Daily Archives: July 25, 2010

July 25, 2010

On Privilege (expanded version of old poem)

1. Definition

It’s an oil,
a white oil,
that gets on everything.

It clumps in dark corners
where it’s obvious
if you put a light on it,
but
spread it
and it becomes invisible,
almost intangible
until you try to grip something.

If you’re born coated with it
you forget it’s there.
The ones who came before you
and know the stuff
teach you how
to work with it, how to make it your friend,
how to make it stick where you want it to stick.
You won’t even remember it’s there
once you get the knack.

It’s no wonder
that you’re insulted when people
calls you “slick”

as they try
to make you see how
it shines so evenly on your skin
while on their own
it’s just a mess of smears and blotches.

No wonder that when you try to touch
those exposed patches,
it comes between you.

2. The Clean Up

The wells that pump it
are deep. Pulling up the pipes
is not like pulling teeth:
it’s more like pulling roots.
Long roots. Nearly infinite roots.
Roots that cross the lawns; pull them,
and the lawns come up with them. Roots
that have spread under the roads; pull them
and the roads crack and split above them.

They’re always leaking.
The oil is everywhere, it seems, and people
can’t see it sticking to them. Scoffers abound
even as they slip and fall on it.

You can’t see it
on yourself either, and it’s so scary to think
of where it has come from. The depth
of those reservoirs is like unto
the Hell you’ve heard so much about:
there is fire, there is ice, there is
the Adversary who rules it
and oh, he says he loves you, his slick
bastard. How could you hurt him so
by rejecting his slippery gifts?

He’s not going to be happy,

and neither are you
as you scrub and scrape and
scrub and scrape and are scrubbed
and are scraped.

You will bleed. There will be
scabs and scars.

3. Aftermath, in brief

I wish I could tell you
anyone really knows what a dry world
will be like,

but at least
we’ll be able to touch and not slide apart,
so we can hold on to each other as we are learning.

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Leave a comment | tags: poems, poetry, race | posted in poetry

July 25, 2010

Anaphora For The Silenced

By Tony Brown

Spit the block from between the teeth
and say it:
no more block.
No more cloth to sop up wet words.

Say it: no more restraint.
No more binding of the tongue.

Spit out what has caused silence saying:
end it. End
living in this moment
and no other moment. End
the denial of potential.

End forgetfulness, end
lockdown of past
that’s traveled this same ground
and discovered what is now thought new.

End
irony. End
sad romantic glow
and false inclusion
around petty blues.

End class disdain.

End feeding of the demons
that breed in racial memory and suspicion
and their domination of the better angels of particularity
and unique experience.
End
fear of difference.

End selective love and listening.
End confusion between
the naturally separated
speaker and words.
End careful
point choice, end the perfection
of the figures traced between
chosen points.
End fire set to voice
and water poured on craft.
End deliberate pouncing upon
every simple inconsistency
that is the hallmark
of humanity.

End the reliance on love
to stop all bullets. End
the invocation of love
as a blind for the killer.
End the exhortations of
hating game and not player
as if they are ever seen as separate.

End
how the self imagines
itself as only hero, not
villain, not bit player,
not bystander, not ignorant
complicit agent, not
collaborator at the same time.

End in this:
the naked, the skinless,
the wet muscles pressed nerve to nerve
in pain and necessary contact.
End in this:
contact. Blood clotting
as if in love with other blood.

End
with this last closing of gaps
and pray for no regeneration
of the previous ease with how
distance can be sanctioned and welcomed
in the service of clustered living
among those who see only each other
as worthy of the touch.

End the need
of the disregarded
to spit out and discard the gags
transferred to their living mouths
by the hands of the favored.

Spit the block into their hands.
Let them marvel at how moist
it has always been.

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2 Comments | tags: anger, meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 25, 2010

In The Suburbs

By Tony Brown

Walking by a pond,
I shiver briefly
near a mound of rocks
and rusted cans.

Because I prefer the visible world,
the blare of neon and loud comfort,
I ignore the possibility
that has just occurred to me,
that the mound covers
a maiden’s grave
and that she is calling to me
to open the pile and see her face,
open to the world, her jaw gaping,
teeth gray with soil, her hands gloved
in the rot of years —

how many years
has she lain here? No telling, because
I will not stop to discover
if any of what I’m thinking
is true, and not a fantasy born
of my unfamiliarity
with the unseen.

I do not want to know if she’s in there,
or if the ground I cover
on my hurried way home
contains more like her — Nipmuc graves,
broken colonial skulls, the wrecks
of more recent people who remain nameless
though they shake me
as I pass.
Every pond may be a grave site,
every heap of stones
a home for a plane
I will not acknowledge.
I do not want to know
where women
who never got a chance
to speak of rape
were raped. I do not know
where children were killed.
I do not know
how the poor suffered
on these same streets
back before affluence
covered their poverty.