man I had once been and gave me the courage to once again question the choices I make in my life daily; choices that I forgot I had.

Based on a true story, the film is set in the early 1990’s. The main character, Christopher McCandless, a recent graduate of Emory University, is the son of a well-to-do family who gives away all of his substantial savings to charity, rejects an obvious path of mainstream ambition and embarks on a lengthy cross-country trip. Heavily influenced by the life and work of writers like Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, he ends up in the Alaskan wilderness. I won’t say how the story ends for the benefit of those who haven’t either read the book or seen the film but I will say that many might see it as a tragic tale.

My take is that the path McCandless chose was one at once courageous and heroic. Here was a youth who sought to be a self-determined man. And, in the end, I think he achieved just that.

So moved was I by the film, that after literal weeks of living hermetically in my house, I got up the very next day to go hiking in a nearby wilderness preserve.

And now I am reading Thoreau.

From the very first page of Thoreau’s Walden, I began to see more clearly how a young student like McCandless could be compelled by the enclosed ideas to strike out on such an apparently extreme quest. Thoreau writes with precision and a quiet lucidity that is difficult to argue against.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

In Thoreau’s writing, I have discovered an eloquent voice for the complex and often troubling feelings I’ve lived with most of my life. The ideas that I am digesting now force me to ask questions like: Why am I here, really? What is it that I want to do with my life? What do I truly need? How much is enough? Who am I? Are there principles that I really believe in, such that I would follow them in the face of others’ disapproval? Or am I reconciled to living a life of “quiet desperation”? Am I one of those who, as Thoreau so pointedly noted, “begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?”

When the time is right, indeed. It seems the time is upon me.

Black Cheer

Hot Yukon blend sweet with golden sugar and heavy with cream. My second favorite morning kiss.

I sit here in a small, south of Atlanta Starbucks. Diana Krall serenades me. I attempt to gather strength to face the day.

Words from a friend. Public. Feed private creative fires within me. I accept your unspoken challenge to be better than I was yesterday.

Here everything is red and white with affected holiday cheer. These pictures of snow-lined houses that wrap dark, black, rich beans are the only white Christmas we’ll see here in Georgia. But I can’t help but be affected just a little by the marketed goodwill towards men.

Or maybe it’s just the coffee and Ms. Krall singing “All Or Nothing At All.”

Giving Notice

I’m supposed to be working on my novel for NaNoWriMo. I am far behind. I should be right around the 25k mark now (the goal is to write 50,000 words in one month). I am halfway through November and presently my word count is just breaking 5,000.

No matter what happens I will count my involvement this year a success. NaNo is an annual event and the previous two years I signed up to take on the task of producing a book in 30 days but never managed to write the first word. So, getting to 5k is already an accomplishment.

Besides, the month is only half-way over. While reading the NaNo forums today I saw that at least one writer had already reached the goal of 50,000. If she can do it in half a month, why not me?

I’ve got about two more hours of free time. I intend to read a bit more of Chris Baty’s No Plot and then flesh out my story outline. Later tonight, after work, I plan to start writing like a proverbial “man possessed.”

Notice to the legion demons of self-doubt: I’ve been practicing my best sleeper hold. Prepare to be choked to unconsciousness