Monthly Archives: July 2016

The hottest places? No.
Dante knew better.
The cold places — the ones
where a candle in the crisis wind
freezes into a red icicle of pointless pose —
that’s where the neutral ones belong.
Hear them sniffling,
wriggling as they hang stiffly
on the fence.

Those of us on either side of a question
who cannot cease raging and roaring
may be wrong, may be right,
may burn in hell
for what we believe
or perhaps shall rise toward
the glorious sun.

We may believe
in neither heaven nor hell,
but we do believe
in heat.

1 Comment | tags: poems, poetry, revisions | posted in poetry

July 10, 2016

Collaborative poem

By Tony Brown

The good folks at the online journal Radius, seeking to address in some way this deeply disrupting historical moment, asked a number of past contributors to contribute to a collaborative poem addressing the theme of “Violence And Heartbreak.”

From editor Victor Infante’s post on the journal’s Facebook page:

“When the air radiates heartbreak, as it does now, there is no one effective way to speak to it as an artist. It’s too big, and too multilayered to be captured succinctly. We asked several of our favorite poets to try anyway. The result is a composite poem by Marvin Bell, Eirean Bradley, Tony Brown, Jenith Charpentier, Lea C. Deschenes Richard Fox, Suzanne Lummis, Heather Mac, Ellyn Maybe, Jaimes Palacio, Sholeh Wolpe and myself.”

This was the result.

Thanks for the opportunity. Proud to be a part of it.

Leave a comment | tags: collaborative work, poems, poems from prompts, Radius | posted in poetry

July 7, 2016

Targets

By Tony Brown

At 5:45 AM
I took out the trash
and did not startle
when a neighbor spoke to me
while my back was turned

because I am not a target.

I watered the container garden
when we were done speaking
and then sat right down
on my own front wall
in the high humidity
and, in the name of
going back to bed
and getting more sleep,
took a few hits off half a joint
and wasn’t too worried
though it was full daylight

because I am not a target.

I could have been a target.
I could have been but almost
in spite of all my handsome
paternal ancestors,
I pass for White
and always have
and thus regardless
of my own thoughts
and obsessions and internal
maladjustments to the way
my frame doesn’t fit my picture,

I am not a target.

I can love and rage
and live out loud
because I am not a target.

I can walk a street
with my eyes set straight upon
the eyes of others

because I am not a target.

I can watch every video
of targets, and target practice,
sit there staring,
crying out and raging up
and falling out,
then turn them off
or turn away

because I am not a target.

No one
and everyone
knows what’s coming.

No one
and everyone
understands

what will not stand;
no one knows how it will
fall. None but the targets

understand
how that’s going to feel.
Everyone’s

going to learn something —
at the very least, how
not to turn away;

at the very most,
how little it will be,
has ever been, about them.

I went back inside
and was ready to sleep

until one of my handsome
paternal ancestors

rose into view,
right through the floor;

she hovered there,
her regalia soaked in blood;

she shook her head,
she would not look me in the eye;

as hard as I wanted to be before her,
I could not be hard. I instead fell

to the same floor she transcended
so easily, and saw then

how difficult it was going to be
if I wanted to claim anything

of what I thought myself
to be; and when I looked up

she was gone, and the blazing eye
of a bull bison hung in her place

for a second only
before leaving me alone

to choose.

Leave a comment | tags: heritage, meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

July 6, 2016

Language You Were Not Born With

By Tony Brown

Talking about a sensitive topic with friends;
there’s a word you think applies

but it’s from language
you were not born with.

You would like to include it
in the conversation — holding it in your mouth

before placing it with right reverence
and emphasis

on the perfect space on the board so to speak —
but are unsure of its reception

and frankly are at least slightly uneasy
with your right to use the word

as it is not
language you were born with.

You consult your dictionary
and find the word there, guide to pronunciation,

all the various connotations, even a sense
of the same dis-ease you feel while considering it.

Now you have permission. This is why
you own the dictionary in the first place:

to give yourself permission. To provide yourself
a place to keep

all the language you were not born with
until you choose to use it.

As you speak you have freedom of choice
to think (or not) of all who’ve died

to provide you with your dictionary. Those
whose mouths once held selected words

that were fortunately plucked
in their ripest darkest moments

and then tucked almost tenderly into your dictionary
to sleep until you needed them. Language

you were not born with, language still blood-sticky.
Talking around a sensitive subject with friends

and there’s the perfect place to stick the word.
This is why you own the dictionary: so you’ve got

something to point at in the silence that follows.
Something to stand on. Something

to hit the dead with when they come forward
to ask why you took what you took from them.

Leave a comment | tags: cultural appropriation, meditations, poems, poetry, political poems, race | posted in poetry

July 4, 2016

Fourth

By Tony Brown

This explosion laden sky —
simulacrum of war — red glare,
etc. Flag, etc. Drums and
parade and roasting, grilling,
etc. The best damn colors
in the whole damn world, etc.,
red among them, red the shade
of all of the blood-spill of our history, etc. —
I am trying to forget my usual rage
in favor of an uneasy delicacy around
one huge fear prompted tonight
at the fireworks show,
among the large trucks in the lot
surmounted with large US flags,
by a small brown boy who ran laughing
and clapping gladly at the exploding sky,
simulacrum of war, red glare, etc.,
knowing nothing but joy
at loud noise and a sky full of flames —
incendiary stars briefly shining
then burning out as they fell
as their cousins the bombs
fall elsewhere upon brown boys
like him, and tonight (at least) the large men
are laughing with him as he runs among their
giant waving flags; he is growing up
under those flags, under a
war-ripped sky, and I wonder: if and when
things change for him here,
will he end up loving or loathing the etc.
that is this place, will he end up
as afraid as I am of the large men
in the large trucks and their flags
the size of tents, of walls, etc., etc.,
when if ever will he become afraid
of all the etc. that comes these days
for so many as part of life
under the red and white and blue.

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

July 3, 2016

The Priesthood

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 8/11/2012.

Priests of every stripe
will tell you one thing
and forget to tell you
another.

They are politicians as much as they are
holy men and women.
They will do what’s right for them,
say it’s right from God.

If you want knowledge you can trust,
don’t ever listen to a human.
Get to an ocean or desert
or a mountain; in fact go

anywhere high desert and mountains
drop into the ocean.
Go sit near the shore for a week
or a few years.

You’ll get
everything you need.

I would tell you
to keep it to yourself
and not risk creating
a priesthood,

but it tends to follow.
You will end up
lying about it
to others,

telling yourself
it’s for their own good,
but it will be, of course,
for your own:

that’s the nature
of it, the message straight
from God: we will always
mess up the truth and have to

look for it again
where the high and bright dry
meets the cold
deep dark.

1 Comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, revisions | posted in poetry

July 1, 2016

Knucklehead (Dig)

By Tony Brown

Dig the white behind
my eyes, white within
my heart; in the blood
enough of me is white
to mask what is not,
but dig it, it’s there — mostly now
just a dark itch,
a reminder of fires
and bullets under the skin,
burrowed, shattering,
leaving the path
by which white
got in; dig

a recognition
of how I will likely
fail at last — torn
apart by my parts,
split open, pieces
separating and falling aside
like halves of a body
in an old and violent
cartoon. Dig how in fact I am
an old and violent cartoon

forever imagining
fictional demises
I come back from
in the next reel, different
but the same, same old
knucklehead,
same old fucked up
half and half,
same old mess
everyone thinks
is playing for laughs —

dig that crazy headdress,
dig those big brown eyes,
dig those whines, those pains,
that history no one
cares to address,
that incompetence
which is only to be expected,
that blood with the dark tinge,
that white white scar all over him
and inside him,
that white white being he is
never going to not be. Dig
how deep he digs to try and
get past it.
Dig the hole
where he lies down,
hoping to sleep.