Monthly Archives: August 2018

August 16, 2018

Prediction

What’s become clear is that
your enemies have the easy stuff
figured out and countered and

that’s at least in part because
you yawp like a puppy instead of
growling or better still coming at them

in silence with cunning
and the strongest weapons you have
loose and swinging in your hands.

Your best bet
is to keep your mouth shut,
mostly. Don’t expose
the back of your throat

where your best weapons
hang — not the throwaways
you store on the tip of the tongue
but the sharpest edges,
the thickest batons,
the rifles with the laser sights.

You won’t listen.

You will die pretending
we are not at war.

We are not there yet,
you will say, even as you fall
bleeding into the sand.

We are not there yet,
you will say, as you die.

3 Comments | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

August 15, 2018

Always The Work

By Tony Brown

Here is
where I was born,

and there is where
I’ll be soon enough.

The space between them
is called by some “waiting to die,”

by others, “learning to live.” All of them say
that how you name the space

is an orientation and
a choice. They argue;

I try to cover my ears.
One day I heard someone else

call the path between them “the Work”
and I opened my arms.

Couldn’t wait for that embrace.
Into the Work I fell,

landing hard upon it,
sinking in after a few minutes,

learning to breathe
what I wrote, learning to

write from my breathing,
all while on my knees

in gratitude for a space
between waiting to die

and learning to live,
for the path called the Work

that has kept me for years,
breathing poetry

as I learned
how to navigate between

where I was born
and where I will be soon enough.

4 Comments | tags: meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

August 12, 2018

Edging Your Lawn

By Tony Brown

You edge your lawn
by trimming off
the parts of it
that intrude upon
the borders of
cement walks,
well mulched
beds of flowers, and
clusters of
hedges and shrubs.

You edge your lawn
although you know
how unnecessary
your lawn is.

You know, you should turn it over
and make it into a garden.
Do it to feed yourself,
your family,
your people.

You know
what you should do
but instead,
you edge your lawn.

You edge your lawn
with small swords.

You edge your lawn
to hold back a riot,
to stem chaos.

Clean lines,
segregated spaces,
perfect delineations,
evenly spaced boxes
for life.

Your lawn
pushes you
to keep it pretty,
serving that
which is useless.

You edge your lawn
in spite of
how hungry you are.

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

August 8, 2018

Recognition

By Tony Brown

I don’t have it anymore.
It’s possible
I’ve never had it,
that I fooled myself
into believing I did.

It’s possible that every word’s
always been
a smear of ash.
Poured a few tears on it,
watched it turn to ink.

Starting to think
that each minute on stage
was a mistake made in public,
a stumble turned into
interpretive dance.

I hate ash,
and I hate dance.
How did I get here?

This is not to say
I did not enjoy it at all.
It had its moment.
It petted my ego and
gave good illusion;

at this point though, any stab
at recovery seems
ridiculous, an obvious
ploy for lengthening
my minuscule, improbable fame.

I’m the downside
of Andy Warhol’s
fatuous words. The
last tick of fifteen
bad, sad minutes approaches.

I hate time,
and I hate loss.
How did I get here?

I could, I suppose,
buckle down and do
the real work
I should have done
early on.

I could, I suppose,
put some blood
into the ash and change
its hue. Stop crying,
stop dancing, stand still

and let myself
become a target
for the hard bullets
that come with the harder work;
I could still learn a thing or two.

I hate this dumb face
and God, I hate this blank screen.
How should I proceed?

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

August 8, 2018

True Crime Stories

By Tony Brown

True crime stories
half the day
on half the media
unless you include
celebrity news

and then it’s all media,
all the time.

I wish instead of this
I could go outside and
talk to a tree but I think
it would insist on speaking
of climate change and air quality
so there’d be no relief there,

that’s a crime as well
and as true as the rest
and we know who the culprits are
and we have the evidence
of our bitter sweat
and hampered breath

to turn over to the authorities
if only we knew who they were.

So I stay inside and use
the flipping of channels as
palliative care, changing
when the dread becomes
overwhelming.

The only comfort left to me
is the hope of updates on ancient episodes
of Cold Case Files and Unsolved Mysteries;

anything to suggest that though justice
grinds slow, it does grind fine
and finally.

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

August 7, 2018

Volcano

By Tony Brown

A fire from the center of the earth
breaks out now and then
to remind us of what is possible
and beyond our own capacity.

Flaming, streaming rock
turned plastic, slippery, and red
comes to the surface
through generations of old stone
and when it catches anything
it burns everything and our weakness
is made clear.

We stare into it,
offer it fear and faith.
Name it for a goddess or god,
curse it as an evil,
flee it and photograph it
and tell stories of its potency,
its devastation,
its swift re-creation
of the land it seizes
or the ocean it boils.

On the horizon,
a glow announces the coming
of the central fire. The world
made new, in ways we cannot
replicate. No wonder

we fear it. No wonder
we gave it a god’s name,
a goddess’s name, a divinity
all its own.

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

August 7, 2018

Half, Confronted

By Tony Brown

1.
The bathroom mirror
where I chase my ancestors

lets me know
in no uncertain way

which ones are hidden
and which are open about themselves.

All I can see there
are the ones I am loath to see.

Random people now and then
see or say they see

the others,
the ones I long to greet.

I do not. Now and then I think
I catch something of them but quickly

convince myself
I’m wrong, then change my mind

and say to myself, at last,
but then I look again and

change my mind again.
It’s not unlike deciding

on the cancer danger of a birthmark
you have been fretting about

your whole life. You will never see it
as nothing you can change.

There are days when
a razor seems to be your only savior

until you think about the blood,
wonder who will have to mop it,

and crestfallen
hold back one more time.

The bathroom mirror
where I chase my ancestors,

the arena where one side
struggles to smother the other,

the pale wall impervious
to my insistence that the other

be allowed visibility to match
what I feel and know of it;

I am certain I hear laughter
every time I see my face there —

the ancestors who killed my ancestors
snickering at my sickening.

I want a shotgun to answer it
most days. I want to fight it,

choke it off, send it to
shadows to hide and be shamed,

stop myself once and for all
from looking in the bathroom mirror.

It’s a lie in there. It’s a truth.
A lie hiding truth hiding lies

hiding an explanation for all the rest.
A face so white it blinds me

to my best possible face,
one I can’t see or imagine

except now and then,
and those are the times

when I most want
to pick up razor or gun

and chase them away
for my own good.

2.
This self-loathing
makes me feel like a revolutionary.

Hours upon hours
of excoriating my Italian face.

Man, I wish I was
Hollywood Native perfect. Not really —

I know better,
of course I do, I know all the lies —

but you know,
maybe I could have

just enough of it to clarify,
astonish, make people

wary of me, as wary as I am
wary of myself.

How easily I fall into those
same mythic traps.

Be yourself, just be yourself,
relax into it, no one

cares, really,
say all the right people.

All the close ones as well as
all the distant arbiters.

They don’t get it:
this is me being totally

myself. As if I was anything else
but this wannabe Other, this

simply mixed kid all grown into this
ridiculous, genocided

old mess. I’m exactly what the Architects
Of The American Dream wanted to happen.

My self-loathing makes me uncommonly
useful to them as I am perfect to point at

when they strongly discourage folks from making
more of me and my type.

This is what you get, they say.
Me in the mirror wondering how to be

something I’m not,
except I am, except not really.

Not really,
except…

No. Take off this face.
Take it away, please.

A mantra I sing
over and over to the glass.

Pleading with the mirror,
pretending

something genuine’s in there
to listen. As if there is

anything whole and healthy
hiding behind the sum of my parts.

My self-loathing is all that’s there. It’s my
political stance,

my stand,
my bonfire beacon.

It’s all I have to go by
in the dark.

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

August 6, 2018

Barbarians

By Tony Brown

I’m not worried about
the long run with these
barbarians. They give off
the whiff, the white heat
of desperate knowledge.
They know they’re done.

It may take twenty
or thirty years, hundreds or
thousands of dead for that
to come to completion.
It won’t be pretty,
but it is inevitable.

We know it too.
We understand their
fear. Which is not to say
we feel compassion for it

or that we should; there’s been
too much of that already,
too much care for their feelings,
too much accommodation
to their ideas as we twist ourselves
into painful shapes to prove we
are not the same as them, when truth is

we are not. Never have been.
Any assumed parallels
come to a vanishing point
in every single instance.

Plenty of immediate killing things
to worry about
in the air, the water, the heat
and the cold and the growing wilder winds
roaring over us all. They had their hands
in that as well, of course, and soon enough
those things will do their worst.
Who knows yet how we will survive those?

But the barbarians, the torch boys,
the crooked crossing guards, the pale
first responders to dog whistles, the wealthy
in their slit-windowed financial houses,
the small monsters in the pointy hoods?

They will do their worst, knowing
how little time is left to do it.
Maybe decades,
maybe a century; maybe.
No thousand-year
self-satisfied reign.
No. It’s time.
They know.

This war
is how they mourn.

2 Comments | tags: poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

August 2, 2018

Preparation

By Tony Brown

In planning for subterfuge
I strive to emulate a mad white dog
who stretches out on snow
in full daylight
and nearly disappears
while remaining in plain sight
of those willing to look carefully
into that which by its very nature
blinds a viewer and obscures
what is being viewed.

In planning for resistance
I work hard to transform myself
into one of a host of frogs
falling from the sky
onto the porches and streets
of those who do not believe
in such things happening, those
who scoff at the possibility
of humble beings pouring down
upon them in their complacency
and ruining, possibly forever,
at least for a moment,
their paradigm.

In readying myself
for what is coming
I stare at my reflection
and think of replicating
the actions of virus, or
of bacterium — unseen and
anonymous, sometimes
not doing visible damage
for appreciable time, leaving
tunnels and palaces
within the opened body of the host
in such a way
that all manner of new life
may enter and make a home.

In thinking out loud
of these tactics, I see they may be
terrifying enough up front
to create in the body politic
an unease that will do
half my work before I make
any decision, and when I do choose
it will be a choice
made without announcement, made
for the love of the future, fully aware
of what must come before that love
can openly manifest.