The difference between
what I look like
from the outside and
what I am like within
is three thousand
miles or so give or take based upon
the precise starting points
and exact destinations
or so I’d like to think
The distance to the village
where I thought I might look right
for the part
but didn’t
is four thousand miles
The distance to the rez
where by rights no one could trust me
to be who I said I was
is two thousand miles
in the other direction
I’ve been to both
Neither fit me well
or at all
You hear this and choose to question
why geography and history
should matter so much to me
when I live right here and
I’m the only one bringing this up
on a routine basis
an obsessive basis
If I’d forgotten all that
gotten over it
I’d have been happier
you say
You remind me that
I’m old poor and sick now
It would seem that should
matter most of all
not race and ancestry
Not missing any sense of home
Make a home here you say
It’s all that matters
I’ve lived among people like you
my whole life
and talked about this
the whole time
and somehow you still wonder
why I have been and will continue to be
mad and lost
all the time
Tag Archives: race
Mad And Lost
Interior Screens
In bed at night
if you close your eyes
tightly enough
your interior screens
turn white
Exactly as hard
as you resist that
is how hard it
will hit you
When you find it happening
in daylight too
you will pull your skin tight
over your hardest bones
and petrify
All that pale light streaming
blanding and blinding at once
makes this a hard place
and making yourself harder
in the comforting dark
will keep you breathing
but in bed at night
as the whiteness
comes down
comes stifling down
open your eyes wide
to your darkness and
find yourself softening
to something like peace
Dragged Along
It feels, always,
like inside me
there’s a documentary
about vanilla
playing on repeat: sometimes
it’s at full volume;
at other times
it’s barely audible
under my head chatter;
but it’s always on. There’s
a episode where
a man in a monocle
purchases an escalator
that no one else gets to ride.
There’s the one with
a princess who gestures
from the top for me to come to her,
but I never get there.
There is that one where
I see myself riding a unicycle
up a long hill.
I’m sure
I have never ridden one before
but somehow in this film
I’m straining and
making slow progress.
I begin to wonder when
this was filmed, is it the reason
I’m such pain here and now?
A spokesman comes on,
a voice over extolling
the wonders of vanilla.
A documentary voice
that makes a compelling
case for the dry factual,
the obviously correct
flavor of vanilla. It doesn’t matter
how hard I drive the sticks
into my ears, how much I bleed,
how hard I squeeze the throat
of the man with the monocle
or cry out my rejection
of the princess; my skin
is caught in the escalator.
I am bleeding;
dragged along, the scent of
vanilla deep in my nostrils,
voiceover yelling my name.
A Social Construct
Originally posted 6-19-2018. Revised.
“Race doesn’t exist,
you know.
It’s just
a social construct,”
he said.
I jabbed him gently
in the face
with my real fist.
When
real men
showed up waving
real guns
and real badges,
I indicated
that whatever
we all did next
in response
was in fact a social construct —
whether or not I went
easily, whether or not
they took me down, whether
I lived or died or they lived or died —
none of it was real
and all of it
should be easily ignored,
but for some reason
they did not ignore a thing.
Was arrested, a social construct.
Made bail, a social construct.
Went to trial, a social construct.
Pled out, a social construct.
Got probation, a social construct.
Came out marked
and civically blighted,
a social construct.
Race is
a social construct
that works better for me than for many.
That’s real.
Money is
a social construct
that works better some days
than others for me,
better overall for some folks,
much worse overall
for others.
That’s real.
What’s real
is a social construct
unless it’s
a mountain
or a desert
or a robin
or a lion
or the skin
you’re in,
the hair you
grow or do not grow,
the strength of
your pulse or
the jerk it makes
as it slows and stops
in response to a bullet
entering your body.
How quickly it stirs
at the screaming
of a child not your own, or at
the sight of
someone else’s blood
on a cracked street?
That’s a social construct.
On page or screen
I’m a social construct.
I wish sophistry
wasn’t so damn real.
White As A Ghost
they said to
a frightened man
you are as white
as a ghost
he said nothing
but thought
about the paradigm that after existing
in the skin
he was born to
for an entire lifetime
the fear of death
would render him as white as the ghost
they thought he would become
after dying
thus negating at last
all else he was and had been
in this notion of the afterlife
fear and death bleach all
and the goal of total assimilation
is thus achieved
but the frightened man
did not say any of this
instead silently resolved that
when at last his term was ended
if he could come back
he would come back
the wraith he would become
would haunt all of this
and his ghost
would be dark
Adjacent
I’ve got a friend
who weeps when called out
for racist words and actions.
Who sobs out loud
when tapped on the shoulder
with a simple, “excuse me, but…”
Who appeals to the masses
for absolution from
wee slips of the tongue and
itty-bitty sins of omission or,
sometimes,
commission.
I feel so bad for them
I’ve created
an easier term to use.
I say,
“You’re not being racist…
friend…
it’s more like…
you are…
racism-adjacent.”
As in, of course
you’re not,
but you share a fence
with it.
As in, of course
you’re not,
but your apartments
share common spaces
where racism
plays Kid Rock so loud
you can’t hear
that nice Justin Timberlake.
As in, of course
you’re not,
but you work
a community garden together;
racism grows weed, you grow
cannabis.
As in, of course,
racism doesn’t know any better.
As in, of course,
you certainly know better.
You’re not racist,
just racism-adjacent.
Sit near it at work.
Talk to it at lunch.
Engage it in debate
online, listen to it
respectfully, indignantly
at PTA meetings,
tut-tut it in private,
slip into silence
when it’s next to you
in the elevator,
the supermarket,
the voting booths.
Of course, you
are not like that.
Of course you would never
although you sympathize
with how hard
it must be sometimes to miss
falling into that
what with all the
provocations
and you know better
but the economy pushes
people and
you would never sacrifice
anyone’s right to speak —
Enough. Friend, listen:
I’m so sorry I called you
racist. It must have been
the lighting, the darkness,
the nearness of
the real racist
in the room — sorry,
I meant to say
“racist-adjacent”
of course but somehow
I forgot. Sin of
omission on my part —
I forgot the word
I’m supposed to use.
Half, Confronted
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.
Vapid
They took everything that was already white
and compressed it into a small cake.
Utterly slick, ultimately waxy,
as small as an ironic footnote.
Laid that bit into a chamber,
set it on flameless fire as if
they didn’t care about it, raised it
from its crushed state into the clouds, huffed it,
blew it out into the thickest shade
of pure chalk imaginable,
then stood behind it in deep admiration
and masturbated
over their skills
at being so unlike
the entire everything
that birthed them.
And oh, the beards they grew,
and oh, the monstrous foods they devoured;
the long nights of staring into the eyes
of the disposable past
with sucking love
and hot detachment.
Leafing through the edges
for paths to the dead center;
admirable little men in their circles —
circles that nonetheless
are still just men masturbating
behind vast, thick clouds of white.
Grays
If you are as colorblind
in your world
as you claim to be,
why are some things there
never just black
and white to you?
Right, wrong,
up, down,
brutal, gentle;
no obvious divides
between them,
only dissolutions
from one shade of gray
to the next
in your world.
There’s always
an excuse, a reason.
You stress them to us;
not all grays,
not all of them,
you say.
Are you being
the shade of gray
you want to see in your world?
Have you advertised
and marketed and sold others
on the shades of gray of your world?
Are you being
the commercial
you want to see for your world?
You don’t understand these questions?
There’s a translation.
It’s written in red, so it may not work for you.
But it’s not my place
to tell you how to feel.
It’s my place to feel in as many colors as I can
and then to talk about it,
to be the feeling
I want to feel in my world.
You don’t see colors. I can see that.
You don’t see me. I can see that.
Exclaiming that I’m wrong to say that?
I can hear that loud and clear.
Clear as a painting.
Loud as an explosion of paint cans
being hurled against a wall.
A gray cinder block wall. Red paint,
blue paint, siren-crimson,
gunshot-blue. Redlined
neighborhoods. Piss-yellow
phone calls to the police.
Your burned coffee
tastes more wrong when there is color
peeking out of your gray.
You have gray parks in your world
and they get a little greener
when there’s a suspicion of color there,
not that you would say that,
of course, as you are color blind.
Only shades of gray in your world
which looks like my world
except yours looks like a fog
settling on mine:
a red pox blanket; a sheet
pinked by blood and fire;
a blur of blue;
a spill of scarlet —
none of which
you can see.
Addressing Mr. White
I note your objection
to my protest
and set it aside.
I acknowledge your expression
of your opinion
and do not consider it valid.
You rationalize with
great precision why you are right
and it moves me not at all.
You proclaim
universal truths
that look parochial from this angle.
I will not apologize
for not apologizing
for your offended moment.
I will extend my vision
over your potential for growth
but am not holding my breath.
When will you understand
how narrow you look from here?
It’s not a question of your longevity
or endurance.
It’s how damnably strong
your default position still is
at this edge of a century
where we’ve been in constant danger
of being obliterated
and how much anguish
we’ll all be in
if we have to support it any longer.
23
Somebody give me one of two things:
a top hat full of noble blood
or a statue of me wearing the hat.
You can call me lord of a lovely
principality. Isn’t it the same thing?
Isn’t a statue of the imaginary me
the same as the red juice of privilege?
I hereby declare that they are the same.
If you give me the blood
and the statue as well, won’t I be
regal and in charge? Go get me
the title as well, something on parchment.
I want to choose who I am
and discard what I was raised to be. It matters less,
it seems, than what I decide a scrap of me
has to report. All that history to wrestle
that once could exalt or drown a person
and now all we have to do is check a box
or stuff one and we are what we claim.
Easy enough for everyone.
I’m enjoying the stony hat on my head now.
I’m enjoying the hell out of my pale marble face.
I’m dreaming of what it all means,
when all it means is that I’m dreaming.
I Am Aftermath
It doesn’t matter
what I call myself,
what I see in the mirror,
how I was raised,
what I learned,
what I was taught,
what name I was given,
who my father and mother were,
what I breathed growing up,
what music I heard growing up,
what fires I sheltered beside,
what drums I felt,
what I did while screaming back at insults,
what I fought or how I fought,
what claims I made or make,
what scars all this has left,
it doesn’t matter;
my existence is proof of genocide;
I should change my name to Aftermath;
I should forget myself.
Mythbuster
A dire wolf in winter, strong
and thick with frost-hung fur.
A unicorn, its coat
a cocaine-dyed feast.
A dragon cloaked
in ice, in shards of flame.
All your fantasies
are white — but a white man?
A man as white
as these myths, a man
who is also alive, and real,
and in the right place in this world?
Such a being would be so cold
its heart would freeze and its blood
would become a static avalanche.
Such a being might long for
green, yet green life
would shirk its presence
and slink back
into the earth to hide,
and how then
would such a white man
live, thrive, populate
beyond its own death?
It’s not possible. No such thing
exists. Look at yourself, look at me:
skinned in shades
of warm pink or brown,
hues of sun and ground.
No white here — so why then the myth?
Some are made
to explain, some are made
to enslave, some are made
to explain enslavement
then tempt away any warmth
of the heart toward those enslaved.
We’re left with a white shroud
on a body gone cold,
hiding its shrunken frame,
its jutting bones. Then,
a sound breaking
the white silence:
howled recognition.
Pierced veil. A necessary burning.
whitenoise
from birth
you were walked
blindered into
forest
forever bumping into
trees
stumbling off path
into a swamp
(as was intended)
your steps
sucking so loud
can’t hear a way out
and not like it’s easy to
grope a way back
hands on trees
you can’t see
in a forest
you can’t see
all you’ve got is your ears
but once you’re out of
the worst of the swamp
it’s all one white blur
of whitenoise
you’ll need a good brown voice
in your ear to find your way
outta here
and it will tell you
the first step
is to open your eyes
and see where the whitenoise
is coming from
and the second step is
to shut up
it must follow
that the third
is to listen
Dyingly
Some children in a store laugh
at my “Standing Rock”
T-shirt, tell me I’m stupid
for wearing it after I explain it.
Adults I’ve known for years
forget who I am, forget
how I identify, forget
it matters to me that they remember.
Other adults insist
I’m not what I am, am not
what I know I am, am not
getting it, am lying about it.
I’ve never denied that what I am
is not easy for me to be:
I know damn well
where I seem to fit on first glance
and what I get from that;
I know damn well what I grew up with
doesn’t show on first glance;
I know I’m supposed to have both sides
all together now. I don’t.
I should have relaxed into my mix
a long time ago, and instead
all I am is dyingly angry — “all I am,”
as if I exist with any completion
outside of my skull at all.
I should fall from a bridge
before you all, crack it open.
You’d call me crazy and peer
into the gray and red and meat and
jelly of my brain and say
there’s nothing there to build on
and eventually let me go. Some of you
will call me the crazy old Indian then,
some the crazy old White guy,
and so the cycle will continue.
In death,
by reputation, I will be
as divided
as I am in life
and damn those children
who laugh and laugh,
who become adults
with no clue,
who end up happy
and whole in ignorance
they likely never had to choose,
a ignorance I wish
I had myself been born with.
Dark Matter 