The Justice Department

2011-10-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

What might you hear about and learn today that the world will speak about next week? Listen to Netroots Radio!

The Justice Department is now on Blue Skies, the flagship station of the Netroots Radio Network.

I'm Special Agent DJ Justice; Radio Host on Blue Skies and the Program / Artistic Director for the Netroots Radio Network; and I'm manning the dials, spinning the discs, warbling the woofers, putting a slip in your hip and a trip to your hop.

Subscription radio too far up in space and the cost astronomical after the free trial? Your favorite college and terrestrial stations sold in the dead of night to right wing FCC scofflaws? Liberal and Progressive politics missing from the programming of the stations left?

Blue Skies Netroots Radio is there for ya, baby!

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(Farm Road and Running Fence Olema, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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The Blue Skies
Netroots Radio Network Player

Vintage James Baldwin, Labor History, Native American Documentaries, the BBC, Democracy Now, The David Packman Show, Union Edge and Equal Time Radio, The Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal, Nicole Sandler, already vintage Waldman and Armando, Music, your Blue Skies Favorites... and so much more, on right now!

Go ahead, now you can listen while roaming the Big Orange and beyond!

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(12-String Ovation Balladeer Astoria, Oregon / copyright Justice Putnam)

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The Blue Skies Daily Line-up

All Times Pacific Time
(east coasters add 3 hours; europeans and others overseas? do what you have to do!)

Sun Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Sun 1am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Sun 11am - Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Sun Noon - 7pm -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Sun 7pm - 8pm -- Professional Left with Driftglass and Blue Gal
Sun 8pm - 9pm -- The Justice Department
Sun 9pm - Mid -- Jibber Your Jabber with Wink & Co.

Mon Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Mon 1am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Mon 11am - Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Mon Noon - 1pm -- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
Mon 1pm - 3pm -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Mon 3pm - 4pm -- Equal Time Radio
Mon 4pm - 6pm -- Nicole Sandler Show
Mon 6pm - 8pm -- On The Porch with Black Kos
Mon 8pm - 9pm -- The David Pakman Show
Mon 9pm - Mid -- The Justice Department

Tue Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Tue 1am - 1:30am -- Free Speech Radio News
Tue 1:30am - 2am -- BBC Outlook
Tue 2am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Tue 11am - Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Tue Noon - 1pm -- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
Tue 4pm - 6pm -- Nicole Sandler Show
Tue 6pm - 7pm -- Against the Grain
Tue 7pm - 9pm -- Norman Goldman Show
Tue 9pm - 10pm -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Tue 10pm - Mid -- Campfire Talk with Steve and Fripp

Wed Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Wed 1am - 1:30am -- Free Speech Radio News
Wed 1:30am - 2am -- BBC Outlook
Wed 2am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Wed 11am - Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Wed Noon - 1pm -- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
Wed 4pm - 6pm -- Nicole Sandler Show
Wed 6pm - 8pm -- Norman Goldman Show
Wed 8pm - 9pm -- -- Against the Grain
Wed 9pm - Mid -- Jibber Your Jabber with Wink & Co.

Thu Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Thu 1am - 1:30am -- Free Speech Radio News
Thu 1:30am - 2am -- BBC Outlook
Thu 2am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Thu 11am - Noon BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Thu Noon -1pm -- -- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
Thu 4pm - 6pm -- Nicole Sandler Show
Thu 6pm -7pm -- Against the Grain
Thu 7pm - 9pm -- Blues Skies Science Special
Thu 9pm - Mid -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice

Fri Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Fri 1am - 1:30am -- Free Speech Radio News
Fri 1:30am - 2am -- BBC Outlook
Fri 2am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Fri 11am - Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Fri Noon - 1pm -- Democracy Now with Amy Goodman
Fri 1pm - Mid -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice

[Fri 5pm - 6pm -- Language and Stories with the Roaring Girl (returning soon)
Fri 6pm - 7pm -- Info Warfare with Dunvegan (returning soon)]

Sat Mid - 1am -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour Update
Sat 1am - 1:30am -- Free Speech Radio News
Sat 1:30am - 2am -- BBC Outlook
Sat 2am - 3am -- Equal Time Radio
Sat 3am - 11am -- Blue Skies Overnight World Service ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Sat 11am Noon -- BBC World Service ~~ News Hour
Sat Noon - 7pm -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice
Sat 7pm - 8pm -- The David Pakman Show
Sat 8pm - Mid -- Open Court ~~ A Selection of News, Commentary & Music chosen by Special Agent DJ Justice

Netroots Radio also features during the day and overnight; Jim Hightower, The Green News Report, Breaking News, Media Matters, Norman Goldman Show, music, Radio Documentaries, Old Time Radio Shows, repeats of our shows and progressive talk podcasts of your favorites.

Can't be around when your favorite is broadcast? TiVo or dvr button won't work here? Not to worry! You can take any of your favorites with you; to the beach, the mall or on the tractor baling alfalfa, with Podcasts on the Go!

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(Cut Stones and Arch St Ceneri, France / copyright Justice Putnam)

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Question: Who is your audience? What are you here for?

Answer: Tribal Alliances, Heart-felt Convictions, Passionate Reason, Random Abandon, Sustainable Civility and a kiss; to comfort the sad and the mad Ones; the Ones roaming the International section of the American Supermarket at night; or roaming the neglected streets looking for an angry malaprop to sink their teeth into; the Ones who seek without seeking and learn as much as they teach; the Ones who embrace and kiss and embrace again; the Ones who sing the song of the city and the ballads of the forest; the Ones who chant the rhythm of the sea and hum the melody of the desert; the Ones who sing the prayer of Her name and Her name is the World. Yes, those are the Ones. -- JP

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(Man, Girl and Broken Window Klamath Falls, Oregon / copyright Justice Putnam)

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(I've pledged the minimum $150 to help heat folks in need and cook their food on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations. Navajo has an important diary posted with all the particulars. Even a small amount can work towards building the minimum. Could you please help?)

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So that explains it... !

Sunlight and Water Pitcher Muir Beach / copyright Justice Putnam

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... Or does it?

(Holy Bible and 3 in 1 Oil Berkeley, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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(Rail Road Crossing, Sonoma California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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"Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but they are all unmourned, and consigned to oblivion, because they had no bard to sing their praises."

-- Horace

"Still the race of hero spirits pass the lamp from hand to hand."

-- Charles Kingsley

You Always Said Pinochet

(words and music
by Justice Putnam)

(roughly to “You Take The High Road)

I’d always say, “Pinoshay”
You always said, “Pinoshet.”

But what of the names of the
Disappeared before Ya!

I will dance on the grave
Of Augusto “Pinoshay”

And you can spit
If you insist
On Augusto “Pinoshet!”

© 2006 by Justice Putnam
Fleur de Sel Musique
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

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2011-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Black Kos Music: Late Night in The Justice Department

The Justice Department is now on Blue Skies, the flagship station of the Netroots Radio Network.

I'm Special Agent DJ Justice; and I'm manning the dials, spinning the discs, warbling the woofers, putting a slip in your hip and a trip to your hop.

Follow me for tonight's playlist, the Blue Skies radio player and other information in...

Black Kos Music: Late Night in The Justice Department...

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Let us go through that Portico, that one there...

(Old Fisherman and Cannery on Corsica / copyright Justice Putnam)

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... the one to the left of the fallen statuary; to the hidden courtyard of...

(House Ruins of Poet St Pol Roux at Brittany, France / copyright Justice Putnam)

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... The Justice Department

(Pacific Stock Exchange San Francisco, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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"And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins

behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs

and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves—
and then is gone,

leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air"

-- Carlo Betocchi
"Summer"

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(Farm Road and Running Fence Olema, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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The Blue Skies
Radio Player

The Justice Department broadcasts live on Sunday nights 8pm - 9pm pacific and Monday nights 10pm - 11pm pacific. Netroots Radio Podcasts of The Justice Department and other shows on the Netroots Radio Network can be found at the Blue Skies Netroots Radio website.

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How do I play Netroots Radio's .PLS file on my Desktop Player?
Listeners wishing to use their default media player (Media Player, Real Player, iTunes) to listen to Netroots radio stations should follow these instructions.

Step 1: Open Player
Step 2: Go to Help or Preferences --> Settings from the top main menu.
Step 3: Check the option that says Play SHOUTcast stations in default media player (Media Player, Real Player, iTunes )
Step 4: Click "Save Settings"

(h/t to dj julianna michigan)

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(12-String Ovation Balladeer Astoria, Oregon / copyright Justice Putnam)

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Playlist for The Justice Department 27 June 2011

Salief Keita -- Djembe

Youssou Ndour -- Baye Fall

Tamikrest -- Aicha

Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate -- Mamadou Boutiquier!

Incredible Bongo Band -- Duelling Bongos

Ah Nee Mah -- Firefall

Omar Faruk Tekbilek -- Love Respect Truth!

Sunda Javanese Gamelan -- Gamelan

Yoshida Brothers -- Fuyu no Sakura

Esbjörn Svensson Trio -- What Though The Way May Be Long

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(Cut Stones and Arch St Ceneri, France / copyright Justice Putnam)

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Question: Who is your audience? What are you here for?

Answer: Tribal Alliances, Heart-felt Convictions, Passionate Reason, Random Abandon, Sustainable Civility and a kiss; to comfort the sad and the mad Ones; the Ones roaming the International section of the American Supermarket at night; or roaming the neglected streets looking for an angry malaprop to sink their teeth into; the Ones who seek without seeking and learn as much as they teach; the Ones who embrace and kiss and embrace again; the Ones who sing the song of the city and the ballads of the forest; the Ones who chant the rhythm of the sea and hum the melody of the desert; the Ones who sing the prayer of Her name and Her name is the World. Yes, those are the Ones.

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(Man, Girl and Broken Window Klamath Falls, Oregon / copyright Justice Putnam)

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(I've pledged the minimum $150 to help heat folks in need and cook their food on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations. Navajo has an important diary posted with all the particulars. Even a small amount can work towards building the minimum. Could you please help?)

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(On Starlight and Fire, Keck Observatory Mauna Kea, Hawai’i / copyright Justice Putnam)

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So that explains it... !

(by Michelle Bava)

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... Or does it?

(Holy Bible and 3 in 1 Oil Berkeley, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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Rail Road Crossing, Sonoma California / copyright Justice Putnam)

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2011-06-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Black Kos Music: Late Night in The Justice Department

The Justice Department is now on Blue Skies, the flagship station of the Netroots Radio Network. Let us go through that portico, there, the one to the left of the fallen statuary; to the hidden courtyard of, The Justice Department.

I'm Special Agent, DJ Justice; and I'm manning the dials, spinning the discs, warbling the woofers, putting a slip in your hip and a trip to your hop.

Follow me for tonight's playlist, the Blue Skies radio player and other information in...

Black Kos Music: Late Night in The Justice Department:

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"Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual
Motion machine of the waves. Everything still

Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody
Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we

Walked that shore, too earnest and sheepish
To hold hands? The wind cutting through our clothes
Cleansed and burned, the chill off the Atlantic
An ache we courted in our dumbstruck talk:

Callow, expectant, what wouldn’t love give?
Cavalcanti’s ray from Mars, Dante’s wheel that moves
The planets and the stars, how nervous
We were, awkward and shivering: “Like this,

Do you like it like this?” Up all night,
Then waking to the smell of flannel and sweat,
We lay grateful, winded, goosefleshed in the chill,
Our own atmosphere rich and breathable:

We drank round the clock, embracing extremes,
Too hurried and heartsore to think of time…
Out fishing after midnight, we watched schools of squid
Slide and shimmer, tentacles tight-wrapped

Around our gig’s hooks: Yanked from the water,
They spouted jets of ink, then pulsed and quivered
And faded to dead-white, their eyes, resigned and sober,
Opening wider and wider…Ten years more,

And will either of us remember
That ink sticky on our hands, the moon-glare
Rippling as we knelt underneath the pier
And scrubbed and scrubbed our hands in the dark water?"

-- Tom Sleigh
"Aubade"

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The Blue Skies Radio Player

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UPDATE:
The player will continue to stream current shows on Blue Skies. A list of podcasts on the Netroots Radio Network are available for free and at any time; including tonight's show.

Blue Skies Podcasts Here!

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Laika and The Cosmonauts

Battant

Pintandwefall

Les Corps Mince De Francoise

Au Revoir Simone

Cinderella Effect

Stina Nordenstam

Aqua Velvets

Lux Aeterna

The Mermen

Iron and Wine

First Aid Kit

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Question: Who is your audience? What are you here for?

Answer: Tribal Alliances, Heart-felt Convictions, Passionate Reason, Random Abandon, Sustainable Civility and a kiss; to comfort the sad and the mad Ones; the Ones roaming the International section of the American Supermarket at night; or roaming the neglected streets looking for an angry malaprop to sink their teeth into; the Ones who seek without seeking and learn as much as they teach; the Ones who embrace and kiss and embrace again; the Ones who sing the song of the city and the ballads of the forest; the Ones who chant the rhythm of the sea and hum the melody of the desert; the Ones who sing the prayer of Her name and Her name is the World. Yes, those are the Ones.

Black Kos Music: Late Night in The Justice Department is a supplement to the free form, eclectic online radio music program on Blue Skies, part of Netroots Radio Network and which broadcasts Sunday nights at 8pm -9pm pacific time and Monday nights at 10pm - 11pm pacific.

(I've pledged the minimum $150 to help heat folks in need and cook their food on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations. Navajo has an important diary posted with all the particulars. Even a small amount can work towards building the minimum. Could you please help?)

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2011-02-12T21:20:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

11 February 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

I purchased and built my first crystal radio with an ear-set with funds gifted to me on my birthday in March of 1963. I was eight years old. It took a couple of weeks before the components arrived in the mail; and I set out to put the thing together. The radio was small and fit in the pocket of my coveralls, while a thin cord snaked its way to my left ear. We lived on the farm in Philomouth outside of Corvallis; and I had many chores to do before the bus picked me up for school. That radio kept me linked to the world while I milked the farm's only cow, slopped slop for the pigs, fed the geese and chickens, collected eggs and churned butter from the cream of that only cow.

The strongest frequency the radio picked up during those early morning duties was a station that broadcast local news, early morning weather and farm reports; and the conservative, baritone intonations of Paul Harvey ("... this is Paul Harvey... good day!"). I attended Saint Mary's Catholic School in Corvallis; and like many Catholics of the day ( and even now, not so surprisingly), photographs of JFK were prominent at home and school.

There was something about Harvey that bugged me as an eight year old. His halting, yet dulcet vocal delivery were pleasant enough, but the content of his broadcasts grated. Later that year, after the 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young school girls; Harvey attempted to diminish the tragedy by explaining that no matter how brutal the murders were, they were to be expected.

Murdering four black school girls was an expectation in America? Even as an eight year old, I knew that wasn't and shouldn't be correct.

A year later, a Great Uncle helped install the antennae for the short wave radio he gave me. I could now listen to the BBC, music from Paris and New York; and I discovered Studs Terkel in Chicago.

Though both Terkel and Harvey broadcast from Chicago, they were worlds apart. Terkel's interviews with Bob Dylan and Mahalia Jackson still resonate in a deep seated radio tape loop in the middle of my cerebelum.

We never owned a television in Oregon, reception being poor or non-existent where we lived. When we moved to Southern California in the summer of 1965, when my father began a 35 year professorship at Cal State Fullerton, we purchased a television shortly after settling in. Later, we purchased one of the first generations of color televisions. I would match the news from the three broadcast networks with that of the BBC, that I listened to on the short wave radio, (it was a big argument about dismantling and moving the antennae from Oregon to California, but my dad prevailed on my mom that is was a good idea). I began to triangulate information before I even knew the word. It just seemed the prudent thing to do.

As a child, I couldn't get enough information. It remains the same today. With each new technological advancement, the ability to gather info increases; and I anticipate it strongly. With events unfolding in Egypt and elsewhere, with social networks in the forefront of a revolution; it is proved that change need not be exacted by the barrel of a gun, but by the wide distribution of information.

DK4 begins officially tomorrow. Rather than smashing an old technology and leaving myself and many others behind, I anticipate yet another growth in my life long quest for knowledge. Difficulties are always prevalent when a new system of dissemination is put in place; but we don't need a hotel heiress or government lackey to set the tone for when and how we get our information.

All we need is the ability of the word to travel the ether.

Total Information Awareness

“This bubble had to be burst, & the only way to do it was
to go right into the heart of the Arab world
& smash something.” The hotel heiress, snapped
flashing her bum in a Bahamas club.

To go right into the heart of the Arab world,
they claim their device can trigger an orgasm:
flashing her bum in a Bahamas club
on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter.

They claim their device can trigger an orgasm.
American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity
on a boozy date with her new bloke, Nick Carter,
say he confessed under torture in Syria.

American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity
without touching a women’s genital area
say he confessed under torture in Syria.
“There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything.”

Without touching a women’s genital area,
I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation.
There’s no explanation why. We’re just not saying anything
to make this objective absolutely clear.

I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation,
but he was in the special removal unit.
To make this objective absolutely clear,
the development of counterterrorism technologies—

but he was in the special removal unit.
This had profoundly shocked the commission,
the development of counterterrorism technologies
with the flick of a switch. Women get turned on.

This had profoundly shocked the commission.
No one detected any radical political views.
With the flick of a switch, women get turned on
to a new business model that only pretends

no one detected any radical political views.
I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation
to a new business model that only pretends
to give consumers more control. In fact,

I take it all seriously. I am withdrawing from all representation
that she refused to be photographed in body paint
to give consumers more control. In fact,
he was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly.

That she refused to be photographed in body paint
constitutes an integral goal of the IOA.
He was handcuffed and beaten repeatedly.
There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout

constitutes an integral goal of IOA
while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police.
There’s no explanation why. An information whiteout.
Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores

while Justice turns to Syria’s secret police,
constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats.
Forebodings of disaster enter into box scores
to achieve total information awareness,

constructing systems to counter asymmetric threats.
This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was
to achieve total information awareness
& smash something. The hotel heiress snapped.

-- John Beer

2011-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

8 February 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

I had a conversation after the Super Bowl, Sunday, with a white progressive friend about Obama's pre-Super Bowl interview with O'Reilly. I appreciate this particular friend's tactic of playing Devil's Advocate; but it has gotten tiresome over the years; to the point I've accused this friend of actually advocating for his arguments. Regardless, he is intent on finding common ground with whatever opposition so that advances can be made, no matter how incremental; and it is that incrementalism that has always bothered me.

Where I saw O'Reilly barely able to temper his disdain for Obama, my friend saw O'Reilly has polite to a fault. The conversation devolved from there. We then discussed Fox News in general; I taking the position of Fox as being a powerful propaganda arm of the GOP; my friend pointing out evidence that is not true. We then debated about a Woman's Right to Choose; though a liberal, he has always been against abortion. He's a vegetarian and deems all life sacred, I will hand it to him, he does have some intellectual integrity; unlike my more reactionary acquaintances who oppose abortion, my friend also opposes the Death Penalty. He takes issue with, what he calls my, "inflammatory rhetoric", that I cannot expect to sway the anti-abortionists if I insist on referring to their position as "forced birth". Of course, calling someone a murderer for saving her own life is somehow not inflammatory. Regardless, if a law was passed to stop funding or treatment for any aspect of men's health, he would be at the front of whatever protest there was; yet, somehow, a microscopic mass of cells in a woman's womb can be more important than the woman. He doesn't exactly put it that way, but that is what I get every time we have this argument.

He then went on to discuss the advances racial minorities have achieved over the years, that by attrition, true freedom will occur; I brought up the anti-brown people laws passed and the insane numbers of minorities incarcerated to show that this incrementalism is not the success he insists.

My friend voted for Obama and considers him a great President; on that we agree. So how is it that two people who claim to be of the same persuasion so mightily disagree with the direction and success of reforms?

He sees the irrevocable change of rocks being worn away by the crashing of the sea; it may not happen in our lifetime, but change will indeed occur. I see that the rocks need to be smashed with sledge hammers; that change and freedom in the future mean little when folks are suffering now.

We may be friends, we may have the same concerns for the well being of the individual; and yet I cannot accept his safety in incrementalism. The gates need to be crashed and the walls of oppression need to be made to tumble down.

Waiting for Time to wear away oppression has never worked for those living in oppression; and it also is proved their great-great-great grandchildren won't experience the freedom that the argument of Time seems to assure.

We may have a Black President, as my friend points out as evidence of the great strides we've made; but when american latino families are murdered by white nationalist vigilantes, when black men and women are incarcerated in astronomical numbers, when income and housing inequality, when segregation are still prevalent; having a Black President is somewhat then, like a nice shiny ribbon on a gift.

The package looks nice, but the hate contained within is not negated by the beauty of the bow.

Going along to get along has never worked.

Booker T. and W.E.B.

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.

--Dudley Randall

2011-02-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

1 February 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

The anti-apartheid, white South African poet, writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach, was exiled after marrying a French national of Vietnamese descent while studying in Paris in the early '60's. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and The Immorality Act of 1950 made it a criminal offense for a white person to have sexual relations with a person of a different race. He made a trip to South Africa in 1975, was discovered in the country, (it has been reported that the ANC betrayed him to the government because they didn't trust him), arrested and sentenced to seven years of imprisonment for High Treason. Massive international intervention ultimately secured his release in 1982, he returned to Paris and obtained French citizenship.

Nigerian poet, novelist and musician, Chris Abani has a prescience that is almost uncanny. His first novel, Masters of the Board, about a neo-Nazi takeover of Nigeria earned him praise as "... (A)frica's answer to Frederick Forsyth." The government, though, believed the book to be a blueprint for an actual coup and sent the 18 year old Abani to prison in 1985. After serving six months, he was released; but he went on to perform in a guerilla theatre group which led to his arrest and imprisonment at the notorious Kiri Kiri prison. He was released again, but after writing his play Song of a Broken Flute, was arrested a third time, sentenced to death and sent to the Kalakuta Prison; where he was jailed with other political prisoners on death row.

Languishing most of the time in solitary confinement, Abani was finally and fortunately released in 1991. He lived in exile in London until 1999, when he emigrated to the United States; where he currently teaches at UC Riverside in California.

With events in Egypt unfolding; and the following poem written in 2006, it seems Abani's prescience is once again put to the fore.

Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach

There are stones even here
worn into a malevolence by time
gritting the teeth and tearing
the eyes with the memory.

Out in the desert, the wind
is a sculptor working the ephemera
of sand. Desperately editing steles
to write the names of thousands of slaves
who died to make Pharaoh great.
It is a fool’s game.

And we are like the blind musician
at the hotel who tells us with a smile:
I’ll see you later.

The guard at the pyramid eyes me.
Are you Egyptian? he demands,
then searches my bag for a bomb.
At the hotel they speak Arabic to me,
don’t treat me like the white guests,
and I guess, even here, with all
the hindsight of history we haven’t
learned to love ourselves.

I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot
explain why. How do you say: In my country
they buried me alive for six months?
And so you lie and tell yourself this is love.
I am protecting the world from my rage.

Rabab tells me: We know how to build graves
here. I nod. I know. It is the same all over Africa.

Do you have a knife? Do you have one?
the guards at the museum ask Breyten and me,
searching us. We call this on ourselves. We
are clearly political criminals.

I trace the glyphs chipped into stone.
As a writer I am drawn to this. If I could
I too would carve myself into eternity.
Breyten watching me says: Don’t tell me
you’ve found a spelling mistake in it!

A line of miniature statues is placed
into the tomb to serve the pharaoh.
One for each day of the year. Four hundred.
The overseers are a plus. I think
even death will not ease
the lot of the poor here.

Statues: it seems the more I search the world
for differences the more I find it all the same.
Perhaps the Buddha was a jaded traveler too
when he said we are all one.

Mona argues about who should pay
to see the mummies. It isn’t often I can
treat a girl to a dead body, Breyten insists.

A woman nearby tells her husand she can see
dead bodies at work. Why pay?
Do you think she works in a hospital? I ask.
That or the U.S. State Department, Breyten agrees.

From the top of Bab Zwelia, flat rooftops
spread out like a conference of coffee tables.
Broken walls, furniture, pots, litter the roofs
like family secrets sunning themselves.
Two white goats on a roof chew
their way through the debris.

On the Nile, Rabab sings in Arabic, tells me
she wants to be Celine Dion.
She is my sister calling me home to Egypt.
Perhaps one day I will be ready.
For now it is enough to know I can
be at home here.

-- Chris Abani

2011-01-28T18:02:00.000-08:00

28 January 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

Born in Munich of an American mother and a German father, educated and graduated from Harvard in 1909, Ernst Hanfstaengel later became one of Hitler's first financial supporters; even hiding him in one of his country homes in the Black Forest after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The two men remained close and in 1937 Hitler appointed Hanfstaengel Foreign Press Chief of the Nazi Party.

After a dispute with Goebbels, he was informed in March of 1937 that he was in danger of being murdered. He fled to the United States and was employed by the Office of Strategic Services as a political and psychological warfare adviser in the war against Germany.

Recent Freedom of Information Act releases of ex-Nazis in our Intelligence apparatus reveals the extent to which the US used techniques and rhetoric the Nazis developed; and it remains with us today. From the Big Lie used by the Right Wing, to calling torture enhanced interrogations, "this country has moved so far to the Right," as Spiro Agnew gushed in the 70's, "you won't recognize it."

But we recognize exactly what has been going on. Will we continue to fight it?

At This Precise Moment of History

1. At this precise moment of history
With Goody-two-shoes running for Congress
We are testing supersonic engines
To keep God safe in the cherry tree.
When I said so in this space last Thursday
I meant what I said: power struggles.

2. You would never dream of such corn. The colonials in
sandalwood like running wide open and available for
protection. You can throw them away without a refund.

3. Dr. Hanfstaengel who was not called Putzi except by
those who did not know him is taped in the national
archives. J. Edgar Hoover he ought to know
And does know.

But calls Dr. Hanfstaengel Putzi nevertheless
Somewhere on tape in the
Archives.

He (Dr. H.) is not a silly man.
He left in disgust
About the same time Shirley Temple
Sat on Roosevelt’s knee
An accomplished pianist
A remembered personality.
He (Dr. H.) began to teach
Immortal anecdotes
To his mother a Queen Bee
In the American colony.

4. What is your attitude toward historical subjects?
—Perhaps it’s their size!

5. When I said this in space you would never believe
Corn Colonel was so expatriated.
—If you think you know,
Take this wheel
And become standard.

6. She is my only living mother
This bee of the bloody arts
Bandaging victims of Saturday’s dance
Like a veritable sphinx
In a totally new combination.

7. The Queen Mother is an enduring vignette
at an early age.
Now she ought to be kept in submersible
decompression chambers

For a while.

8. What is your attitude toward historical subjects
Like Queen Colonies?
—They are permanently fortified
For shape retention.

9. Solid shades
Seven zippered pockets
Close to my old place
Waiting by the road
Big disk brakes
Spinoff
Zoom
Long lights stabbing at the
Two together piggyback
In a stark sports roadster

Regretting his previous outburst
Al loads his Cadillac
With lovenests.

10. She is my only living investment
She examines the housing industry
Counts 3.5 million postwar children
Turning twenty-one
And draws her own conclusion
In the commercial fishing field.

11. Voice of little sexy ventriloquist mignonne:
“Well I think all of us are agreed and sincerely I my-
self believe that honest people on both sides have got
it all on tape. Governor Reagan thinks that nuclear
wampums are a last resort that ought not to be re-
sorted.” (But little mignonne went right to the point
with: “We have a commitment to fulfill and we better
do it quick.” No dupe she!)

All historians die of the same events at least twice.

13. I feel that I ought to open this case with an apology.
Dr. H. certainly has a beautiful voice. He is not a silly
man. He is misunderstood even by Presidents.

14. You people are criticizing the Church but what are
you going to put in her place? Sometime sit down with
a pencil and paper and ask yourself what you’ve got
that the Church hasn’t.

15. Nothing to add
But the big voice of a detective
Using the wrong first names
In national archives.

16. She sat in shocking pink with an industrial zipper spe-
cially designed for sitting on the knees of presidents in
broad daylight. She spoke the president’s mind. “We
have a last resort to be resorted and we better do it
quick.” He wondered at what he had just said.

17. It was all like running wideopen in a loose gown
Without slippers
At least someplace.

-- Thomas Merton

2011-01-26T10:19:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

25 January 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

When the first photos of torture at Abu Ghraib were distributed online; photos of dogs barking at naked, hooded prisoners, while guards smiled at the camera with thumbs-up gestures of a grand accomplishment; many of my more law and order acquaintances argued it wasn't torture; that the allegations of such abuse, the use of dogs, of fire hoses, of solitary confinement wasn't torture because it was common in our own prisons here in the states; that in fact, guards like Charles Graner, had been prison guards stateside, that their tactics and procedures would never muster a legal challenge, let alone rise to the level of a crime. They maintained that Graner was a hero doing a tough job overseas, a job he had done stateside in the same fashion for years without incident; he was perfectly trained for Abu Ghraib and they saw no problem.

I spoke to a few of those acquaintances after reading Deoliver's essay Sunday on Bradley Manning and the prison industrial complex. They continue to see nothing wrong with solitary confinement; our supermax prisons, they reminded me, even have weekend long cable shows devoted to the practice.

"So I guess that makes it ok," I replied sarcastically.

"The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation," they continued to remind me, "it is a big business and not going away any time soon. But even so, we don't torture; and we certainly don't abuse prisoners. All practices and procedures have been approved by medical professionals."

Plus, it's all on TV.

Charles Graner Is Not America

Let’s get this straight: Charles Graner
is not America. America would never
hold a knife to his wife’s throat, then say
when she woke that he was considering
killing her. And America’s wife in turn
would never call her husband “my own
Hannibal Lecter.” Am I right, or what?
Charles Graner may be Hannibal Lecter,
but he is not America. America is not that
kind of husband. Nor would America email
his adolescent children photos of himself
torturing naked Iraqi prisoners and say
“look what Daddy gets to do!” Am I right?
America is not that kind of father. America
would never torture naked Iraqi prisoners.
Let’s be absolutely clear about all of this.
And America’s ex-lover and co-defendant
would never whisper to the sketch artist
at America’s trial: “You forgot the horns.”
Charles Graner may or may not have horns,
but America is horn-free. America does not
torture prisoners. America may render them,
fully clothed, to Egypt or Syria, for further
interrogation, or to men like Charles Graner,
but America is not, ipso facto, Egypt or Syria,
and Charles Graner is not now nor has he ever
been America. And don’t talk to me about
Guantanamo. Please! Let’s get this straight.
You and I know who America is. We know
what America does and doesn’t do, because we
(not Charles Graner!) are America. Am I right?
Is this all clear? Tell me—am I right, or what?

-- Geoffrey Brock

2011-01-19T11:33:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

18 January 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

It is the parade of indolent progress; it is a parade of influence marching across islands and continents; a flotilla churning across oily-foamed seas and jet-set through nitrogen-acid skies; it is a procession of killers and victims stumbling across the black pavement at the corner of Main Street and International Blvd; it is a march of wardens ordering leg-irons and yokes to weigh down the hopes of our better angels, while assuring a cheap labor force for the Captains of Industry as they guide the Ships of State in a firing line outside the Bay of Sugar and Blood.

Miss America pontificates from a platform behind the curtain on the NSA, It's A Small World Hay Ride Monster Truck.

The Oligarchs and the Generals ride in a bubble-top convertible, supplied by medical companies saving dollars and commonsense selling diluted milk powder and super-charged bacterial water to the victims of earthquakes, hurricanes and famine.

It is the parade of indolent progress; it is a parade of influence marching across islands and continents.

Affekt Funereal / Affekt Jamboree

(as on TV)

Welcome to this
special edition

double cortege for
Galbraith, Kenneth—
Friedman, Milton—

ssstately cortege...

efffusively-shiny
like your kids teeth—

...such éclaircissement
on this beautiful morning

lustrum
(kids, that’s Latin, we mean to say
“wow”)

...directly behind the caskets—is that
—it’s the Macy’s Rat (in mid-air)...neat, real neat...

in front
the lead-coated horses don’t seem to mind the officers’
droppings...

is that a gigantic molar,
with worms popping out?
—such a variety of colors!

...look, some Teamsters
are in a tussle with some scab teletubby over on
23rd St. and Madison

...ok, now, now they’re under arrest...

if you look carefully you’ll see there’s two pre-funeral exercises for
Fukuyama, Francis—
Soros, George—
on 24th

—not, not as stately...

a delegation of mainstream poets!

and behind them, this year’s NPR security-clearance
float!...ooh...

ya, they’re rather new at this but...wait—

there’s a lone guerrilla girl
running through the crowd now

she’s

she’s managed to get the Cultural Studies delegation
to strip and

dress up as

squeegee-bearing babushkas it looks like

...it’s 20 degrees so, that’s rather—ok, she’s, she’s
under arrest now...

...those are neat, those little plastic thingies, aren’t they?...

The Bill Gates (My Charter) High School Marching Band!

The Steve Case (My Charter) High School Marching Band!

behind them
the post ’89, post-historical
acrobat academics

on mini-lawnmowers...

that’s smart...

The Yucky’s!

The Yucky’s, yeah, they’re an interesting group...
they do things like suppress that
Sidney Poitier
is the best American actor ever

...oh look, the Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saúd
float

...the F14’s behind him are real

...now, that’s smart!

...I think he just waved at me

...who’s that man with the Moocle grabbing his—

that’s Mister Modernist!

he’s been a regular at these events for over 90 years now

...Saga of The Blank Page float
a real favorite...

ooh, he just dropped his—wait

a babushka—her, her boot’s—

crkkkk...

oh, that’s, that’s not good...but

—did you know that
these are the first
100% soy
caskets
ever made?

some people have actually run up to nibble at them...

kids, if you’re watching this...

make sure you never think of any other social arrangement
other than one that

Militarily Has To Dominate Three Quarters of The World

-- Rodrigo Toscano

2011-01-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

14 January 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

On the evening of 4 June 1968, at the age of thirteen, I accompanied my father to the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. For several years, he had been writing policy and research papers for the California State Democratic Steering and Platform Committees. I had walked precincts and volunteered at the Kennedy Campaign Headquarters in the San Gabriel Valley for the preceding two months, so as a sort of reward, I was allowed to stay up past my regular bedtime to go with my father to what was, we were certain, to be a victory celebration.

Dad and I had been at the Ambassador since around 8:30 p.m. It was a huge and boisterous crowd. Normally, I retired before 10 p.m., so by the time Kennedy entered the ballroom around 11:30 p.m., I was pretty bushed. His speech would be broadcast on the radio, so Dad and I headed home. On the way, we heard Kennedy and five others had been shot.

I was at a department store near our home, in the television department when the news of Martin Luther King's assassination was broadcast on 4 April 1968. Dad had been teaching his history classes at Cal State Fullerton that day and evening; and had not heard the news, so my revelation was the first he had heard of it. I never had seen my Dad cry, but he teared up when I told him. At that point, I had been a Eugene McCarthy aficionado, but I changed allegiances after listening, with my father, to Kennedy's speech in front of a black audience in Indiana, informing them of MLK's assassination.

Kennedy is reported to have questioned earlier, when informed of King's killing, "When will this violence stop?" It is a question that is still shouted to high heaven today.

So it is in Tucson, yet again more people are maimed and dead in a political shooting; and damn! When will it stop?

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

=====================================================================

2011-01-12T13:14:00.001-08:00

11 January 2011

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

Out of the tragedy in Tucson over the weekend, the invocation of false equivalencies was trumpeted from mountain high and valley low; the shooter was propelled to his act by the rhetoric of violence from the Left and the Right; or that he was an insane loner just like John Schrank, so politics had nothing to do with the act. Marshmallow Liberals fell to bended knees, as is their long history, to scrub any surface of the stain of calling a bigot a bigot; TeaBirchers fingered their guns and demanded we apologize for accusing them of intimidation.

What drove the shooter to commit carnage on that Saturday morning will be debated for years. What is obvious, is the irresponsible acts of the Right is rearing its ugly countenance and finding form in the insane among us.

It is true that a pound of lead and a pound of flowers, when dropped from the roof of a building, will strike the heads of pedestrians below at the same time. But whereas the lead will smash the heads of the pedestrians with life-ending force, the flowers will dissipate in a forceless explosion of color. They are not equivalent.

And the utterances of the Palins, the Becks and the Limbaughs do indeed have...

Consequences

I. Of Choice

Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,

Don’t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,

More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.

My desperate friends, I want to tell
Them, you take too delicate offense
At the stench of time and man’s own smell,
It is only the smell of consequence.

II. Of Love

People love each other and the light
Of love gilds but doesn’t alter,
People don’t change one another, can scarcely
By taking will and thought add a little
Now and then to their own statures
Which, praise them, they do,
So that here we are in all our sizes
Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes,
Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves,
Human, the beams of attention
Of social animals at their work
Which is loving; and sometimes all dark.

The only correction is
By you of you, by me of me.
People are worth looking at in this light
And if you listen what they are saying is,
Love me sun out there whoever you are,
Chasing me from bed in the morning,
Spooking me all day with shadow,
Surprising me whenever you fall;
Make me conspicuous as I go here,
Spotted by however many beams,
Now light, finally dark. I fear
There is meant to be a lot of darkness,
You hear them say, but every last creature
Is the one it meant to be.

III. My Acts

The acts of my life swarm down the street like Puerto Rican kids,
Foreign but small and, except for one, unknived.
They do no harm though their voices slash like reeds;
All except one they have evidently been loved.

And down the hill where I’ve planted spruce and red pine
In a gang of spiked shadows they slouch at night.
I am reasonably brave. I have been, except on one occasion,
Myself: it is no good trying to be what you are not.

We live among gangs who seem to have no stake
In what we’re trying to do, no sense of property or race,
Yet if you speak with authority they will halt and break
And sullenly, one by one, show you a local face.

I dreamt once that they caught me and, holding me down,
Burned my genitals with gasoline;
In my stupid terror I was telling them names
So my manhood kept and the rest went up in flames.

‘Now, say the world is a fair place,’ the biggest one said,
And because there was no face worse than my own there
I said it and got up. Quite a lot of me is charred.
By our code it is fair. We play fair. The world is fair.

-- William Meredith

2011-01-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

04 January 2011

At a holiday gathering, a friend recounted a story told by Senator Al Franken, in which he balanced Liberal and Conservative approaches to the history of the United States. The Conservative, Franken said, loves America and its past like a four year old; whereas, Liberals love America like adults.

The four year old loves mommy and mommy can do no wrong; and woe to those in the sand box who might question mommy's correct and consistent exceptionalism. The adult sees their parents as flawed but noble creatures who did the best they could. Could have been better, but the adult still loves them for the energy in protecting the family, for keeping the family together.

The adult cannot just explain away or ignore the terrible compromises their parents made along the way; the adult will acknowledge and attempt to better their own futures with the knowledge of those ancestral histories.

The Conservative either feigns ignorance or simply ignores the history; or conjures a child-like myth to scare away the bedtime ghosts of our past.

On the Steps of the Jefferson Memorial

We invent our gods
the way the Greeks did,
in our own image—but magnified.
Athena, the very mother of wisdom,
squabbled with Poseidon
like any human sibling
until their furious tempers
made the sea writhe.

Zeus wore a crown
of lightning bolts one minute,
a cloak of feathers the next,
as driven by earthly lust
he prepared to swoop
down on Leda.
Despite their power,
frailty ran through them

like the darker veins
in the marble of these temples
we call monuments.
Looking at Jefferson now,
I think of the language
he left for us to live by.
I think of the slave
in the kitchen downstairs.

Linda Pastan

2010-12-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

14 December 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Race in America can sometimes be explained by the illusion of negative and positive space in art; where figure-ground reversal will show a vase in the positive space and the silhouetted profile of two faces in the negative. The Danish psychologist, Edgar Rubin, used this and many other examples to...

... state as a fundamental principle: When two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the immediate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges from the common border of the fields and which operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one than on the other.

Arguments abound whether Race is an issue in the post-Obama world; one is that the very fact a black man is President is example enough that America's sordid racial past has been refuted; sort of like seeing only the figure, or only the ground. A countervailing argument is that the sheer numbers of incarcerated people of color as opposed to population averages as example that Race is and will continue to be an issue; that would be perceiving the ground and the figure shifting back and forth.

In 1968, the short-fiction writer and poet, Henry Dumas, was shot and killed at the age of thirty-three by a white New York transit officer; in what was explained as a case of mistaken identity. Maybe not so mistaken, though; when the face in the negative space is black.

The Zebra Goes Wild Where the Sidewalk Ends

I

Neon stripes tighten my wall
where my crayon landlord hangs
from a bent nail.

My black father sits crooked
in the kitchen
drunk on Jesus’ blood turned
to cheap wine.

In his tremor he curses
the landlord who grins
from inside the rent book.

My father’s eyes are
bolls of cotton.

He sits upon the landlord’s
operating table,
the needle of the nation
sucking his soul.

II

Chains of light race over
my stricken city.
Glittering web spun by
the white widow spider.

I see this wild arena
where we are harnessed
by alien electric shadows.

Even when the sun washes
the debris
I will recall my landlord
hanging in my room
and my father moaning in
Jesus’ tomb.

In America all zebras
are in the zoo.

I hear the piston bark
and ibm spark:
let us program rabies.
the madness is foaming now.

No wild zebras roam the American plain.
The mad dogs are running.
The African zebra is gone into the dust.

I see the shadow thieves coming
and my father on the specimen table.

-- Henry Dumas

2010-12-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

10 December 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

In the economic warfare that has been raging for decades, the divisions of the economic classes have widened. The rich, though a small number, hold the majority of the wealth, the middle class is shrinking, the poor are increasing in numbers and are being kicked in the gut for it.

But the Holidays are upon us and the bright twinkling lights on the 100 foot Douglas Fir in the town square draws us to the business district. Canned Holiday Music wafts from the warm interiors of department stores as shoppers look for that perfect gift. Not last year's model, of course; and certainly not some nostalgic, lead-painted toy from their youth. No, what everyone wants, what everyone seems to need, are some...

Brand New Products

A vigilant gun that always picks out
The right target—even if it’s you—
No matter who you’re aiming at.

A computer that listens and blows you,
As you blow it, to your favorite tune.

Meat that cleans your teeth
As you’re masticating it.

A truck so awesome, only the President
Of the United States of America’s allowed
To careen in it, to his own beat.

A dictionary with positive adjectives only.
A dictionary with no wet verbs.
A dictionary with negotiable definitions.
A dictionary that defines words by their antonyms.

All the greatest hits from the last millennium
Performed live, on stage, on the inside
Of your state of the art, acoustically-enhanced skull.

A complete set of nude photos
Of you, taken by you and sold
Back to you—at a discount.

A sex doll with a mirror for a face.
A sex doll with a Ph.D.
A sex doll with adjustable skin tone.

A sensitive sex doll that just wants
To be friends—a Platonic sex doll.

Rain water in a bottle, sunshine in a box
And ambience sounds from a bus stop
Down the street, recorded on a CD.

A 24-hour video of what you did yesterday.
A 24-hour video of what you’ll do tomorrow.

A super realistic photo of what’s outside
Your window, pasted to your window.

A baseball game that never ends,
To be played simultaneously with
A football game that never ends.

Cluster bombs that scatter copies of Leaves of Grass
Over a thousand mile radius, for a thousand years.

Landmines made with dough,
Topped with mozzarella and all
Your favorite toppings.

An airplane that never lands.

And, finally, your favorite fairy tale
Painted on your new plastic limbs.

-- Linh Dinh

2010-12-09T02:37:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

07 December 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Both of my sisters were raped by the time they were sophomores in high school. The younger one was raped twice more by the time she graduated. They don't mind that I mention these facts. They have counseled young girls and women on rape; and we all worked at rape and suicide crisis call-in centers when we were in our teens and early twenties.

Zona, is a year younger than me and put in 25 years as an RN in intensive care pediatric oncology at Children's Hospital in Orange County. She thought she was retiring, then the economy went bad. She now teaches high school science and does some private nursing. Zreata, is four years younger and was a calendar model jetting around the world until she was almost thirty. She looks like a cross between Sophia Loren and Pam Grier, so she was scantily clad in photo shoots from Malibu to Madrid. Afterwards. she was a deputy sheriff for about 7 years and later started her own bounty hunter operation. She sold the business a few years ago and now takes care of our aging mother.

I would hold them and console them during convulsive sobbing nights in our youth, both apologizing and condemning men for their brutish actions; and all the injustices we perpetuate on women. Fearing that I was failing in convincing them they were not the ones in the wrong; the one litany they both lamented was,

"What about my rights?"

Yes, what about their rights? Why is it that my sisters, my nieces, or any woman must consider what she wears, or the time of day or night, before she goes to the store? Why are women treated as spoils of war, or objects of abuse in abusive relationships?

Though their right to merely go about their days without fear was denied, both of my sisters exercised what rights were left them, took their rapists to court and won convictions. Though, with my sister Zreata's stint in law enforcement, I couldn't help but think of her when June Jordon published the following in 2005:

Poem about My Rights

Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose it was not here in the city but down on the beach/
or far into the woods and I wanted to go
there by myself thinking about God/or thinking
about children or thinking about the world/all of it
disclosed by the stars and the silence:
I could not go and I could not think and I could not
stay there
alone
as I need to be
alone because I can’t do what I want to do with my own
body and
who in the hell set things up
like this
and in France they say if the guy penetrates
but does not ejaculate then he did not rape me
and if after stabbing him if after screams if
after begging the bastard and if even after smashing
a hammer to his head if even after that if he
and his buddies fuck me after that
then I consented and there was
no rape because finally you understand finally
they fucked me over because I was wrong I was
wrong again to be me being me where I was/wrong
to be who I am
which is exactly like South Africa
penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
Angola and does that mean I mean how do you know if
Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like the
proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland
and if
after Namibia and if after Angola and if after Zimbabwe
and if after all of my kinsmen and women resist even to
self-immolation of the villages and if after that
we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say will they
claim my consent:
Do You Follow Me: We are the wrong people of
the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what
in the hell is everybody being reasonable about
and according to the Times this week
back in 1966 the C.I.A. decided that they had this problem
and the problem was a man named Nkrumah so they
killed him and before that it was Patrice Lumumba
and before that it was my father on the campus
of my Ivy League school and my father afraid
to walk into the cafeteria because he said he
was wrong the wrong age the wrong skin the wrong
gender identity and he was paying my tuition and
before that
it was my father saying I was wrong saying that
I should have been a boy because he wanted one/a
boy and that I should have been lighter skinned and
that I should have had straighter hair and that
I should not be so boy crazy but instead I should
just be one/a boy and before that
it was my mother pleading plastic surgery for
my nose and braces for my teeth and telling me
to let the books loose to let them loose in other
words
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South Africa and the problems
of Exxon Corporation and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it’s about walking out at night
or whether it’s about the love that I feel or
whether it’s about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and idiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the
wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic
the wrong sartorial I
I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent
to my mother to my father to the teachers to
the F.B.I. to South Africa to Bedford-Stuy
to Park Avenue to American Airlines to the hardon
idlers on the corners to the sneaky creeps in
cars
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life

-- June Jordan

2010-12-09T02:07:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

03 December 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

Since I was a child, I have been both enamored and appalled at the increasing militancy of our nation. We glory the Soldier as a Hero, one whose pedestal is not to be sullied. Songs are sung and films are broadcast about yellow ribbons and Gold Stars and red sky at morning and Johnny come marching home and tears at Arlington on Memorial and Veteran's Day with 20 gun salutes and full metal jackets shredding jungles and deserts and seas and air.

Everywhere I look, supplicants genuflect and tithe at the Altar of the Military; politicians and preachers sky pilot high school football homecoming prom dances, while daddy works in a coal mine going down down down burning fossil microbes to steam a turbine while economies and marriages suffer from codified martial strategies of weapons procurement and international arms sales.

A pedestal not to be sullied; a Hero exalted. Semper Fidelis until Johnny needs a job and a shoulder to lean on when the slide show of dismembered limbs and dead babies scorched against the charred breasts of scattered skeletons scrolls behind closed eyelids on a lazy summer afternoon; an exalted Hero until stumbled on the cold winter night theater district broken sidewalk, hungry and lame and mumbling about the Newburgh Conspiracy and how he is just a festering scar on the nation and no amount of cleaning the wound will stop the seeping ooze of his forgotten service, no amount of slicing away the rotting flesh will justify the public amnesia.

Debridement

Debridement

Black men are oaks cut down.

Congressional Medal of Honor Society
United States of America chartered by
Congress, August 14, 1958; this certifies
that STAC John Henry Louis is a member
of this society.

“Don’t ask me anything about the
medal. I don’t even know how I won
it.”

Debridement: The cutting away of dead
or contaminated tissue from a wound
to prevent infection.

America: love it or give it back.

Corktown
Groceries ring
in my intestines:
grits aint groceries
eggs aint poultry
Mona Lisa was a man:
waltzing in sawdust
I dream my cards
has five holes in it,
up to twenty holes;
five shots out of seven
beneath the counter;
surrounded by detectives
pale ribbons of valor
my necklace of bullets
powdering the operating table.

Five impaled men loop their ribbons
’round my neck
listening to whispers of valor:
“Honey, what you cryin’ ’bout?
You made it back.”

Caves
Four M-48 tank platoons ambushed
near Dak To, two destroyed:
the Ho Chi Minh Trail boils,
half my platoon rockets
into stars near Cambodia,
foot soldiers dance from highland woods
taxing our burning half:

there were no caves for them to hide.
We saw no action,
eleven months twenty-two days
in our old tank
burning sixty feet away:
I watch them burn inside out:
hoisting through heavy crossfire,
hoisting over turret hatches,
hoisting my last burning man
alive to the ground,
our tank artillery shells explode
killing all inside:
hoisting blown burned squad
in tank’s bladder,
plug leaks with cave blood:

there were no caves for them to hide—

In the Projects
Slung basketballs at Jeffries
House with some welfare kids
weaving in their figure eight hunger.

Mama asked if I was taking anything?
I rolled up my sleeves:
no tracks, mama:
“black-medal-man ain’t street-poisoned,”
militants called:
“he’s an electronic nigger!”

“Better keep electronic nigger 'way.”
Electronic Nigger?
Mama, unplug me, please.

A White Friend Flies In from the Coast
Burned —black by birth,
burned —armed with .45,
burned —submachine gun,
burned—STAC hunted VC,
burned —killing 5-20,
burned —nobody know for sure;
burned —out of ammo,
burned—killed one with gun-stock,
burned —VC AK-47 jammed,
burned —killed faceless VC,
burned —over and over,
burned —STAC subdued by three men,
burned —three shots: morphine,
burned —tried killing prisoners,
burned —taken to Pleiku,
burned —held down, straitjacket,
burned —whites owe him, hear?
burned —I owe him, here.

Mama’s Report
“Don’t fight, honey,
don’t let ’em catch you.”

Tour over, gear packed,
hospital over, no job.

“Aw man, nothin' happened,”
explorer, altar boy—

Maybe it’s ’cause they killed people
and don’t know why they did?

My boy had color slides of dead people,
stacks of dead Vietnamese.

MP’s asked if he’d been arrested
since discharge, what he’d been doin’:

“Lookin’ at slides,
looking’ at stacks of slides, mostly.”

Fifteen minutes later a colonel called
from the Defense Department, said he’d won the medal;

could he be in Washington with his family,
maybe he’d get a job now; he qualified.

The Democrats had lost, the president said;
there were signs of movement in Paris:

Fixing Certificates:   Dog Tags:   Letters Home
Our heliteam had mid-air blowout
dropping flares—5 burned alive.

The children carry hand
grenades to and from piss tubes.

Staring at tracer bullets
rice is the focal point of war.

On amphibious raid, our heliteam
found dead VC with maps of our compound.

On morning sick call you unzip;
before you piss you get a smear.

“VC reamed that mustang a new asshole”—
even at movies: “no round-eye pussy no more”—

Tympanic membrane damage: high gone—
20-40 db loss mid-frequencies.

Scrub-typhus, malaria, dengue fever, cholera;
rotting buffalo, maggoted dog, decapped children.

Bangkok: amber dust, watches, C-rations,
elephanthide billfolds, cameras, smack.

Sand&tinroof bunkers, 81/120 mm:
“Health record terminated this date by reason of death.”

Vaculoated amoeba, bacillary dysentery, hookworm;
thorazine, tetracycline, darvon for diarrhea.

'Conitus’ : I wanna go home to mama;
Brown’s mixture, ETH with codeine, cortisone skin-creams.

Written on helipad fantail 600 bed Repose;
“no purple heart, hit by ’nother marine.”

“Vascular repair, dissection, debridement”:
sharp bone edges, mushy muscle, shrapnel: stainless bucket.

Bodies in polyethylene bag: transport:
'Tan San Nhat Mortuary’

Blood, endotracheal tube, prep
abdomen, mid-chest to scrotum—

“While you’re fixin' me doc,
can you fix them ingrown hairs on my face?”

“They didn’t get my balls, did they?”
50 mg thorazine—“Yes they did, marine!”

Street-Poisoned
Swans loom on the playground
swooning in the basket air,
the nod of their bills
in open flight, open formation.
Street-poisoned, a gray mallard
skims into our courtyard with a bag:

And he poisons them —

And he poisons them —

Electronic-nigger-recruiter,
my pass is a blade
near the sternum
cutting in:
you can make this a career.

Patches itch on my chest and shoulders—
I powder them with phisohex
solution from an aerosol can:
you can make this a career.

Pickets of insulin dab the cloudy
hallways in a spray.
Circuits of change
march to an honor guard—
I am prancing:
I am prancing:

you can make this a career.

Makin’ Jump Shots
He waltzes into the lane
’cross the free-throw line,
fakes a drive, pivots,
floats from the asphalt turf
in an arc of black light,
and sinks two into the chains.

One on one he fakes
down the main, passes
into the free lane
and hits the chains.

A sniff in the fallen air—
he stuffs it through the chains
riding high:
“traveling” someone calls—
and he laughs, stepping
to a silent beat, gliding
as he sinks two into the chains.

Debridement:   Operation Harvest Moon:   On Repose
The sestina traces a circle in language and body.
Stab incision below nipple,
left side; insert large chest tube;
sew to skin, right side;
catch blood from tube
in gallon drain bottle.
Wash abdomen with phisohex;
shave; spray brown iodine prep.

Stab incision below sternum
to symphis pubis
catch blood left side;
sever reddish brown spleen
cut in half; tie off blood supply;
check retroperitoneal,
kidney, renal artery bleeding.

Dissect lateral wall
abdominal cavity; locate kidney;
pack colon, small intestine;
cut kidney; suture closely;
inch by inch check bladder,
liver, abdominal wall, stomach:
25 units blood, pressure down.

Venous pressure: 8; lumbar
musculature, lower spinal column
pulverized; ligate blood vessels,
right forearm; trim meat, bone ends;
tourniquet above fracture, left arm;
urine, negative: 4 hours; pressure
unstable; remove shrapnel flecks.

Roll on stomach; 35 units blood;
pressure zero; insert plastic blood
containers, pressure cuffs; pump chest
drainage tube; wash wounds sterile
saline; dress six-inch ace wraps;
wrap both legs, toe to groin; left arm
plaster, finger to shoulder: 40 units blood.

Pressure, pulse, respiration up;
remove bloody gowns; scrub; redrape;
5 cc vitamin K; thorazine: sixth
laparotomy; check hyperventilation;
stab right side incision below nipple;
insert large chest tube; catch blood drain bottle ...

The Family of Debridement
Theory: Inconvenienced subject will return to hospital
if loaned Thunderbird
Withdrawn. Hope: Subject returns,
Treatment:
Foreclosure for nine months unpaid mortgage;
wife tells subject hospital wants deposit,
Diseased cyst removal:
'Ain’t you gonna give me a little kiss good-bye’
Subject-wife: To return with robe and curlers—
Subject tells friend he’ll pay $15 to F’s stepfather
if he’ll drive him to pick up money owed him.

“This guy lives down the street,
I don’t want him to see me coming.”

“It looked odd for a car filled with blacks
to be parked in the dark in a white neighborhood,
so we pulled the car out under a streetlight
so everybody could see us.”

Store manager: “I first hit him with two bullets
so I pulled the trigger until my gun was empty.”

“I’m going to kill you, you white MF,” store manager
told police. Police took cardload, F and F’s parents for
further questioning. Subject died on operating table: 5 hrs:

Subject buried on grass slope, 200 yards
east of Kennedy Memorial,
overlooking Potomac and Pentagon,
to the south,
Arlington National Cemetery.

Army honor guard
in dress blues,
carried out assignment
with precision.

-- Michael S. Harper

2010-12-09T01:57:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

30 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

I come from a strong Matriarchy; so strong in fact, one might say I come from a feminist extended-family. There was no division of labor by gender when doing chores, growing up; all of us mowed the lawn, washed dishes, cooked, cleaned. When we lived on the farm outside of Corvallis; all of us learned to sew and sow.

The great Matriarch of the Family, our Great Aunt Mabel, lived to be 102. Shortly after marriage in the late 1880's, she and her new husband provisioned a covered wagon and trekked across the plains on their way to California. Along the way, as she put it, "he wasn't up to snuff, so I had to kick him out." She took up with another fellow during the almost year long voyage; and he was "worse than the first", so he was sent packing as well. It took a special man to be with this special woman; as it has been, as it is and as it will be with all the women in my family.

I've heard the accusation, on more than one occasion, that the women in the family are "full of themselves."

"Yes," is their unabashed reply, resonating across the generations, "yes we are!"

Poem For A Lady Whose Voice I Like

so he said: you ain’t got no talent
    if you didn’t have a face
    you wouldn’t be nobody

and she said: god created heaven and earth
    and all that’s Black within them

so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
    they tell me plenty sisters
    take care better business than you

and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
    and all good things to eat
    and said: “that’s good”

so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
    yo skirt and been giving you the big play
    you’d a had to come on uptown like everybody else

and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
    from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
    name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts
    that simone may sing a song

and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
    and i’ll show you a hungry person

-- Nikki Giovanni

2010-12-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

23 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

One of the American Myths about Thanksgiving is how a bounty of riches was bestowed and shared; that God's goodness shone down from above and anointed all with an infinite Grace. It's nice to think so. It's nice to think that benevolence and friendship forged the bessemer of this Nation.

If only it were true.

The truth is that this nation was forged with the white-hot ingots of conquest, genocide and slavery; there is a reckoning and it will be discussed at...

The Powwow at the End of the World

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.

-- Sherman Alexie

2010-12-09T01:38:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

Newt's Inaugural (c) BlueGal

19 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

I was involved in a rather spirited discussion recently, with some former classmates whose brains have been consumed by the ghastly TeaBircher walking dead; and have become mouth-gnawing-bone-breaking-mindless-shuffling-toward-any-loud-noise-or-smell-of-blood Zombies themselves.

It was sad to see once beautiful and sexy women reduced to spittle-flecked, red-eyed rage; and once lithe and athletic men now gray and bloody and mad; frantically tearing at corpses long void of any discernible nourishment.

These weren't Zombies from some Caribbean Mythic conjuring though; so I had no choice but to retreat to the high ground to gain some better bearings.

One would think, that if these Zombies looked in the mirror, they would know their mortal coil has been conquered, that their Souls have left the vessel; that their broken and flailing limbs, their skulls absent of brain tissue, the ganglia hanging loose and dripping a slimy green liquid; you would think that would give them a clue to their predicament. But they only respond to a bright flash, a jarring thud and the smell of raw meat. So they shuffle and grasp and mouth senseless words that are mere recitations embedded in a lizard-center of a forgotten hormonal gland activated by Fox News wireless electrical shocks.

Maybe it's cruel for me to say so, maybe it's inflammatory to call these folks the walking dead and use such ghastly, grade-b monster movie metaphor.

Maybe it's simplifying matters to call these folks mindless Zombies; when they know damn well what they are doing. Just as the Good Germans, they so mightily resemble, did before, during and after the fall of the Third Reich.

These TeaBirchers complain of brown people harrassing them with cupped hands begging for something not due them. These TeaBirchers complain of the jobless as losers who should be left to disappear in some other ether; just don't park on their street or ask for a job at their shop. These TeaBirchers consume the most and give back the least; and cheer when doctors are assassinated while advocating for a woman's right to choose.

The TeaBirchers say they harken to the Silent Majority from the time of Nixon and Reagan. Rather than silent, they are a cruel majority; a cruel majority that would rather see a child die of sickness than extend healthcare. A cruel majority that will kick a man or woman when they are down and then penalize them for complaining about it. A cruel majority that expects the unflinching fealty any bully demands, from any who comes between them and what they wish to possess.

A Poem for the Cruel Majority

The cruel majority emerges!

Hail to the cruel majority!

They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.

Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.

If the cruel majority would only cup their ears
the sea would wash over them.
The sea would help them forget their wayward children.
It would weave a lullaby for young & old.

(See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears,
one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.)

One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud
between his thumb & middle finger,
to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps.

He is a little god but not a poet.
(See how his body heaves.)

The cruel majority love crowds & picnics.
The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags.
The cruel majority celebrate their birthday.

Hail to the cruel majority again!

The cruel majority weep for their unborn children,
they weep for the children that they will never bear.
The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow.

(Then why are the cruel majority always laughing?
Is it because night has covered up the city's walls?
Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness?
The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?)

Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.

They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds
Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.

Hail to the cruel majority!
Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!

The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams.
The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority.
Then the cruel majority line up to be buried.

Those who love death will love the cruel majority.

Those who know themselves will know the fear
the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror.

The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor.
They order the sun to shine only on weekdays.

The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree.
Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends.
The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky.

(If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows,
they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.)

Hail to the god of the cruel majority!
Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god!

Hail to his face in the mirror!

Hail to their faces as they float around him!

Hail to their blood & to his!

Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them!
Hail to their world & their god!

Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!
Hail & farewell!

-- Jerome Rothenberg

2010-12-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

11 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

As Haiti and her tragedies continue to fade from the collective memory of a Nation consumed with its own Exceptionalism, there remains a collective few who keep the memory alive. If we don't keep Haiti in the forefront of our concern, then we will have condemned the island and her people as we always have. Yet concern without action means we have condemned Haiti to an even greater tragedy.

Neglect

What good are your tears?
They will not spare the dying their anguish.
What good is your concern
to a child sick of living, waiting to perish?

What good, the warm benevolence of tears
without action?
What help, the eloquence of prayers,
or a pleasant benediction?

Before this day is gone,
how many more will die
with bellies swollen, wasted limbs,
and eyes too parched to cry?

I fear for our souls
as I hear the faint lament
of their souls departing ...
mournful, and distant.

How pitiful our "effort,"
yet how fatal its effect.
If they died, then surely we killed them,
if only with neglect.

-- Michael R. Burch

2010-11-22T13:36:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

12 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

In the Dogon cosmology, the Andoumboulou are a failed, earlier form of Human Being, who live underground inhabiting holes in the Earth. The voice of the Andoumboulou is merely their breath; it is the music of the wind. Nathaniel Mackey takes this breath to the text; a reification of language to body, the ink on the page being as real as the skin that chatters for the Andoumboulou. He chronicles the journey of that voice, that music of the wind, as it courses over the land and time.

There is an explosion of stammers in the Andoumboulou's flawed world of abortive language. Though imperfect and flawed, meaning emerges in the errors. That meaning is beyond words; it is lost in human utterance; it is something to be determined as but a whisper from a human existence we can only speculate about, that we can only feel. A feeling like the wind on our cheeks; and grains of sand blown from our hands.

Song of the Andoumboulou: 55

Carnival morning they
were Greeks in Brazil,
Africans in Greek
disguise. Said of herself
she
was born in a house in
heaven. He said he was
born in the house next
door... They were in hell.
In Brazil they were
lovebait.
To abide by hearing was
what love was... To
love was to hear without
looking. Sound was the
beloved’s
mummy cloth... All to say,
said the exegete, love in
hell was a voice, to be spoken
to from behind, not be able
to turn and look... It
wasn’t Greece where they
were,
nor was it Benin... Carnival
morning in made-up hell, bodies
bathed in loquat light, would-be
song’s all the more would-be
title, “Sound and Cerement,”
voice
wound in bandages
raveling
lapse

Up all night, slept well
past noon. Awoke restless
having dreamt she awoke on
Lone Coast, wondering
afterwards what it came
to,
glimpsed interstice,
crevice,
crack... Saw her
dead mother and brother
pull up in a car, her brother
at the wheel not having driven
while alive, newly taught
by
death it appeared. A fancy car,
bigger
than any her mother had had while
alive, she too better off it
appeared... A wishful read, “it
appeared” notwithstanding, the
exegete impossibly benign. Dreamt
a dream
of dream’s end, anxious, unannounced,
Eronel’s nevermore namesake, Monk’s
anagrammatic Lenore... That the
dead return in luxury cars made
us
weep, pathetic its tin elegance,
pitiable,
sweet read misread,
would-be
sweet

-- Nathaniel Mackey

2010-11-09T00:56:00.000-08:00

Voices and Soul

06 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

In July, I posted a little seen diary on dKos and also on my blog entitled, On Oscar Grant, Martyrdom and The Digital Age. I juxtaposed the self immolation in 1963 of the Buddhist Monk, Tich Quang Duc with that of the alternative musician in 2006, Malachi Ritscher; and the murders by police of supposed North Viet Namese sympathizer Nguyen Van Lem in 1968 and of Oscar Grant the morning of 1 January 2009.

In the early morning hours of 1 January 2009, Oscar Grant loosely fit the description of a young black man in America; a supposed sympathizer to the Thug Life and a threat to the community, the nation and the world; and so Oscar Grant was shot in the back by Police in those early morning hours, while laying face down on the Fruitvale BART station platform...

I wrote,

... Oscar Grant was murdered by long-held fear and animosity, murdered during a war on brown people domestic and abroad; by a policeman whose only defense is that he meant to torture Grant with 50,000 volts instead. There was no trial for Oscar Grant, only an apprehension and a gunshot in the back.

As I write this, the Judge in the murder trial of Grant is finalizing his sentencing decision for Johannes Mehserle; which will be handed down around 4pm Pacific Time. I am listening to KPFA interview activists at the Courthouse in Oakland, as they gather in solidarity. During the interview, a contingent of KKK and neo-Nazis stormed the area. They were quickly apprehended after they attacked a black kid who dared utter a protest against them. The thugs were taken inside the courthouse; where a holding cell is. I doubt Faux News will report that; but rest assured, plenty of images of black men in dark sunglasses and leather jackets will be portrayed, with commentary of the new hell that is America, what with a black man in the White House.

It is often stated that the US should be renamed, Prison America. I don't disagree with that assessment. It's almost as if we live a daily Stanford Experiment; some of us are guards, most of us are prisoners; but all of us, guards and prisoners alike, are housed within the confines of a concrete block-walled, razor-wired, guard-shack land.

There Are Black

                         There are black guards slamming cell gates
on black men,
                         And brown guards saying hello to brown men
with numbers on their backs,
                         And white guards laughing with white cons,
                         and red guards, few, say nothing
to red inmates as they walk by to chow and cells.

                         There you have it, the little antpile . . .
convicts marching in straight lines, guards flying
on badged wings, permits to sting, to glut themselves
at the cost of secluding themselves from their people . .
                         Turning off their minds like watertaps
wrapped in gunnysacks that insulate the pipes
carrying the pale weak water to their hearts.

                         It gets bad when you see these same guards
carrying buckets of blood out of cells,
see them puking at the smell, the people,
their own people slashing their wrists,
hanging themselves with belts from light outlets;
it gets bad to see them clean up the mess,
carry the blue cold body out under sheets,
and then retake their places in guard cages,
watching their people maul and mangle themselves,

                         And over this blood-rutted land,
the sun shines, the guards talk of horses and guns,
go to the store and buy new boots,
and the longer they work here the more powerful they become,
taking on the presence of some ancient mummy,
down in the dungeons of prison, a mummy
that will not listen, but has a strange power
in this dark world, to be so utterly disgusting in ignorance,
and yet so proudly command so many men. . . .

                         And the convicts themselves, at the mummy’s
feet, blood-splattered leather, at this one’s feet,
they become cobras sucking life out of their brothers,
they fight for rings and money and drugs,
in this pit of pain their teeth bare fangs,
to fight for what morsels they can. . . .

                         And the other convicts, guilty
of nothing but their born color, guilty of being innocent,
they slowly turn to dust in the nightly winds here,
flying in the wind back to their farms and cities.
From the gash in their hearts, sand flies up spraying
over houses and through trees,

                         look at the sand blow over this deserted place,
you are looking at them

-- Jimmy Santiago Baca

2010-11-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

02 November 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

On this Election Day, as we cast our votes in a declaration of independence and civic duty; as an affirmation of our heritage as Americans; I cannot help but consider that part of our Heritage that is like the crisp autumn leaves of dried blood on our hands; a heritage passed down by the spilled blood of brothers and sisters past; of the blood of grandfathers and grandmothers weeping from a round house; the blood of elk and bison spilled on sands and in forests; blood of eagles on a snow-capped precipice and blood of mallards on a Cascade valley lake; the blood of our Heritage carried by blood-vein rivers across this vast red earth. A heritage that preceded the landing at Plymouth Rock, even that of the landing of the Santa Maria. A heritage planted by a tribal people who also, nonetheless, in a vast and distant time, emigrated from the distant shores of another distant continent. Who, because of aeons of intimate connection with this landscape, believed that every thing is alive. So much so, that coastal tribes built their dugouts with hearts and lungs; because they believed the tree was still alive in the boat.

On this Election Day, as we make those important votes and then go about our daily routines, routines that takes us along the corridors of pavement or through the static of the air; let us consider a once powerful people. A people subjegated, marginalized and weakened. A people caught between two worlds not of their choosing. A people left with only...

A Declaration, Not of Independence

Apparently I’m Mom’s immaculately-conceived
Irish-American son, because,
Social-Security time come,
my Cherokee dad could not prove he’d been born.

He could pay taxes, though,
financing troops, who’d conquered our land,
and could go to jail,
the time he had to shoot or die,
by a Caucasian attacker’s knife.

Eluding recreational killers’ calendar’s
enforcers, while hunting my family’s food,
I thought what the hunted think,
so that I ate, not only meat
but the days of wild animals fed by the days
of seeds, themselves eating earth’s
aeons of lives, fed by the sun,
rising and falling, as quail,
hurtling through sky,

fell, from gun-powder, come—
as the First Americans came—
from Asia.

Explosions in cannon,
I have an English name,
a German-Chilean-American wife
and could live a white life,
but, with this hand,
with which I write, I dug,
my sixteenth summer, a winter’s supply of yams out
of hard, battlefield clay,
dug for my father’s mother, who—
abandoned by her husband—raised,
alone, a mixed-blood family
and raised—her tongue spading air—
ancestors, a winter’s supply or more.

-- Ralph Salisbury

2010-11-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

26 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

The Prison Industrial Complex insists that it is a growth industry; and it's hard to argue with that assessment. With the building of ever more prisons, both by Government and Private Industry, with mandatory sentencing and inflexible drug laws; the resonant cadences of chain gangs past can be heard echoing from sea to shining sea.

It is presumed that Drug Prohibition began with the Harrison Act of 1914, but California enacted the Nation's first anti-narcotics law in 1875 in response to anti-chinese sentiment. Ostensibly enacted to crack down on opium dens, the law was used to incarcerate or banish Chinese nationals deemed as unfair competition with white workers. When several boatloads of Punjabi Sikhs landed in San Francisco in 1910, it sparked an uproar of protest from Asian exclusionists, who pronounced them to be even more unfit for American civilization than the Chinese. Immigration authorities capped the influx at little more than 2,000 in the state, mostly in agricultural areas of the Central Valley. Even so, the Sikhs remained a popular target by racists of the times; and were accused of many crimes, all while under the influence of hashish or marijuana. In the 1920's and 1940's, when Braceros and other workers from Mexico were no longer needed, even harsher laws were enacted to hasten their exodus. Anti-narcotics laws were also enacted in the South to intimidate the black population and used as an excuse to deny them the vote.

To ignore the racial animus that drives the Prison Industrial Complex, is to ignore the obvious; it is to ignore the history of our nation.

Divide and Conquer is a strategy used by military and political professionals alike. If people can be divided by culture and race, the job of the General or the Oligarch runs smoother. It runs smoother still, if the divisions extend within those very cultures and races, as well.

A Fable

Once upon a today and yesterday
and nevermore there were 7 men and women all locked
up in prison cells. Now these 7 men and women
were innocent of any crimes; they were in prison
because their skins were black.

Day after day, the prisoners paced their cells,
pining for their freedom.

And the non-black jailers would
laugh at the prisoners and beat them
with sticks and throw their food on the floor.

Finally, prisoner #1 said,
“I will educate myself and emulate
the non-colored people.
That is the way to freedom
c’mon, you guys, and follow me.”

“Hell, no,” said prisoner #2.
“The only way to get free is
to pray to my god and he will deliver you like
he delivered Daniel from the lion’s den,
so unite and follow me.”

“Bullshit,” said prisoner #3.
“The only way
out is thru this tunnel i’ve been
quietly digging, so c’mon, and follow me.”

“Uh-uh,” said prisoner #4,
“that’s too risky.
The only right
way is to follow all the rules
and don’t make the non-colored people angry,
so c’mon brothers and sisters and unite behind me.”

“Fuck you!” said prisoner #5,
“The only way
out is to shoot
our way out, if all of
you get together behind me.”

“No,” said prisoner #6,
“all of you are incorrect;
you have not analyzed the
political situation by my
scientific method and historical meemeejeebee.
All we have to do is wait long enough
and the bars will bend from their own inner rot.
That is the only way.”

“Are all of you crazy,” cried prisoner #7.
“I’ll get out by myself,
by ratting on the rest of you
to the non-colored people.
That is the way, that is the only way!”

“No-no,” they
all cried, “come and follow me.
I have the
way, the only way to freedom.”

And so they argued, and to this day
they are still arguing;
and to this day they are still
in their prison cells,
their stomachs
trembling with fear.

-- Etheridge Knight

2010-11-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

22 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

I was thinking about Kurt Vonnegut the other day. I was thinking about the firebombing of Dresden and the burning of Beatles albums in the South. I was thinking about the destruction of the Library in Alexandria and dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan. I was thinking of laws that prevented blacks from reading; and if there were no laws, the local Citizens Council made sure no reading occured.

Vonnegut was not the only one to call the bombing of Dresden an act of terror. Even British Air Commodore Colin McKay Grierson, a confidant of Churchill, admitted to AP war correspondent Howard Cowan, that the raid also helped destroy...

... what is left of German morale.

Cowan then filed a report that the allies had resorted to terror bombing.

The firebombing of Dresden, a center for Art and Literature, was a strategic act of terror. The burning of Beatles albums was a conscious act by white supremacists and one meant to intimidate. Laws to prevent the education of blacks and brown peoples are making a virulent resurgence. In fact, there are calls by the TeaBirchers to defund the Department of Education and to also limit funds for any education measure on the local level.

In the historic center of Baghdad, on a street named after the tenth century classical poet, Al-Mutannabi, a street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls, an area often referred to as the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community; a car bomb exploded and killed 26 people on 5 March 2007.

on the day Al-Mutanabbi street was bombed

did you notice
how quickly the open sky
folded in upon itself

the flaking burnt pages
like torn moth wings
flying up the fetid smoke
then drifting
down

the broken teacups
and coffee stained saucers
the splintered chairs
empty shoe
splattered blood

and
just before
that moment

did you hear the
euphony of the street
as men wrangled
and summoned
swore and cajoled
addressed
if not solved
defined
if not created
the problems
and the promise
of their country's
tomorrow

did you even know
of the dreams imploded
inside the molten iron
across the narrow
book lined street
as debate turned
to barbed screeches
philosophy
into choked smoke
and a thousand
years of history
was buried in the rubble

or was there

nothing
except an inexorable
deadly silence

-- devorah major

2010-11-03T10:34:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

19 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

A late summer on the west coast, the occasional rain squall that cleans the air. A temperate mid-70's as the sun casts moving shadows of moving clouds pushed by a confluence of sea and desert winds. Ntozake Shange evokes this landscape of concrete, glass and chaparral, of date palms and ice plant, the freeway and the back yard; as she pays homage to the...

People of Watts

where we come from, sometimes, beauty
floats around us like clouds
the way leaves rustle in the breeze
and cornbread and barbecue swing out the backdoor
and tease all our senses as the sun goes down.

dreams and memories rest by fences
Texas accents rev up like our engines
customized sparkling powerful as the arms
that hold us tightly black n fragrant
reminding us that once we slept and loved
to the scents of magnolia and frangipani
once when we looked toward the skies
we could see something as lovely as our children's
smiles white n glistenin' clear of fear or shame
young girls in braids as precious as gold
find out that sex is not just bein' touched
but in the swing of their hips the light fallin cross
a softbrown cheek or the movement of a mere finger
to a lip many lips inviting kisses southern
and hip as any one lanky brother in the heat
of a laid back sunday rich as a big mama still
in love with the idea of love how we play at lovin'
even riskin' all common sense cause we are as fantastical
as any chimera or magical flowers where breasts entice
and disguise the racing pounding of our hearts
as the music that we are
hard core blues low bass voices crooning
straight outta Compton melodies so pretty
they nasty cruising the Harbor Freeway
blowin' kisses to strangers who won't be for long
singing ourselves to ourselves Mamie Khalid Sharita
Bessie Jock Tookie MaiMai Cosmic Man Mr. Man
Keemah and all the rest seriously courtin'
rappin' a English we make up as we go along
turnin' nouns into verbs braids into crowns
and always fetchin' dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn't make it whose smiles and deep
dark eyes help us to continue to see
there's so much life here.

-- Ntozake Shange

2010-10-18T11:31:00.001-07:00

Voices and Soul

15 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

When the Roberts Court handed down the decision in the Lilly Ledbetter case, the opinon proffered by Samuel Alito was there was no constitutional issue. Ledbetter was denied her back pay because of statutory limitations on her right to sue; she was deemed to have brought the charges beyond the 180 day limit set by law. Never mind that she didn't know she was being discriminated against; never mind that Goodyear made talk of pay among her and her fellow workers a firing offense. Never mind that Ledbetter followed the provisions has specified in her contract.

When it was discovered that the male managers (and only the male managers, mind you) at her Goodyear plant were privvy to each other's pay, Alito held that Ledbetter must have known as well; that she should have and could have sued for back pay, rather than waiting beyond the 180 limit.

Fortunately, the Obama Administration signed a bill into law that addresses the inequity of the Roberts Decision. The new law didn't recoup Ledbetter's back pay, but it did protect other women from the discrimination that Ledbetter suffered.

Therein lies the problem. From inequities in pay and promotions, to the uneven field of sexual politics; women have always been held to...

A Double Standard

Do you blame me that I loved him?
   If when standing all alone
I cried for bread a careless world
   Pressed to my lips a stone.

Do you blame me that I loved him,
   That my heart beat glad and free,
When he told me in the sweetest tones
   He loved but only me?

Can you blame me that I did not see
   Beneath his burning kiss
The serpent’s wiles, nor even hear
   The deadly adder hiss?

Can you blame me that my heart grew cold
   That the tempted, tempter turned;
When he was feted and caressed
   And I was coldly spurned?

Would you blame him, when you draw from me
   Your dainty robes aside,
If he with gilded baits should claim
   Your fairest as his bride?

Would you blame the world if it should press
   On him a civic crown;
And see me struggling in the depth
   Then harshly press me down?

Crime has no sex and yet to-day
   I wear the brand of shame;
Whilst he amid the gay and proud
   Still bears an honored name.

Can you blame me if I’ve learned to think
   Your hate of vice a sham,
When you so coldly crushed me down
   And then excused the man?

Would you blame me if to-morrow
   The coroner should say,
A wretched girl, outcast, forlorn,
   Has thrown her life away?

Yes, blame me for my downward course,
   But oh! remember well,
Within your homes you press the hand
   That led me down to hell.

I’m glad God’s ways are not our ways,
   He does not see as man,
Within His love I know there’s room
   For those whom others ban.

I think before His great white throne,
   His throne of spotless light,
That whited sepulchres shall wear
   The hue of endless night.

That I who fell, and he who sinned,
   Shall reap as we have sown;
That each the burden of his loss
   Must bear and bear alone.

No golden weights can turn the scale
   Of justice in His sight;
And what is wrong in woman’s life
   In man’s cannot be right.

-- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

2010-10-13T11:34:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

12 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

I came across a poll recently, showing that working class whites without four year college degrees, back Republican and TeaBircher policies with great majorities. Makes sense then, why we are hearing calls from Republicans and TeaBirchers to dismantle the Department of Education; if an educated voting public votes Democrat, then assure that the voting public is uneducated.

I have been harangued myself by this group, folks I went to high school with and have found me on the world wide web. I remember them as slackers and partiers, cheaters on tests who had no real expectation of a four year college education. They were very reminiscent of the characters in a parody of the movie, Saturday Night Fever on Saturday Night Live in the '70's, where Dan Akroyd happily proclaims in a disco club,

"To be young and stupid with no future, god I love this life!"

I have been accused by these "friends", because of my BA's in History and English, and an MA in American Literature, to have been brainwashed by the Liberal Educational system. They are of the belief that the more educated one is; excepting homeschooling, or attendance at Regent of Liberty Universities, but specifically, educated in public schools and "secular" colleges and universities; the more brainwashed that person. Never mind that I started Catholic School before Vatican II, never mind that one of my history professors at Portland State for example, Basil Dmytryshyn, could hardly be considered liberal.

The terrible ramifications of such an approach is obvious; from the problems of Science, whether it be Physics or Evolution, to the problems of historical revisionism and the..

Problems of Translation: Problems of Language

1

I turn to my Rand McNally Atlas.
Europe appears right after the Map of the World.
All of Italy can be seen page 9.
Half of Chile page 29.
I take out my ruler.
In global perspective Italy
amounts to less than half an inch.
Chile measures more than an inch and a quarter
of an inch.
Approximately
Chile is as long as China
is wide:
Back to the Atlas:
Chunk of China page 17.
All of France page 5: As we say in New York:
Who do France and Italy know
at Rand McNally?

    2

I see the four mountains in Chile higher
than any mountain of North America.
I see Ojos del Salado the highest.
I see Chile unequivocal as crystal thread.
I see the Atacama Desert dry in Chile more than the rest
of the world is dry.
I see Chile dissolving into water.
I do not see what keeps the blue land of Chile
out of blue water.
I do not see the hand of Pablo Neruda on the blue land.

    3

As the plane flies flat to the trees
below Brazil
below Bolivia
below five thousand miles below
my Brooklyn windows
and beside the shifted Pacific waters
welled away from the Atlantic at Cape Horn
La Isla Negra that is not an island La
Isla Negra
that is not black
is stone and stone of Chile
feeding clouds to color
scale and undertake terrestrial forms
of everything unspeakable

    4

In your country
how do you say copper
for my country?

    5

Blood rising under the Andes and above
the Andes blood
spilling down the rock
corrupted by the amorality
of so much space
that leaves such little trace of blood
rising to the irritated skin the face
of the confession far
from home:

I confess I did not resist interrogation.
I confess that by the next day I was no longer sure
of my identity.
I confess I knew the hunger.
I confess I saw the guns.
I confess I was afraid.
I confess I did not die.

    6

What you Americans call a boycott
of the junta?
Who will that feed?

    7

Not just the message but the sound.

    8

Early morning now and I remember
corriendo a la madrugada from a different
English poem,
I remember from the difficulties of the talk
an argument
athwart the wine the dinner and the dancing
meant to welcome you

you did not understand the commonplace expression
of my heart:

the truth is in the life

la verdad de la vida

Early morning:
do you say la mañanita?
But then we lose
the idea of the sky uncurling to the light:

Early morning and I do not think we lose:
the rose we left behind
broken to a glass of water on the table
at the restaurant stands
even sweeter
por la mañanita

-- June Jordan

2010-10-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

5 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

My ten year old grandson is as precocious as his father and his grandfather were at his age. He is a sponge for knowledge and is always reading. I found myself reprimanding him recently, the way I reprimanded his father; and I was reprimanded by mine,

"I don't care how late you read, and you really should get some rest, but if you're going to read at 10 at night, turn on more light!"

When I was his age, we had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to do farm/ranch chores before we went to school, so I had a 9:30 p.m. bedtime with a 10 p.m. curfew on reading. I was too often caught and scolded for using my official army green, right angle Boy Scout flashlight while reading under the covers of my bed after the "curfew," sometimes as late as midnight.

I never had the problem of my son reading at midnight, but I expect to with my grandson; especially since I am so involved with his reading list. I'll state here and now, I am not responsible for the Stephen King novels he has; a barely competent story teller, but a terrible writer; my ex is responsible for that. It makes sense to me now why she would expose him to such swill. Whereas during our younger and sexier married life, I would choose Barry Lopez or Durrell for beach reading; she would embarrass me with Stephen King, or that charlatan, Michael Crichton! There's only so much a person can take. Like I said, she is my ex.

My grandson has been showing an interest in the Civil Rights and Anti War movement of the 60's and early 70's. His father has regaled him with some stories of my family's involvement, so when I visited recently, I brought some photos and news clippings from marches, speeches, gatherings and events my family or I had participated in. I want him to know; and also my 6 year old and 8 month old granddaughters to know, when they get old enough; that the family reunions that include haitians and irish, latins and romas, chippewas and jews, czechs and cajuns, greeks and nigerians, and yes, gays and celibates as well, was peculiar to our family 50 years ago; and not the norm; as it seems to them now. I want them to know how much of a struggle it was to simply get a glass of water or use a bathroom if they were not of the correct hue. I want them to know that the simple act of holding hands might have jeopardized their lives in certain parts of this country. Each of us have the artifacts and history that records that struggle and change; from the stories we tell our children or grandchildren as they sit rapt at our knee, to the explanation behind a family photograph at the beach; our lives stand as a testament and a recurring...

History Lesson

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each

tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,

forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,

her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.

-- Natasha Trethewey

2010-10-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

1 October 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

On 2 October 1977, my Son Israel Putnam was born. I assisted in his birth and placed his wrinkled, writhing body on his mom's stomach. I let the others attend to the umbilical cord and such. I had already done so with several calves and foals on the farm and ranch growing up in Oregon, it was enough to stroke my wife's forehead and help clean his tiny hands. It was a momentous day, to be sure.

On 2 October 2010, thousands will march in Washington; a show of solidarity against the TeaBircher demonstrations that have taken place recently. A gathering of workers and mothers, small business owners and students, gays and atheists, catholics and lesbians, protestants and teachers, nurses and shias, housekeepers and lawyers. I expect it to be a momentous day.

I visited Israel and my three grandkids in Salem, Oregon a week ago. I love to take the train. It was a practice our family embraced when I was a toddler in the late 50's; and I've used it often since. I enjoy the trains in Europe much more of course, but the Amtrak Coast Starlight is a great way to see the West Coast of the United States. Sitting in the Salem rail station for my return back the the Bay Area, I engaged in a conversation with a young Army Ranger, dressed in desert camo and burdened with desert camo duffle bags, who was on his way to visit relatives in Portland. A pretty black-haired goth girl gave the perfunctory genuflection, uttering the requisite mantra of patriotic thanks. I was more curious when and where he was going back. I was more concerned he had to go at all.

He was closing a camp near the Euphrates and moving it to the Afghan-Pakistan border. He only had two days with his relatives in Portland; on 2 October 2010, he would be with his fellow Rangers in Iraq.

On the train, I was sat next to a young man who works for an NGO in Ecuador building schools. In the mid-80's, I worked for a contractor hired by UNICEF drilling water wells for schools in Honduras; so we talked of Latin America and how the problems of abject poverty complicate matters. He was on his way to the offices in the Mission District of San Francisco, California, before traveling back to Guayaquil. He was then due to be in the tiny village of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno on 2 October 2010.

As I sat in the viewing car that night, watching the full moon as we rolled through the Cascades, I thought of the petty nature of bigotry; and how the actions of those two men, the actions of the marchers in DC stand against that pettiness. I thought how the struggle is long and hard; and how we cannot allow that pettiness to go unchallenged; lest we return to another 2 October, this time in 1937, when Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered 20,000 blacks killed because they could not roll the letter “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for...

Parsley

1. The Cane Fields

There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.
Out of the swamp the cane appears

to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General
searches for a word; he is all the world
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—
out of the swamp, the cane appears

and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.
There is a parrot imitating spring.

El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining
out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.
And we lie down. For every drop of blood
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.

2. The Palace

The word the general’s chosen is parsley.
It is fall, when thoughts turn
to love and death; the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming
four-star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders
Who can I kill today. And for a moment
the little knot of screams
is still. The parrot, who has traveled

all the way from Australia in an ivory
cage, is, coy as a widow, practicing
spring. Ever since the morning
his mother collapsed in the kitchen
while baking skull-shaped candies
for the Day of the Dead, the general
has hated sweets. He orders pastries
brought up for the bird; they arrive

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;
he sees his boots the first day in battle
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—
how stupid he looked!— at the sound
of artillery. I never thought it would sing
the soldier said, and died. Now

the general sees the fields of sugar
cane, lashed by rain and streaming.
He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears
the Haitians sing without R’s
as they swing the great machetes:
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows
his mother was no stupid woman; she
could roll an R like a queen. Even
a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room
the bright feathers arch in a parody
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother’s, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
The general remembers the tiny green sprigs
men of his village wore in their capes
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word.

-- Rita Dove

2010-09-29T12:21:00.001-07:00

Voices and Soul

28 September 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Being the son of a professional Historian, having a degree in History myself; I am both, amazed and appalled, by the blatant historical revisions and ignorance that is on display by the TeaBirchers© and their fellow travelers. From outright editing and distribution of Jefferson's Letter to the Danbury Baptists as a whole document, so as to support their dubious claims of the Founders being against the existence of a Wall between Church and State; to Fox News editing Obama's public exchanges so his presidency is diminished and marginalized.

Surely, if one has to lie to support an argument, the argument must not be very sound. What if we "edit" the lie out these discourses? What do we get? How about an honest assessment of where we came from:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. It's astounding to me, for example, that so many people really seem to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn't stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts.

-- James Baldwin
"A Talk to Teachers," Oct. 16, 1963

It is true that a Dream arose out of the disaffection experienced by those hungry, and poor, and convicted. It is true that tragedies and dangerous compromises occurred to make that Dream of America a possibility. Just let us not lie about where it was we came from and how it is we came to be who we are; let us look honestly to where our present is and where our future could be; let us not lie to make the Dream true. It is said, Knowledge is Power; and that is a sad truism when taking account of the axiom's terrible permutations. Ignorance though, masking itself as Knowledge, is not real Power; but real Ruination.

The only real course to stem this ruination then, is to embrace Knowledge and not Ignorance; to arm our minds and soul and activism against those corporate armies of propaganda, against those mobs of malice and hate; who in either, ignorance or guile, or both, would go to any means necessary than...

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

-- Langston Hughes

2010-09-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

When I was a young father and husband in my mid-20's, attending Portland State University to finish out my undergrad degree, one of the many jobs to make ends meet, was as a life form model in several Art Schools in town.

It seemed curious to me at the time, why few of the student artists would draw the scars from my athletic injuries; tank track-like scars on my right shoulder and right knee, back in the day when they flailed you open to operate. I asked one of those student artists why that was so,

"Because," he sort of sniffed, "true Artists are only concerned with Beauty. By our efforts, we only want to immortalize that which is Beautiful."

And that summed up the dichotomy that presented itself, to me, in Art generally, but Poetry in particular; is Poetry of the detached observer or of the active participant? Is Poetry to concern itself with Beauty only? How then, is Beauty defined? To that question, I had already concluded with Balzac and Baudelaire, that Beauty is in and can be found in, all things. Regardless, Art and Poetry are records, Art and Poetry are History. As the French academic, Fernand Braudel wrote:

For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color.

-- Fernand Braudel
On History

And Victor Hugo punctuated,

One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.

-- Victor Hugo
Les Misérables

The Beats, The Harlem Renaissance and especially The Black Arts movement incorporated in their Ethos, The Primacy of Experience; one's primary experience is what one recorded. It followed then, that one's primary experience was usually that of the active participant. When the neighborhood is burning and dad is shot by vigilantes and mom is cursing the helicopter lights and moving shadows as the windows shake from the prop wash, it's a little difficult to meditate on the petals of an orchid.

So it was for me in the days and weeks after 11 September. I had already flirted with the cynicism brought on by multiples of personal, national and world tragedies; from love lost by absence, incarceration or death; to stumbling upon,

"... the gutted remains of Honduran peasants desiccated next to red bougainvillea, as green hummingbirds darted and stopped at delicate petals and darted away again. I have seen the blasted remains of the last hospital in Sarajevo spilling stone and beds onto the street."

In spite of these experiences, I was still able to hold onto some child-like wonder at the world. I visited New York before the month of September 2001 ended. I didn't find any answers, but I had many questions, questions that revolved around Time, around the change in a person's Heart; questions revolving around the steady erosion of Innocence and how the graduations of that erosion is marked by...

The Dates of Demarcation

by

Justice Putnam

How many times
Can a Heart be broken
How many times
Can a resolve be tested

Is this the meaning
Of Life?

To be reminded
At the most unexpected
Time of
Pain and impermanence

How many times?

I hear the voices
Of those whose
Memories of
Lost innocence

Are etched with the
Precision of a Calendar
On the Stone of History:

Jack London remembered
The Boxer Rebellion
Jack Reed recalled more
Than Ten Days

Hemingway remembered
A Hospital in Italy
Vonnegut talked of
Dresden’s fiery face

Our Grandparents
Think of the Seventh
Of December

While others recall

A day in Dallas
A balcony in Memphis
A hotel in LA

How many more times
How many more generations

Will be born into this
Impending loss?

How many more
Incidents of horror
Before the last
Vestige of innocence
Is carried away?

These questions
May seem on the surface
To be a plea

But
How many more times

How many more images
Of a woman

Her dress blown
In a fall among

Glass
Concrete
Steel
Fire?

(New York September 2001)

from: The Nature of Poetics Collapsed Outside My Window

© 2006 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

2010-09-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

10 September 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

The Impossibility of Categorization might be the first theme of the American Epic. By turns, the Hero might be the Rugged Individual traversing mountain and stream, or the stout but tender Matriarch helping bridge the decreasing gulf between the Wilderness and the Town. The Hero might at once be anti-heroic, then by actions and deeds, raised to the Heroic, then by another set of actions and deeds, once again to fall utterly; while retaining the mantle of Hero still.

As the National Myth though, the Epic functions as a device to define the members of that nation; and by what marks they were to be identified.

For the American Epic she set out to construct, Phillis Wheatley could see no method for determining who was a member of the culture and who was an other; indeed, the two positions expatiate each other constantly and indefinitely. Wheatley's subversive refusal to accept the taxonomies of a culture that marked her as the other shows Wheatley's own assimilation; she would not and could not place herself outside the narratives she recites. Her construct of the American Epic and its narratives of belonging required her participation in the culture, even if it wasn't the culture her masters constructed. For Wheatley, all Colonial Americans were equal; precisely because definitions of equivalency or difference cannot be established.

Wheatley's investigation of the dominant notions of who belongs, within the boundaries of what it is to be American, is particularly evident in her poem, To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America. She makes explicit her African marginality, while issuing correctives to her audience; important, because writs issued to the good Earl were also made public for all the colonies to read.

Writing before the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of a Constitution which permitted slavery, Wheatley offered a vision of an American Culture without a privileged center and without qualifications for membership based on race, class or gender. Indeed, Wheatley is the archetype American, a type which paradoxically marks itself as belonging, through a constant process of making and unmaking; of repeating and then differing from itself.

She wrote of this so long ago; we may get there still.

To The Right Honourable William, Earl Of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary Of The State For North-America

HAIL, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,
Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:
The northern clime beneath her genial ray,
Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:
Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,
Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,
While in thine hand with pleasure we behold
The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.
Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies
She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:
Soon as appear'd the Goddess long desir'd,
Sick at the view, she languish'd and expir'd;
Thus from the splendors of the morning light
The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.
No more, America, in mournful strain
Of wrongs, and grievance unredress'd complain,
No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,
Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand
Had made, and with it meant t' enslave the land.
Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,
And thee we ask thy favours to renew,
Since in thy pow'r, as in thy will before,
To sooth the griefs, which thou did'st once deplore.
May heav'nly grace the sacred sanction give
To all thy works, and thou for ever live
Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,
Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,
But to conduct to heav'ns refulgent fane,
May fiery coursers sweep th' ethereal plain,
And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,
Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God

-- Phillis Wheatley

2010-09-07T10:13:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

7 September 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, though born a free woman in the time of slavery, was nonetheless, a fierce advocate for abolition and equal rights. She was part of the Free Produce Movement, a boycott of goods made with slave labor. "Free" meant, "not enlsaved" and "Produce" was any good or crop made or harvested by human effort. Some have argued how effective the movement was; given that slavery existed for almost a century from the movement's inception. But whether a boycott is against "Blood Diamonds", or "Sweat Shop Fabric", an individual stand, indeed, carries great power. It brings about irrevocable change; like waves wearing away rock along the coast line. When asked by the landed gentry of the times, why she would boycott goods made by her "people", she insisted that what she owned was Free; that it was manufactured by men and women of their own Free Will, who were paid an honest wage for an honest day's work. She insisted that what she owned was not extracted by the whip and the lash, by the tearing apart of families, flesh and the Soul. She insisted that what she owned was truly from:

Free Labor

I wear an easy garment,
O’er it no toiling slave
Wept tears of hopeless anguish,
In his passage to the grave.

And from its ample folds
Shall rise no cry to God,
Upon its warp and woof shall be
No stain of tears and blood.

Oh, lightly shall it press my form,
Unladen with a sigh,
I shall not ‘mid its rustling hear,
Some sad despairing cry.

This fabric is too light to bear
The weight of bondsmen’s tears,
I shall not in its texture trace
The agony of years.

Too light to bear a smother’d sigh,
From some lorn woman’s heart,
Whose only wreath of household love
Is rudely torn apart.

Then lightly shall it press my form,
Unburden’d by a sigh;
And from its seams and folds shall rise,
No voice to pierce the sky,

And witness at the throne of God,
In language deep and strong,
That I have nerv’d Oppression’s hand,
For deeds of guilt and wrong.

-- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

2010-09-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

31 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

This past weekend, on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington, a right wing demagogue and his ill-informed minions descended on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to, as they put it, Restore Honor in America.

“America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," the demagogue sputtered and as his minions cheered.

The theology the demagogue invoked though, was something entirely different than the theology of Martin Luther King and by extension, Obama's; and the same theology that took me to Latin America the year Archbishop Romero was assassinated. He made it abundantly clear what those differences are,

"You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”

The demagogue then insisted that to, "turn back to God", was to glory in the future and the goodness that will come; and to ignore the harpings of the "victims" of that progress.

But we will not forget the sins of our past and present. We will not forget how it is that we are where we are. A battle is taking place then, between forces that claim to have the ear of God; similar to the battle between the Angels of Heaven and Earth in Robert Hayden's...

The Ballad of Nat Turner

Then fled, O brethren, the wicked juba
and wandered wandered far
from curfew joys in the Dismal's night.
Fool of St. Elmo's fire

In scary night I wandered, praying,
Lord God my harshener,
speak to me now or let me die;
speak, Lord, to this mourner.

And came at length to livid trees
where Ibo warriors
hung shadowless, turning in wind
that moaned like Africa,

Their belltongue bodies dead, their eyes
alive with the anger deep
in my own heart. Is this the sign,
the sign forepromised me?

The spirits vanished. Afraid and lonely
I wandered on in blackness.
Speak to me now or let me die.
Die, whispered the blackness.

And wild things gasped and scuffled in
the night; seething shapes
of evil frolicked upon the air.
I reeled with fear, I prayed.

Sudden brightness clove the preying
darkness, brightness that was
itself a golden darkness, brightness
so bright that it was darkness.

And there were angels, their faces hidden
from me, angels at war
with one another, angels in dazzling
combat. And oh the splendor,

The fearful splendor of that warring.
Hide me, I cried to rock and bramble.
Hide me, the rock, the bramble cried. . .
How tell you of that holy battle?

The shock of wing on wing and sword
on sword was the tumult of
a taken city burning. I cannot
say how long they strove,

For the wheel in a turning wheel which is time
in eternity had ceased
its whirling, and owl and moccasin,
panther and nameless beast

And I were held like creatures fixed
in flaming, in fiery amber.
But I saw I saw oh many of
those mighty beings waver,

Waver and fall, go streaking down
into swamp water, and the water
hissed and steamed and bubbled and locked
shuddering shuddering over

The fallen and soon was motionless.
Then that massive light
began a-folding slowly in
upon itself, and I

Beheld the conqueror faces and, lo,
they were like mine, I saw
they were like mine and in joy and terror
wept, praising praising Jehovah.

Oh praised my honer, harshener
till a sleep came over me,
a sleep heavy as death. And when
I awoke at last free

And purified, I rose and prayed
and returned after a time
to the blazing fields, to the humbleness.
And bided my time.

-- Robert Hayden

2010-08-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

24 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

We are not born American, anymore than we are born Christian, Muslim or Jew. We are not born a Hindu or a Jain, a Sikh or an Atheist. We are not born French, Ugandan, Chinese or Uzbek. We may become those things in time, but at birth, we are from Dust. When we die, we become Dust. Can anyone really, with the naked eye, divide one particle of Dust from another? Can our differences be so great that those differences are easily made out in a maelstrom of particles dusted across the Universe? What does it mean then, to be American? To be French or Ugandan? To be Chinese or Uzbek? What does it mean to be a Christian, a Muslim or a Jew? A Hindu or a Jain? A Sikh or an Atheist? Human ego, small-minded bigotry or national identity might demand that we are special; the few among the many. But as it was in the Beginning, so it shall be in the End; we are nothing more than...

Common Dust

And who shall separate the dust
What later we shall be:
Whose keen discerning eye will scan
And solve the mystery?

The high, the low, the rich, the poor,
The black, the white, the red,
And all the chromatique between,
Of whom shall it be said:

Here lies the dust of Africa;
Here are the sons of Rome;
Here lies the one unlabelled,
The world at large his home!

Can one then separate the dust?
Will mankind lie apart,
When life has settled back again
The same as from the start?

-- Georgia Douglas Johnson

(On Starlight and Fire, Keck Observatory Mauna Kea, Hawai’i / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-08-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

The Truth Behind The Lie

by

Justice Putnam

I took another small sip of water as the next questioner rose, this time by the stacks of French novels. She was cute; red hair, tall, maybe 5'9" or 5'10", well proportioned. Had to be another doctoral student in Comparative Literature at Cal; so even at 24 or 25, was too young for my wandering eye.

"You stated," she stated determinedly, "and I quote; 'Comedy, Poetry and Fiction are only effective and only become Art if there is a Truth behind the humor, the verse and the lie.'"

"Yes," I uttered to fill the small silence.

"In your writing; in your humor, verse and lies, are you telling a Truth about yourself?" she asked, "or are you telling a Truth about the Culture and Society as a whole?"

"Yes," I answered.

--Justice Putnam
"Conversations With The Audience"

That Which Does Not Kill You

by

Justice Putnam

Gramps was an Immortal, right up to the moment he died.

--Jim Dodge
"Fup"

I am an Immortal; that’s why it’s so hard to admit my life has been a mistake. But if you’re living forever, you might as well get used to it.

The problem with being an Immortal is that early on, when you just start being an Immortal in your youth; you think all mistakes can be rectified. But that is just youthful Immortal folly. Being an Immortal is recognizing that you make the same mistakes over and over, always thinking that it will be different the next time. And you have the rest of your Immortal life to ponder that.

It is very tiresome, pondering that which cannot be changed. Even when your children tell you that they always know you’ve loved them, you know the truth. Because an Immortal means not being tied to time and space; loved ones are ultimately neglected. Of course you embrace them and provide when you can, and they profess appreciation that you care. But an Immortal knows the truth.

Like the time a photography gig took you to Honduras. An Immortal always knows the danger. That’s why you went. And when the military broke your camera and your arm, you knew it was no different than surfing over coral, or hang gliding off El Capitan.

Or the time your son was ten and you left to work on a tuna boat in the Gulf of Alaska. You figured the experience would round you as a writer. Plus, the danger was as good as the money. Too bad money isn’t as immortal as you are. But an Immortal can always make money.

At least that’s what you told both of your wives. An Immortal knows that no amount of money can justify the absences, not really. An Immortal knows about these mistakes.

In time, an Immortal will ponder these dangers of the past, these mistakes. None of them killed you, after all you’re an Immortal; but the scars are there, for the rest of your Immortal life.

© 2006 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

Beauty, Truth and Bibliomania

by

Justice Putnam

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Why do you have four books by Bukowski?" she seemed disturbed as she closed The Most Beautiful Woman In Town."

I'd have more of his opus," I answered, "I'm slowly re-building my library."

"But I don't understand, you like Bukowski?"

"Sure," I responded, a little tentative, not quite understanding her question, "I've always been attracted to his writing style. He is very spare."

"But Bukowski is a misogynist and you have four of his books!" she pointed at my bookcase.

South Of No North, Factotum and Women, plus the one she was returning to the shelf indeed totaled four.

I thought of all the other books I used to have, lost now from bad love affairs and bad finances. I used to have all of Will and Ariel Durant's tomes, even a rare, Mansions Of Philosophy. I had all of Jack London's books and stories. I had all of Cooper's Leather Stocking Tales. I had most of McMurtry's work from the sixties and seventies; All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers prominent among them. I had Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems and stories. I had H.G. Well's Outline Of History.

I had everything by Virginia Woolfe and Janet Flanner. I had obscure poems and letters by Gertrude Stein. I had most of Phillip K. Dick, Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. I had most of Clifford D. Simak. I had a first printing of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre by B. Traven. I had everything by Hemingway. I had everything by Orwell; including Down And Out In Paris And London. I had all the works of De Sade and Thackeray. I had a dozen volumes of Eugene Field. I had Dickens and Marlowe. I had Melville, Chaucer, Defoe, Voltaire, Swift, Virgil, Plutarch and Donne.

I had all the English translations of Mishima. I had Kobe Abe's Woman In The Dunes. I had volumes of Dryden, Pope, Shakespeare and Spencer. I had Balzac and Fante. I had Baudelaire and Fitzgerald. I had poems by St John Of The Cross and essays by Annie Dillard. I had all of Henry Miller. I had some of John Rechy.

I had volumes of Linda Paston and Marge Piercy. I had some of Sharon Olds and all of Jack Kerouac. I had all of Gary Snyder's work and volumes of Eric Hoffer. I had Kahil Gibran and Rilke. I had Ovid and Nietzsche. I had Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Ghandi. I had Autobiography Of A Yogi by Yogananda. I had the Kama Sutra and the Upanishads. I had The Analects and The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. I had Byron. I had Percy and Mary Shelley. I had Ten Days That Shook The World by Jack Reed and I had volumes of Emma Goldman. I had Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and volumes of Faulkner. I had God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr. and I had The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey.

"I take Bukowski's work," I began, though I feared she was having none of it, "to be stories and characters that show us how not to be. He is taking a snapshot of life as it is, in all of its dirt and grime; in its violence, bigotry and selfishness. But I don't take his life of the gutter milieu to be a blueprint or affirmation of bad behavior."

"Oh," she said, pulling out a volume of the Alexandria Quartet, "you have Durrell. Now this is beautiful."

© 2004 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswessen

American Idol

by

Justice Putnam

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin

It’s not often that a member of the radical fringe gets a chance to revel with the High and Powerful. But chance and strategic sexual networking will get you into anywhere in this town; that’s how I got an opportunity to converse with Simon Cowell, the maker of American Idols.

Ok, I admit, I used the Aging Starlet for more than the fun and games, but one benign and totally unconscious benefit was to gain entry to THE year’s social event; "Bestowing Upon One, Simon Cowell, The Governor’s Crystal Medal of Humanitarian Achievement."

I had found out I was on a terrorist watch list for donating to Amnesty International back during Iran/Contra and I couldn’t fly from Oakland to Burbank. The agents who debriefed me after my chat with Simon told me that I was included on the list for, "aiding and abetting potential enemies of the State through the Socialist practice of Humanitarian concern." Since 9/11, I travel mostly by crewing on yachts that sail from the Bay Area to points beyond.

The Aging Starlet, who shall remain unnamed, because after all, I am a Gentleman, asked if I could help with her yacht she docked at the Encinal Yacht Club on Alameda.

"Sure," I said, "I know my way around a Hattaras."

After a few minutes of stowing her gear, she commented on my hands,

"Your hands," she cooed in her pouty-lipped, big-breasted Aging Starlet way, "are the hands of a sailor, you must know your way with ropes and tackle?”

"Yes," I replied. Though the Hatteras is a motor yacht, she had me grind up her main sail and set her block and tackle. We didn’t sail that night. The next morning though, we’re in her Maserati as she’s jetting down Coast Hwy to Pepperdine in Malibu. I was going to be her arm-candy at THE social event of the year.

After attending the event for an hour or so, I found a rest room. I didn’t notice Simon Cowell at the urinal next to me at first, but I felt his gaze.

"So you’re the arm-candy for the night," Simon said to me as I was zipping up, "I can see that you’re more than that."

"Thanks," I said, a bit self-conscious, though it’s still a little nice to hear; even from the flaccid, botox-injected-in-the-biceps Simon Cowell. "She owns a Hattaras and I’m helping her motor it to Cabo next week."

"Yes, she does like to motor," Cowell lasciviously said in his slithering English accent.

I chuckled in that way guys do who know a common secret, "Thank God!" I finally said.

Cowell couldn’t keep from laughing.

"You must not watch my show," Cowell accused.

"No, I don’t. Why?" I asked.

"Because you’re not damaged," Cowell whispered. It was then that I noticed he was a little drunk. "My show has been discovered by scientists to put holes in people’s brains! No, no! I’m tellin’ the truthhhh," he began to drawl. "That brain-dead girl that everybody said was alive, you know?"

Cowell sort of fell onto me; I helped him up and said, "Sure, Terri Schiavo."

"Right! Right!" Cowell said a little loud, Tarrieee Sheeeaaavvvvohhhhh, If you cracked my audience’s heads open, their brains would be mush, just like Sheeeeeeeaaaavvvohhhhh."

"Mr. Cowell" I said, trying to rouse him, "Mr. Cowell?

"And you knnnnnoooowww what?" Simon‘s head was wobbly and his eyes a milky blur, "the President knnnnnooooooowsssssssss."

Just then a loud bang came through the doors. Several men dressed in black and wearing radio ear-sets entered and scooped Cowell up. They escorted me to a holding cell for a few hours and then let me go.

The Aging Starlet later found out that I’m good with horses and I know my way around a saddle.

© 2006 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

The Princess and the Frog

by

Justice Putnam

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

--Socrates

She said she chose me because I was the best behaved in the whole pond. I guess those etiquette lessons my frog aunts taught me when I was a tadpole really helped. All those Saturday night Brown Derby dinners dressed in my little tadpole-sized frog tuxedo, my frog aunts in their pearls and gloves, all seated in our special Brown Derby frog booth, somehow all that prepared me for the chance of a frog lifetime; to be kissed by the most beautiful Princess in the world.

I must tell you, everything we frogs heard was true. The sun back-lit her dark red curls, her full ruby lips touched mine. I remember she tasted of lavender and orange. The transformation was magical; I was no longer the ugly frog. I became her handsome Prince standing tall and strong and happy!

Oh, sure. She had to change my wardrobe and make it more diverse, as a Prince’s wardrobe must be. I was mostly into turtlenecks because I thought it would hide my frog throat more. But she liked the open collar look, she said, because she liked how manly a strong neck was. I always thought my best feature were my legs! Such is the mystery of the most beautiful Princess in the world.

She insisted I grow my hair longer. I took to sporting a goatee and wearing little round sunglasses. I grew accustomed to jet lag on royal visits to her ancestral homes in Europe.

I became her Prince, but she seemed unhappy.

We had just returned from a weekend at the home of my best bullfrog friend. His property included some of the best mud baths in all of Sonoma County.

“Your frog friends are ill mannered and uncouth,” she sobbed, “they smack their lips when they eat and use terrible grammar. You must choose them or me and if you choose them, you will not be my Prince!”

I didn’t know that the spell could be reversed. I thought, once kissed and transformed, a Prince forever you would be.

“Are you serious?” my Bullfrog friend spit at me later when I told him of the ultimatum. “You think you’re a Prince? She’s too good for you, man. She’s way out of your league. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You might be a Prince, but in your eyes, not hers! What made you think you could keep a woman like that happy? I hate to hurt your feelings, but at least you have feelings to hurt!”

All of my frog friends practice “tough truth,” but knowledge of that has never lessened the sting of their observations.

A note sat on the table when I came through the door that hot afternoon. She had gone and would not be back. I went to the bathroom and looked at the mirror there.

I knew which fork to use for the salad and how to swirl a vintage red to check its legs. But there was no mistaking it.

I had always been a frog.

But now I was one with a goatee and little round sunglasses.

© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

The Story of My Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

by

Justice Putnam

“News organizations, including The Associated Press, routinely prepare obituaries on prominent figures so stories can be run quickly when they die.”

-- CBS News

~ West Coast Poet R. Justice Putnam ~

New Wreck Times
Senior Obituary Chief Editor
Gerry Bronco

 California poet, author, singer/songwriter, chef and raconteur, R. Justice Putnam, died in a tragic church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama Saturday night. He was alone in the 16th Street Baptist Church’s rectory preparing for the commemoration ceremonies of the four black schoolgirls killed in a similar church bombing at the church in 1963.

Born Royal Justice Moody on 26 March 1955 in Eugene, Oregon, he attended various Catholic schools in the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountains before his mother, the be-bop jazz stylist, Patricia Harris remarried and the family moved to Southern California. Adopted by his stepfather, the historian, Jackson K. Putnam in 1964, Mr. Putnam cited the elder Putnam as having the most profound of influences on his life and written work.

“In my attempts to weave an archetypal story out of the American Landscape,” Mr. Putnam was quoted in an interview with Simon Dray on KUSF “Poet’s Corner” in San Francisco, “I have used elements of the 'good and bad father.' Nothing about the 'bad father' has anything do with my dad, Jack. If I have any redeeming qualities in my life, I acquired them from my him.”

Mr. Putnam published his first poem at the age of fifteen. He continued to publish poetry, short stories, plays, songs and lyrics, criticism and political essays. One day before his assassination, Mr. Putnam published an essay condemning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the rampant racism that perpetuates violence here and abroad. It is believed his assassins could be either Christian or Islamic fundamentalists; he was known to take both to task and offended them regularly. A fatwa was issued for his death by the Islamic cleric al-Akim after Mr. Putnam’s folk song, "Just Like Tom Paine’s Blues" was played in public last year. Christian Internet sites called for his death because of the same song. The song used the "f" word to condemn the use of God and Religion to achieve power and terror.

A world traveler, Mr. Putnam is survived by his father Jackson, his mother Patricia and her husband Tom Watanuki, siblings Mike, Zona and Zreata, his former wives, Carol and Flore, his son Israel, daughter-in-law Ola, his grandchildren Isaiah, Tahlia and Sicilia; and many lovers and friends.

At Mr. Putnam’s request, as specified in his living will, his ashes will be scattered around a tree on the family property in the Cascades east of Eugene. It is also his wish that friends and family remember him for his bad jokes and that they would dance as if dancing on his grave. He wished that an Irish Jig would be the most popular, but the Lindy Hop would suffice.

A plaque had been commissioned by Mr. Putnam, to be placed at the tree of his scattering. A quote from Czeslaw Milosz reads,

“Not that I want to be a god or hero.
But just to change into a tree
Grow for ages
Not hurt anyone.”

© 2009 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

Sunlight and Water Pitcher, Oakland, California and Evergreen on Wolf Ridge, Blue River, Oregon / copyright Justice Putnam

2010-08-18T00:37:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

17 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

I had the great fortune to meet Abbey Lincoln backstage at Yoshi's in Oakland's Jack London Square in 2004. I was a little awe-struck, not so much by her fame as a jazz great, but more because of her actions and voice over all these years for civil rights. Though her albums were prominent on our turntable growing up, it was the poetry in her songs, the poetry that gave voice to the struggle of man and woman, that we spoke about in our family. It is the same poetry I give to my ten year old grandson and six year old granddaughter, as they embark on their own journey of life.

Abbey Lincoln's journey is done and she has gone home. May her rest be at ease.

Story Of My Father

Do we kill ourselves on purpose?
Is destruction all our own?
Are we dying for a reason?
Is our misery all our own?
Are the people suicidal?
Did we come this far to die?
Of ourselves are we to perish?
For this useless, worthless lie?

My father had a kingdom
My father wore a crown
They said he was an awful man
He tried to live it down
My father built us houses
And he kept his folks inside
His images were stolen
And his beauty was denied.

My brothers are unhappy
And my sisters they are too
And my mother cries for glory
And my father stands accused.

My father, yes my father
Was a brave and skillful man
And he led and served his people
With the magic of his hand.

My father, yes my father
His soul was sorely tried
‘Cause his images were stolen
And his beauty was denied.

Sometimes the river’s calling
And sometimes the shadows fall
That’s when he’s like a mountain
That is in master over all.

This story of my father
Is the one I tell and give
It’s the power and the glory
Of the life I make and live

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And he lives within the people
And the lives he handed down
My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down.

Well sometimes the rivers callin’
And sometimes the shadows fall
That’s when he’s like a mountain
That’s a master over all.

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
And he lives within the people
And the lives he handed down

My father has a kingdom
My father wears a crown
Through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down
Through the spirit of my mother
The crown was handed down
Through the spirit of my mother, Lord
The crown was handed down!

-- Abbey Lincoln

2010-08-11T01:16:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

10 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

She is a spectre, a ghostly presence that we can ignore until we can't. She is pushing a ragged shopping cart, she is stumbling with a cane, she is walking in the slow elegance of the elderly matron; yet we don't see her, even though we move out of her way. She lives next door, down the street, across the river and under a freeway overpass. She is our mother, sister, cousin, aunt and grandmother.

She might have been great once; but we don't see her, we don't hear her. We ignore her, until we can't.

American Sonnet (35)

boooooooo. spooky ripplings of icy waves. this
umpteenth time she returns--this invisible woman
long on haunting short on ectoplasm

"you're a good man, sistuh," a lover sighed solongago.
"keep your oil slick and your motor running."

wretched stained mirrors within mirrors of
fractured webbings like nests of manic spiders
reflect her ruined mien (rue wiggles remorse
squiggles woe jiggles bestride her). oozy Manes spill
out yonder spooling in night's lofty hour exudes
her gloom and spew in rankling odor of heady dour

as she strives to retrieve flesh to cloak her bones
again to thrive to keep her poisoned id alive

usta be young usta be gifted--still black

-- Wanda Coleman

2010-08-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

3 August 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

A literary conceit was used in Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", in which The Counsel carries an ever-increasing bundle of letters from his ex-wife. He tells others in the village of the letters' contents and his ex-wife's day to day itinerary of experiences; as each missive is delivered to the village post office. When asked when she will come to visit, his constant reply is, 'soon.' When his ex-wife does arrive unexpectedly, to reconcile their relationship, no less; it is revealed he has never opened any of the letters from her; years worth of letters unopened, yet each letter was enthusiastically awaited for.

"Hell," The Counsel would tell all within earshot, "Hell is my natural condition."

Pablo Neruda would walk the Promenade and watch from the window of his seaside villa as humanity strolled by on oppresively hot summer days and nights. His solitary observances evoked what some have described as a Hell, or at least a purgatory of human sin and degradation. It is all of that and more, but it is also a simple acknowledgement of the Beast that is in all of us; the Beast that conjures and transcends Angels. The Beast that is hidden until one finds themself as a...

Gentleman Alone

The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad couples;
Under the elegant coconut palms, near the ocean and moon,
There is a continual life of pants and panties,
A hum from the fondling of silk stockings,
And women's breasts that glisten like eyes.
The salary man, after a while,
After the week's tedium, and the novels read in bed at night,
Has decisively fucked his neighbor,
And now takes her to the miserable movies,
Where the heroes are horses or passionate princes,
And he caresses her legs covered with sweet down
With his ardent and sweaty palms that smell like cigarettes.
The night of the hunter and the night of the husband
Come together like bed sheets and bury me,
And the hours after lunch, when the students and priests are masturbating,
And the animals mount each other openly,
And the bees smell of blood, and the flies buzz cholerically,
And cousins play strange games with cousins,
And doctors glower at the husband of the young patient,
And the early morning in which the professor, without a thought,
Pays his conjugal debt and eats breakfast,
And to top it all off, the adulterers, who love each other truly
On beds big and tall as ships:
So, eternally,
This twisted and breathing forest crushes me
With gigantic flowers like mouth and teeth
And black roots like fingernails and shoes

-- Pablo Neruda

2010-07-29T11:18:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

27 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

When Kruschev spoke at the UN, back during the height of the Cold War, he famously banged his shoe on the lectern he spoke from; it made all the news at the time. People were either aghast and apalled, or humored by yet again, another Kruschevian, dramatic masterpiece. Regardless, the world couldn't stop speaking about it. What was less reported was an off hand answer to an off hand question as Kruschev moved about on his escorted tour of the US. He was asked how he was so sure that the Soviets would prevail over the West.

"When I come to grind the West under the iron heel of my iron boot,"

I like to emellish his response,

"rest assured, the Capitalist will sell me the rope I hang him from first."

That last part is all Kruschev; and though the Soviets have gone the way of the Velociraptor, Kruschev's truism about the Capitalist cannot be refuted. How else to explain the oil blow out in the Gulf? How else to explain contaminated foodstuffs, acid rain, polluted aquafiers and mountaintop removal? How else to explain what it means to live...

Under Corporate Skies

Dawn, you miserable slow-cooker
of goat meat, why do you park
yourself at my window to snooker

me into imagining the smoky night
will never come again? Sometimes
when you turn up so impeccably

disguised as a new day with wines
of forgetfulness, I respectfully
give in. Life clouds the very trail

life spins: a spidering website.
How long can we put truth in jail?
How long can politicians stab

biology and physics in the heart
and gut the world before there is
no world left? Where profit ignites,

where dividends burn up, lives go out.

-- Al Young

(Knockout Stacks, Martinez, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-07-26T17:02:00.001-07:00

Voices and Soul

Friday 23 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor

For those of the Black Community who have been incarcerated, Due Process was really a Dual Process; and Equal Protection was really Unequal. It is an old tale, as old as America, sadly; and one that seems to be unchanged now or in the future. Etheridge Knight spent eight years in Indiana State Prison. He chronicled his time there; and later, after his release in 1968, became an important part of the Black Arts Movement. Though many of his poems speak of redemption, many more also speak of hope lost; and of the mind-numbing passage of time, locked in a warren of oppressive authority.

Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane

Hard Rock/ was/ "known not to take no shit
From nobody," and he had the scars to prove it:
Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above
His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut
Across his temple and plowed through a thick
Canopy of kinky hair.

The WORD/ was/ that Hard Rock wasn't a mean nigger
Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head,
Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity
Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back,
Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose,
Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status.
and we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep,
To see if the WORD was true.

As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak
Of his exploits: "Man, the last time, it took eight
Screws to put him in the Hole." "Yeah, remember when he
Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?" "he set
The record for time in the Hole-67 straight days!"
"Ol Hard Rock! man, that's one crazy nigger."
And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit
A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit.

The testing came to see if Hard Rock was really tame.
A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch
And didn't lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
>From before shook him down and barked in his face
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and look silly.
His empty eyes like knot holes in a fence.

And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name,
we told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long.
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed.
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things
We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do.
The fears of years like a biting whip,
Had cut deep bloody grooves
Across our backs.

-- Etheridge Knight

2010-07-21T00:32:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

20 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

The Nigerian Poet, Playwright, Actor and Political Activist, Wole Soyinka, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986; the first African writer to be so recognized. Though much of his early work satirized the absurdities of his society with gentle humor and an affectionate spirit; as the struggle for independence in Nigeria turned sour, Soyinka's work took on a darker tone. One such example is a conversation between two adversaries who are often pitted against each other; two adversaries who, in the heat of battle, believe one to be the master of the other, yet each are one and the same; and so Soyinka offers us a discussion between a...

Civilian and Soldier

My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.
You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your traning sessions, cautioning -
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth
From the lead festival of your more eager friends
Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.
I hope some day
Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair
With meat and bread, a gourd of wine
A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question - do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?

-- Wole Soyinka

2010-07-15T10:53:00.000-07:00

On Oscar Grant, Martyrdom and The Digital Age

by

Justice Putnam

Two iconic images from my childhood have always haunted me; and I have seen them manifested from time to time over my five and half decades of walking this luminous sphere. Images so powerful that a Truth was hinted at by the many questions the images provoked.

There was no Twitter, YouTube or e-mail to transmit those images around the world; yet only days after the events, the world had seen them and was talking about them.

One is the self-immolation at a busy intersection in Saigon in 1963 of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc:

I was eight years old when I saw that photograph in a magazine.

The other is the shooting, on another busy Saigon street in 1968, of the supposed Viet Cong Sympathizer, Nguyen Van Lem by the Police Chief of Saigon, Nguyen Ngoc Loan:

I turned thirteen years of age shortly after viewing the photo.

Thich Quang Duc's death was a protest against the war and Diem's treatment of the country's Buddhist monks; the photograph has a staged quality to it, Duc after all, had made his plans known. Nguyen Van Lem's death on the other hand, was a murder, a summary execution by a policeman. There was no trial, only an arrest and a gunshot in the head; the photograph is a frozen snippet in time, truly an accident it was taken at all.

Now flash forward to 3 November 2006. Malachi Ritscher, though no monk, hoped his death to be one of purpose. On his Web site, the 52-year-old experimental musician, who some family members said fought with depression, even posted his obituary.

As he stood on an off ramp in downtown Chicago at 6:30 in the morning; he saw his death as a call to the nation, as a potent symbol of his rage and discontent with the U.S. war in Iraq. He set up a video camera, doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire.

"Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country... "

... he wrote in a suicide note found nearby...

"... If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country."

 
And so Malachi Ritscher martyred himself, so his voice would be heard.

But no one was listening.

In the early morning hours of 1 January 2009, Oscar Grant loosely fit the description of a young black man in America; a supposed sympathizer to the Thug Life and a threat to the community, the nation and the world; and so Oscar Grant was shot in the back by Police in those early morning hours, while laying face down on the Fruitvale BART station platform.

Outraged passengers recorded the scene on cell phones and digital cameras.

Those images circled the globe in mere seconds.

Malachi Ritscher did everything he could to draw attention to his martyrdom in this digital age; he consciously hoped to shock and outrage. His failure at that may be more because the Traditional Media could keep his suicide from the news cycle; and no independent images came from his demise. Few remember, know or care of Ritscher's death, or his protest.

Oscar Grant was murdered by long-held fear and animosity, murdered during a war on brown people domestic and abroad; by a policeman whose only defense is that he meant to torture Grant with 50,000 volts instead. There was no trial for Oscar Grant, only an apprehension and a gunshot in the back.

Because those images of Oscar Grant's apprehension and murder were independently recorded and deftly transmitted as they happened, or in the seconds afterward; the Traditional Media and our own Justice system could not ignore them. One of the officers tried to confiscate cameras and phones, for the investigation she told people; but the train was packed and she couldn't confiscate them all. Six separate digital videos made it out. As shocking and outrageous as Grant's murder was to those who experienced it that early New Year's morning; their recordings and transmittals of his shooting also shocked and outraged a world.

Does anyone doubt for a moment, that a Prosecutor would have championed Oscar Grant's cause if those six videos had not rattled the consciences of people around this digital world? Though a conviction of sorts was secured in Oscar Grant's murder, Justice may not be wholly in the offing, but people are listening; and when people are listening, voices are heard; and when voices are heard, more voices are raised.

Change then might be immediate and whole, or sadly incremental; but it is always where change begins.

© 2010 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

(cross posted at Daily Kos)

2010-07-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

13 July 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

When all seems hopeless, when the hyena cackle of defeat is biting at pant cuffs and frayed nerves; when the crushing weight of today is laying low; when the heat stroke of burned out ambitions are sweating inside an oppressive solitary cage, a cage that is bolted in a boxcar rattling along this penal colony rail road earth; it is important to remember...

destiny

under volcanoes & timeless years within watch
and low tones. Around corners, in deep caves among
misunderstood and sometimes meaningless sounds.
Cut beggars, outlaw pimps & whores. Resurrect work.
Check your distance blue. Come earthrise men
deepblack and ready, come sunbaked women rootculture on the move.
Just do what you're supposed to do, what you say you gonta do
not the impossible, not the unimaginative,
not copy clothed as original and surely
not bitter songs in european melodies. Take hold
do the necessary, the possible, the correctly simple
talk of mission & interpret destiny
put land and selfhood on the minds of our people
do the expected, do what all people do
reverse destruction. Capture tomorrows

-- Haki Madhubuti

(Merced River, El Portal, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-06-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

29 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Much has been written about Gwendolyn Brooks' poem, The Ballad of Rudolph Reed. It has been speculated that Brooks was condemning the reaction Reed took to the injury of his daughter by racists in his new neighborhood; that he was at fault for moving into a white enclave he should have been wise enough to avoid. Others have speculated that she was advocating his reaction and that he was justified in spite of the tragedies that followed.

Still others state that she was simply recording the facts.

I say it is none of these. I say that Brooks is showing that all reactions don't arise out of a vacuum; that for every action, there is indeed, a reaction. Whether the actions and/ or reactions are justified, is up for the reader to conclude.

What is certain is that a man and woman have a breaking point, no matter how oaken they may be; that a man and woman can only be pushed so far.

What is certain is that tragedy upon tragedy has been perpetuated on the Black in America; and any reaction, whether rioting in the streets or taking vengeance on the perpetuators of hate, arises not out of one instance that set the world ablaze; but many instances. What is certain is that few will remember or care what caused the reaction, save for those who reacted; and no bandage after the fact will lessen the pain of the tragedies that occurred; and are bound to occur later.

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

"I am not hungry for berries.
I am not hungry for bread.
But hungry hungry for a house
Where at night a man in bed

"May never hear the plaster
Stir as if in pain.
May never hear the roaches
Falling like fat rain.

"Where never wife and children need
Go blinking through the gloom.
Where every room of many rooms
Will be full of room.

"Oh my home may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it,
And fight for it when I find it."

The agent's steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back for grass?

The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)

The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.

Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
And a beastly butcher knife.

He ran like a mad thing into the night
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.

By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger--" his neighbors said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.

-- Gwendolyn Brooks

2010-06-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

22 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

With Father's Day just past, I want to pay homage to fathers old, current and new; I want to pay homage to the fathers who are there every day and the fathers who can't be.

I asked my dad, in a more maudlin time just after the birth of my own son almost thirty-three years ago, how I could be a better son?

"By being a good father," he said simply.

When my grandson was four, I wrote the following that has been published a few times in the intervening years. A simple suggestion from a father to a son. Because a father will always wonder if he's done enough; he will always wonder if his mark was for good or ill; and if he is truly the contemplative sort, he will also wonder if there is ever a balance...

On Poetry and Fathers

by

Justice Putnam

The one thing
That always amazed me

Even from the
Earliest moment
Of your life

Was the utter trust
You had in me

And I was struck
At the time
By the amount
Of doubt

I had in myself.

Even though
Your mother and I
Had half a year
To practice breathing

I doubted that
I could remember
Properly when to
Encourage the right
Breath

And when the doctor
Said I could assist
And I finally held
You

Gray and small

I thought to that
Distant day
When you would

Hold your own son
In the same way

And I thought of
The resolve you would
Have

Just as I had

To love
Like no other
Father has loved.

So the years pass

And I doubt
You felt the
Prayer of love

Over that distance
And separation
You grew in.

A correspondence
Is a poor substitute
For a kiss

Yet each word
Was a universe
Of touch

I doubt it
Was enough.

I cannot now
Apologize

For all that you
Went through

I wish it were
Otherwise

But mere words
And sentiment

Are hollow.

You are now
A father

Kiss your son
While you can

Circumstance

Has a way
Of intruding
Upon the best
Of plans

And apologies

Become terrible
Temptations.

© 2004 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

(Avocado Orchard, Irvine California / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-06-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

15 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Returning with a drug habit he acquired while serving in Korea, Etheridge Knight was arrested for robbery and sentenced in 1960 to eight years in Indiana State Prison. While serving time, he began to write poetry and corresponded with members of the burgeoning Black Arts Movement; Gwendolyn Brooks was one and enthusiastically championed him and his prison poetry. His first volume "Poems From Prison" was published in 1968 while he was still incarcerated. It was an immediate success and he continued to write while out of prison, receiving grants and honoraria from The Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment of the Arts, among others. In 1990, at the age of 49, Knight earned a Bachelor's degree in American Poetry and Criminal Justice from Martin Center University in Indianapolis. He died the next year of lung cancer.

The Idea of Ancestry

Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews.They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.I know
their dark eyes, they know mine.I know their style,
they know mine.I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say).He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space.My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him.There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

-- Etheridge Knight

2010-06-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

08 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

Two quotes by Malcolm X resonated with me during my early childhood in Oregon; and resonate still.

"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters, Plymouth Rock landed on us!"

and

"I have no mercy or compassion for a society that crushes people, and then penalizes them for not being able to stand up under the weight."

Many things have been written and speculated about the Rap Artist, Tupak Shakur. He was certainly a child and man of his times; and he died far too early. His social commentary and poetry of the human condition; particularily, the conditon of black men and women, is certainly informed by the two quotes I cited. His poetry addresses the plain facts of what it is to live under a dual system of Due Process and Equal Protection. It might be argued that the "apartheid" Jim Crow laws were overturned in the public and private arenas; but Shakur saw how that Jim Crow mentality is alive and well in the most cherished of our "Ideals." Because when millions of black men and women are incarcerated and war criminals walk free, one would think that...

Liberty Needs Glasses

Liberty Needs Glasses
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumped into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie

justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses

-- Tupak Shakur

2010-06-02T01:45:00.001-07:00

Voices and Soul

01 June 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

In the middle of August 1936, soldiers loyal to Franco arrested Federico García Lorca. Considered by many to be the premier poet of the early 20th century, Lorca wrote the following poem in 1929 while a student at Columbia University. It was published posthumously. The Gacela (gazelle) of the poem is a symbol for a young black man who was lynched in the state of South Carolina early in 1929; though it might have been a prescience of Lorca's own death. A few days after his arrest, he was executed and his books burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen. To this day, even after 35 years since Franco's death, the grave of Federico García Lorca remains a mystery.

Gacela of the Dark Death

(translated by Robert Bly)

I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.

When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.

-- Federico García Lorca

2010-05-28T21:10:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day: "Sacrifice, Death and Divorce"

by

Justice Putnam

My second wife and I would spend Memorial Day in France. She is a French National and the bulk of our work was there; well, the bulk of HER work. At the time, I could work anywhere; but that is another story. We would leave the Bay Area around late March or early April and return before the end of September. Sometimes we would celebrate the New Year at a family retreat near the Belgium frontier; and then the next two weeks of Jaunary at another family chateau in Nice. On the 50th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, I took this photo that I entitled, National Cemetery in Vanishing Point Perspective, Normandy, France, above the cliffs of the beaches that were once crowded with men, blood, lead and the windy, cold salt air.

I also wrote the following that finally became a song five years ago that goes with the photo:

Josephine

words and music by
Justice Putnam

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

(m/8) Taking the steps
Down to the sea
Somewhere along
The coast of Normandy

Where the white
Fossil sands
Churned turbulently

Where men rushed
Into battle
And died violently

Whose last
Dying breath
Was to plead with

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

(m/8) Could be
The grasslands
Of the Sioux

No matter
Which side
They were on
They were all
Thinking of you

Could be in
In the South Pacific
Or the Persian Gulf
An Indonesian jungle
Or an Arctic hut

Could be in a
Manhattan penthouse
Or a cold water den

(coda) We’ll all grasp
At that last
Bit of hope
In the end with

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

(tacet) Josephine
Take me
Home

© 2005 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

The film role was left undeveloped for almost eight years; I had thrown it in a box of to-do creative endeavors that I would attend to eventually.

When my wife, the French actress, Flore De Valicourt

and I decided to end our marriage; I went into a deep funk and could not bring myself to look over those artifacts of our time together. That and many other roles of film, notes and such sat until I was strong enough to remember why I took those photos and made my notes.

Call me a wimp, but I really did love her. One time, we were driving from Paris to La Tranche Sur Mer out on the Atlantic coast and passed through Reims, headquarters of the National Front run by Le Pen.

"Do you smell that?" she asked.

I took a whiff of air and said, "I don't know, what is it?"

"It smells like," she paused momentarily, scrunching her nose in a disgusted expression before continuing, "it smells like, fascism."

I don't know about you; but it made me love her even more fiercely.

Flore told me a story on the way to her mother's family home in Brittany; I took this photo on the way there that is entitled, Tournesol in the Fields of Normandy, France:

and also this one I entitled, House Ruins of Poet St Pol Roux at Brittany France:

Her story became a poem that is emblematic of, for me, the solemnity of Memorial Day:

A Windy Day In Normandy

by

Justice Putnam

Your floral-print dress
A breeze across fields
Of Sunflower and Lavender

You told me the story
Of the tragedy of
Your family

Your grandfather on
His mailman bicycle
The delivery of
Resistance correspondence

The fear of discovery

(The inevitable retaliation
Against the village

An Uncle hung
In the Square
A few weeks short
Of the liberation)

I watched your tears
As you prayed near
The soldier multitude of
White crosses and
The occasional
Star of David

Here and there even
An alabaster Crescent Moon

You wept for them all
As the tournesol
Faced West

Your dress clung in folds

And your red hair
Framed the History
Of your familial grief

(Saint Ceneri, France, 1994)

© 2005 Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

Though it didn't work out for Flore and myself; she taught me truly what it is to feel reverence for the sacrifice of those in our pasts, our presents and it is sad to say so; in our futures as well.

If that is all I learned; then simply knowing her made me a better man.

© 2010 Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

(Cut Stone and Arch, St Cenari, France; National Cemetary in Vanishing Point Perspective, Normandy France; Woman on Bicycle, Paris, France; Tournesol in the Fields of Normandy, France; House Ruins of St Pol Roux at Brittany, France; Farm Road and Running Fence. Olema, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

update: this was Rescued on Daily Kos

2010-05-27T00:44:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

25 May 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesdays Chile Poetry Editor

Jorge Mateus de Lima was considered by many to be the most complicated of the artists who took part in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in São Paulo in 1922; that has come to mark the independence of Brazilian literature and art from its European models. Inspired by an iconoclastic insurrection against the Parnassian ideals of the past, with their limiting views of national reality, modernist writers initiated a poetic rediscovery of Brazil and sought a new identity through popular language set in regional and folkloric detail; rich in music and magic, dance and myth. The movement aimed to produce a literature for export to replace the dominant imported literature. Characteristic of Brazilian Modernism as a whole is the promotion of a critical consciousness of national reality, accompanied by an incorporation of its most diverse elements; the Indian and the Portuguese, the piano and the berimbau, the jungle and the school, the religions of the descendents of African slaves and the Landowner Elite.

Though few of de Lima's critics were as enthusiastic about his so-called Christian Phase; when he converted to Catholicism and used its many icons and images in his poetry; he remained true to the ideals of the Semana de Arte Moderna; where myth and reality are not two opposites; but an intermingling that is emblematic of the Brazilian Soul.

Poem To A Sister

(translated by Mariza Góes)

O sister
now that the nights come early
and an immense sadness
hovers above everything
and the silence lingers for so long
turning the dogs insane on the streets,
sister, come to remind me
that we grew up together
when the days were long and different.
Sister, if you know the signs
to change the time, come.
Come because I want to leave
to other places
where seagulls are less useless
and where a heart can be found at each harbour;
and the seabirds
so cleansed and white
and so slow and aware of journeys
come to flap
above my pipe
where the comets of the sky faded.
Sister, on my rhythms
are friends who shout:
Daubler, Ehrenstein, Stramm, suicides,
vagabonds, lepers and prostitutes who
still remember their family prayers.
There are, somewhere, other air, other hills,
other limits...farewell sister.
O, what a long night,
o what such a long night!
What cries outside?
The humanity, or some fountain?

-- Jorge Mateus de Lima

2010-05-19T01:52:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

18 May 2010

by Justice Putnam,
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

João da Cruz e Sousa was the son of freed slaves, born on the island side of what is now Florianopolis, in Southern Brazil. A pioneer of Symbolism in Afro-Brazilian literature, he was nonetheless shunned by his late 19th century peers. Fluent in French, Greek and Latin; and also a graduate of Math and Science taught by Fritz Mueller; Cruz e Sousa's intellectual contemporaries did not understand him and he held their work with contempt and disdain.

A racist mediocrity and the Parnassian Criticism that was currently en vogue, elicited the following anonymous "poetic review" of two collections he released in 1893, "Missal" and "Shields":

"A spiritualizing,
half-wit dunce
brought up
in distant Mozambique
has picked at true Art
with his beak

Swaying sickly,
with sonorous grunts.

And all the blacks from Senegal
do a buck-and-wing
as they caterwaul

and hail him
with rockets exploding in the air."

It's not hard to wonder why then, this little-studied Modern Renaissance Man, this Abolitionist Man of Letters harbored a...

Sacred Hate

I bore,
like corpses lashed
lashed to my back
and incessantly
and interminably rotting,
all the empiricisms of prejudice,
the unknown layers
of long-dead strata,
of curious
and desolate
African races
that Physiology
had doomed forever

to nullify with the mocking papal
laughter of Haeckel!

All the doors and passage-ways
along the road of life are closed to me,
a poor Aryan artist-yes,
Aryan,
because I acquired,
by systematic study,
all the qualities of that great race.
To what end?
A sad black man,
detested by those with culture,
beaten down by society,
always humiliated,
cast out of every bed,
spat upon in every household
like some evil leper!

But how?
To be an artist and black?

O my hatred,
my majestic malice
my sacred,
pure and benign
malevolence
anoint my forehead
with your pure kiss
so that I may be both
proud and humble

Humble and generous

to the meek
but haughty to those lacking Desire,
lacking in Goodness and faith,
who know not the lamp of the gentle,
fecund sun.

O my hatred,
my blessed emblem
which flaps in the wind
of my soul's infinity
while the others' banners
droop Hearty,

benign hatred be my shield!
against those villains of love,
whose infamy resounds from the
Seven Towers of Mortal Sin.

-- João da Cruz e Sousa

2010-05-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

11 May 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile
Contributing Poetry Editor

One of the many benefits of living in the San Francisco Bay Area is being able to listen to the flagship Pacifica radio station, KPFA. Hard Knock Radio is a show on KPFA that interviews Hip Hop and Rap artists weekdays at 4pm. This week's poet, Rocky Rivera was interviewed recently on Hard Knock Radio. My son, Israel Putnam/IzzyMaq has had some regional success in the Northwest with his Hip Hop/ R&B stylings, so I like to think that I have developed an "ear" for Hip Hop that belies my generational Punk origins.

Rocky Rivera is the Hip Hop persona of a young Filipina who spends her time between Los Angeles and the SF Bay Area. Some statements from her Hard Knock Radio interview resonated with me. One in particular, about the origins and direction of Hip Hop/ Rap, stood out more prominently,

"It's not about being a gangster, it's about being a guerrilla. It's not about bling, it's about survival."

This week's poem; and yes, Hip Hop/ Rap is certainly poetry, pays homage to the Filipina revolutionary, Gabriela Silang, who was executed in 1763 after leading insurrectionists against the Spanish Crown when her husband, Diego Silang was executed earlier that year; Black Panther, Angela Davis and the four school girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing; and United Farm Worker activist, Delores Huerte.

Along the way, Rocky Rivera packs a lot of history, with a strong back-beat, into this poem/ song about strong women who changed the world, with power and...

Heart

Left him on a Tuesday
Found him on a Sunday
Cried when I saw my
Hankerchief in his suitcase
Letter folded neatly in his pocket
With my perfume
Knew that he was lying when he
Told me he’d be back soon…
I couldn’t sleep the night
He left me with a promise
That he’d always keep me close
When the struggle got the hardest
So I…wiped the tears
Tied the hankerchief around me
Rallied up the troops
So we could
Find the Spanish army
It was time to stop the cryin’
Time to start the fightin’
Love was the beginning
But my people steady dyin’

And so I promised him the same thing
Gabriela blast in the name of the Philippines

I could hear em in the back of my mind
They said “Please don’t break my heart”
It could only be a matter of time…

Studying overseas
When I heard about the blast
And I knew the little girls
Who were killed in Alabama
It was Carole, Addie Mae
Cynthia & Denise
The Klan got away
In cahoots with the police
Knew that it was coming
When the Panthers started forming
So I booked the first flight to the states
In the morning
To show them my solidarity
Tightened up my afro
Books in my hand
Revolution in my heart
So I used my education
To combat the injustice
It was more
Than Malcolm X and Martin Luther
In the trenches

Sistah soldiers put ya rifles up
Angela Davis ride when the Klan try to light us up

I could hear ‘em in the back of my mind
They said
“Please don’t break my heart”
It could only be a matter of time they said

It was modern day slavery
Livin’ in the Valley
Stockton, California
Pickin’ grapes with my family
And my people broke they backs
Just to make a couple bucks
While the whiteys in the town
Ridiculed us in they trucks
So I
Picked up the megaphone
Shouted to my people, El
Pueblo Unido
Jama Sera Vencido
…Told em to stick together
Demand to be treated equal
Otherwise
These fucking crackas
Will continue to abuse us
Threw me in the slammer
20 times and some change
Yeah they broke a couple ribs
But the spirit remains

Do it again in a heartbeat
Para mi gente
Dolores what they call me

-- Rocky Rivera

(used with permission of the author)

(On Starlight and Fire, Keck Observatory Mauna Kea, Hawai’i / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-05-05T00:43:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

4 May 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile
Contributing Poetry Editor

Percy Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, was published in England in 1818. Earlier that year, Percy, with Mary Shelley and their children; and along with his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron's child, expatriated to Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In the late summer, they moved to Este, near Venice to be closer to Byron's villa. At a time when the "Exceptionalism" of British colonial reach was unquestioned; in fact, exalted in verse, theatre and the academy, Shelly acknowledged the erosion Time has on all leaders and empires:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Ozymandias"

Jamaican-born Claude McKay certainly channeled Shelley, when in 1922, he questioned the "Exceptionalism" of an America that held the "hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." McKay saw also, though few will admit the obvious erosion of Time, that even for America, there will be a future where the "lone and level sands stretch far away."

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

-- Claude McKay

(House Ruins of Poet St Pol Roux, Brittany, France / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-05-01T17:51:00.000-07:00

A Bad Day At Work

by

Justice Putnam

I've had quite a few diverse jobs over the years. Making money was always secondary to playing music and writing poetry. That is not to say I only chose low-paying jobs, far from it. But I didn’t judge myself from my jobs. Working was only a way to make money to make Art. Several of those jobs proved to be fairly lucrative but very dangerous. One in particular caused a woman I was going out with to silk screen a T-shirt that I wore for years.

I was working for Gulf Oil Corporation in Production and Exploration. I held the position of Production Operator "A," which meant I was on a rung a little higher up the ladder. My responsibilities included taking care of the "Tank Farm" and administering to the leases up in the Yorba Linda Hills and out Carbon Canyon way.

A combination of events occurred, that if they happened alone, or just a couple of them happened at the same time, there would have been no problem. As it was, a dangerous situation could have been worse. I could have died.

Gulf Oil had been drilling those leases for years, so they had in place a Steam Injection technique that "softened" the hard deposits in the formation enough to liquefy and pump the crude out. Once piped to the Tank Farm, the oil was so emulsified, that the only way to separate the water and oil molecules was to "drop" the water out with a silicate. That took quite a while. Once the water was out we pumped to the 76 Refinery and they made plastics out of the oil. Hydrogen Sulfide, otherwise known as H2S, is a dangerous by-product of oil production. A bacteria grows, eating the proteins in the oils and the "waste-products" from that bacteria, the gasses, form H2S. If you smell rotten eggs, the concentration is such that you can walk away and live. It's when you don't smell H2S that you die. It takes only a fraction of a second, and your respiration is "cut-off."

Vapor Recovery Systems to "burn-off" the H2S were situated throughout the "field," with one large and final one at the Tank Farm.

My schedule was a bit different. I worked 3 days during day-light hours in which my responsibilities were mostly in the Field, and 2 nights alone in mostly the Tank Farm with an occasional quick tour of the leases to check for leaks or equipment failures. Tuesday through Thursday I worked from 7am to 4pm. Saturday and Sunday, my shift was from 7pm to 4am.

I arrived at work early one Tuesday morning and read the log for that night and previous day.

The log failed to mention that the Vapor Recovery Systems were down to maintenance the Steam Injectors. It also failed to mention that the Wells I was to take fluid levels from were "shut-in," thus concentrating H2S.

As it was, a cold morning in the hills meant any gasses would be close to the ground. The very first Well I came to take a “fluid level” just so happened to have the "fitting" in the "cellar." The "cellar" is a pit dug fairly deep to catch spills.

All these "events" conspired to almost kill me.

I "opened the casing" and attached my "echometer."

I didn't smell a thing. But I felt weird.

One thing I learned from the experience was, those who die are the ones who argue the most with themselves about what is really happening. I began to have those same arguments; but I thought of one thing.

I had experimented with many illegal substances in many different circumstances in many different parts of the world, but none of them made me feel the way I did at that Well. It suddenly occurred to me that I was being poisoned; I was dying.

I stumbled from the Well and got into my truck, I thought if I could just get a blast of fresh air, things would be better. I somehow made it back to the Tank Farm. An ambulance took me to St. Jude's in Fullerton. I was ok, but as a precaution, I was on a respirator for 3 days.

When I got out of the Hospital, my girlfriend presented me with a T-shirt that read,

"Illegal Drugs Saved My Life."

© 2005 and 2010 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

(Oil Refinery, Martinez, California / copyright Justice Putnam) 

2010-04-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

27 April 2010

by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Contributor

Of all the poems since the late 70's by Nikki Giovanni, "Nikki-Rosa" is probably the most anthologized, critiqued, essayed and deconstructed in her oeuvre. Not much more can be written than what has already been written about the poem's intense voice in advocacy of personal and cultural identity; its chronicle of familial connection over the generations; and the poem's embrace of essential, common truths. Better to let Nikki Giovanni tell it. Better to let her tell of those days when she was known as...

Nikki-Rosa

childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you're Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have your mother
all to yourself
and how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understand their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father's pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
and though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good christmasses
and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

-- Nikki Giovanni

(Farm Road and Running Fence, Olema, California / copyright Justice Putnam)

2010-04-21T01:50:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

20 April 2010

By Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Poetry Contributor

The Song which is America is harmonized by many diverse voices. Some of those voices sing America from an unbridled joy deep within them; while others sing America from the constant anguish brought by generation after generation suffering under the manacle and the lash; a sad refrain sung from that inner pain brought from the loss of ancestry and Home. The melodies of both interweave and play a coda on the landscape and the Soul of America.

It is on that landscape that the first faint strains of the Song that is America became the forceful tacet on an American Exceptionalism; a certainty of purpose and an almost religious devotion to save those not touched by our benevolence. It is the chorus singing that they must be saved and it's for their own good. As when...

A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America

All day she heard the mad stampede of feet
Push by her in a thick unbroken haste.
A thousand unknown terrors of the street
Caught at her timid heart, and she could taste
The city of grit upon her tongue. She felt
A steel-spiked wave of brick and light submerge
Her mind in cold immensity. A belt
Of alien tenets choked the songs that surged
Within her when alone each night she knelt
At prayer. And as the moon grew large and white
Above the roof, afraid that she would scream
Aloud her young abandon to the night,
She mumbled Latin litanies and dream
Unholy dreams while waiting for the light.

-- Helene Johnson

2010-04-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month: "Woman as Muse, Man as Dog"

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun `tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of coloured beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

-- Edna St Vincent Millay
"Witch-Wife"

The last time I saw richard was detroit in '68,
And he told me all romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe
You laugh, he said you think you're immune, go look at your eyes
Theyre full of moon
You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
All those pretty lies, pretty lies
When you gonna realise they're only pretty lies
Only pretty lies, just pretty lies

He put a quarter in the wurlitzer, and he pushed
Three buttons and the thing began to whirr
And a bar maid came by in fishnet stockings and a bow tie
And she said drink up now its gettin' on time to close.
Richard, you haven't really changed, I said
It's just that now you're romanticizing some pain that's in your head
You got tombs in your eyes, but the songs
You punched are dreaming
Listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet?
Oh and love can be so sweet, love so sweet

Richard got married to a figure skater
And he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator
And he drinks at home now most nights with the tv on
And all the house lights left up bright
I'm gonna blow this damn candle out
I don't want nobody comin' over to my table
I got nothing to talk to anybody about
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes
Dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings
And fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days

-- Joni Mitchell
"The Last Time I Saw Richard"

The Lone Dog

by

Justice Putnam

It is said
That if you
Throw a rock
Into a pack of dogs

The one that is hit
Barks the loudest.

But I have to tell you
I am a loud dog

But not of the Pack

I am the individual
Surviving
By my wits
By my ability

To adapt to
The situation and
Accept that the
Given

May not be enough

I don't act out of impulse
I knew the rock
Would be thrown

But my survival
Depends on
My abilities
By my experience
And analytical prowess

Does the Moon
I howl to at night
Have power over me?

I suppose
It pulls at the
Oceans.

Does the
Hunger
I constantly
Feel have
Control?

The answer is obvious.

Is the two-legged animal
With the whip and leash
God?

No

God
Is much
More mysterious
Much more Powerful

Much more the
Provider
Much more the

Taking Away

God does
Speak to me

Yes
God speaks
To a loud
Lone dog

God doesn't
Speak through the
Pack

But to me
Personally

You could say
I have a
Personal
Conversation with

God

But not of
Words

God is
Much more
Mysterious
Than that

So I pray alone

For what
God and I have is
Personal.

I figure
It's the same with
Everything that has

Soul.

From: "The God Debate- a dialogue between Tom Paine and the Carthaginians”

© 2002 Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen;
and also appeared on verse 3, "The World is Mine" from the CD Judgement Time
by 50 Tramp Dawg
and World Wreckards Productions

Enough is Enough

by

Justice Putnam

ya ever get tired
of someone whining
that their big ass
had nothing to do
with the hurt?

do ya?

and do ya ever get tired
of someone moaning
that they’ve never
been this hurt and
it’s worse than
all that came before?

do ya?

well
i for one am

i’m tired of it

because
how many times
does the same line

get used
for each perceived

conquest
that flew out the door?

and how can this
special one be more
special than
the previous
special one?

or the one after?

answer me that.

it’s like a guy
i knew in L.A.

he told me once

he always picked up
the intellectual chicks

(his words, mind you)

at the art museum.

he asked if i
wanted to also

well
i begged off

because
if that was
the best it got

i figured
i’d curl up
with an ancient
author instead.

from: “The Nature of Poetics Collapsed Outside My Window”

© 2005 by Justice Putnam and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

In Answer to Fundamentalism

 

by

Justice Putnam

It is not right
To elevate Her
To the status of
Goddess

Rational man
Would refute it.

A material world
Critical of
Class and place

Would find
That elevation
To be demeaning.

My Heart
Doesn’t beat
In a material world

Though
I be nothing
More than
Flesh and
Bone.

In a sky
Of light

A universe
Of gravity

A galaxy
Among the void
And plasma

And yet some
Would question
Whether another
Would doubt

The Power of
God’s hand?

© 2006 by Justice Putnam and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

The Poet Walks The City At Dawn

by

Justice Putnam

Why cry
When I can
Have the sun

When I
Can walk
To the corner

And turn it.

When every
Face could be
A Home.

© 1980 and 2004 by Justice Putnam and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen 

Arctic Dream

Words and Music by
Justice Putnam

Come across the desert
Up over the sea
Through the Bering Strait
Where the seas freeze

(Come on, baby
Have an arctic dream
With me.)

Put down the palm fronds
In the Polynese
Tack into a
Northern westerly breeze

(Come on, baby
Have an arctic dream
With me.)

The frozen tundra
Aurora's eerie glow
An igloo house
Where we can go

(Come on, baby
Have an arctic dream
With me.)

© 1980 by Justice Putnam, El Segundo Linea Music and Arch Heights Publishing;
© 2005 by Justice Putnam, Fleur de Sel Musique
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

I'm Way Gone

(words and music
by Justice Putnam)

(bluesy)

I'm sometimes monastic
But I'm not a priest
I just feed the birds
At the towers of ivory

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

I got a gift
Of roses
The thorns were removed
But that fragrance
Without that pain
Is just not the truth

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

I kissed a girl from Kyoto
I kissed a girl from France
We all played
Wet at the
Industrial dance

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

I've slept with some
Older women
Some young ones too
But talk of loving me
Or me loving you and

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

I got my sin
I got my poetry
I got my transcontinental
Blasphemy

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

(m/16) Mama sang some Beatnik
Daddy drove real fast
But Grandma
Always took me
To the Early Mass

Mama sang some Beatnik
Daddy drove real fast
But Grandma
Always took me
To the Early Mass

I'm sometimes monastic
But I'm not a priest
I just feed the birds
At the towers of ivory

(I'm gone
yeah man
I'm way gone

I am so gone
Yeah man
I'm way gone)

© 2004 by Justice Putnam
Fleur de Sel Musique and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

She Looks Familiar To Me

Words and Music
by Justice Putnam

I've seen her serve tea
In Hawaii

Pour an oil slow massage
In Denver

Her henna painted foot
On a Moroccan
Mosaic floor.

A walk through
The Tenderloin
In latex

A North Beach
Dance behind glass

A motel neon
Fading on a
Red door.

(The streets of Portland
The booths of Amsterdam

The canopies of tapestry
In Bangalore)

She hides tears
Of memory

With a touch
And a fragile
Invincibility

Yet
She looks
Familiar to me.

(It's not because
Of fantasy
That I see her
In the places
That I go

But something more
Recognizant
As family

A survivor-sadness
And a strength
On the road.)

She hides tears
Of memory

With a touch
And a fragile
Invincibility

Yet
She looks
Familiar to me.

© 2005 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

She Leaves The Gypsies
(Howling at the Moon)

words and music by
Justice Putnam

1) My baby's got
Such a sweet disposition
She'll stop traffic
In Paris at noon
She might take
A little Basque vacation

She'll leave the gypsies (m/16)
Howling at the moon.

2) My love is like
Some sweet libation
The kind you drink
At some Left Bank Rue
She'll take you
Way past intoxication

One glance at her (m/16)
And you begin to swoon.

3) My baby's not
Afraid of Tradition
Just watch the seditious
Way that she moves
It's not that
She waits for consummation

She wants love (m/16)
And a whole lot of truth.

My baby's got
Such a sweet disposition
She'll stop traffic
In Paris at noon
She might take
A little Basque vacation

She'll leave the gypsies (m/16)
Howling at the moon.

© 1996 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

So Very Late

words and music by
Justice Putnam

Pardon moi
Monsiour
S'il vous plait
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien parle

Pardon moi
Monsiour
S'il vous plait

Je ne suis quand Americain
Je ne se pas
Tre bien parle

The night is cold
The winds blow late
The train pulls loud
The Bells toll late

The roses
Are still blooming
In a broken vase

(And she comes (refrain)(m/8)
To see me
So very late.)

(repeat refrain)(m/8)

Pardon moi
Madame
S'il vous plait
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien parle

Pardon moi
Madame
S'il vous plait

Je ne suis quand Americain
Je ne se pas
Tre bien parle

4) The moon may
Be shining bright
But it is sinking late

The waves are
White thorns
Roaring late

The lights (m/16)
Of the city
Stab the night
So late

(And she comes (refrain)(m/8)
To see me
So very late.)

Pardon moi
Madamoiselle
S'il vous plait
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien parle

Pardon moi
Madamoiselle
S'il vous plait

Je ne suis quand Americain (tacet)
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien parle

Je ne suis quand Americain
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien joue

Je ne suis quand Americain
Je ne sais pas
Tre bien parle

© 1998 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

The Disinherited

words and music by
Justice Putnam

In your
Book of dreams
You have so many
Stages of grief
You stay so well hidden
You have the tenure
Of the given

(Go ahead (refrain) (m/8)
Go ahead and be tempted
Go ahead and be tempted
By the love
Of the disinherited)

2) You painted shade of light
On your own chosen
Radiant sphere
A seascape
Behind a landscape
Advocate the darkness
Of your fear

(Go ahead (refrain) (m/8)
Go ahead and be tempted
Go ahead and be tempted
By the love
Of the disinherited) (m/16)

3) What does it represent
You're only just a
Pilgrim in revolt
The chosen
Angel fallen
And there's going
to be a summing up

(Go ahead (refrain) (m/8)
Go ahead and be tempted
Go ahead and be tempted
By the love
Of the disinherited)

(repeat refrain (m/8) to coda)

© 1986 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen

Josephine

words and music by
Justice Putnam

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

Taking the steps
Down to the sea
Somewhere along
The coast of Normandy

Where the white
Fossil sands
Churned turbulently

Where men rushed
Into battle
And died violently

Whose last
Dying breath
Was to plead with

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

Could be
The grasslands
Of the Sioux

No matter
Which side
They were on
They were all
Thinking of you

Could be in
In the South Pacific
Or the Persian Gulf
An Indonesian jungle
Or an Arctic hut

Could be in a
Manhattan penthouse
Or a cold water den

We’ll all grasp
At that last
Bit of hope
In the end with

Josephine
Josephine
I’m pleading
With Josephine

Josephine
Take me
Home

© 2005 Justice Putnam
Fleur du Sel Musique
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

("Woman on Bicycle, Paris, France" and "Winter Moon and Clouds, Forestville, California" copyright Justice Putnam)

cross posted at Daily Kos

2010-04-14T01:04:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

13 April 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Contributing Poetry Editor

I had a fairly heated discussion with a couple of Bible Belt tourists to San Francisco recently. I work at a small bed and breakfast on Nob Hill and we get visitors from around the world. I usually avoid political or religious discussions among the guests as they mingle in our lobby during afternoon tea and sherry; but I'll offer my opinion, historical and literary expertise when asked. The Bible Belt tourists complained that we "coddle" the poor here in San Francisco and proceeded to recite biblical verse to show the error of such charity. I reminded them that the city was named after St. Francis, after all; and I came from a liturgy that exalted charity.

They didn't know who St. Francis was, but were well acquainted with Leviticus; and shamelessly recited verse from his texts to "prove" the inferiority of gays, blacks and anything Liberal. They were complete "eliminationists" and I wondered why they came to San Francisco; business, apparently. When I attempted to approach the argument from a more secular and less religious stance, I was accused of being part of the, "blame America first crowd." It was like being on Fox News, only in the lobby of a small B&B in San Francisco, California. I'd had enough. It was completely lost on them, but I recited the following Michael S. Harper poem that is a small lesson in...

American History

Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn't find them.
Can't find what you can't see
can you?

-- Michael S. Harper

2010-04-07T00:55:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

6 April 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Contributing Poetry Editor

The witness of poetry is a powerful force. It not only can describe events, it also can give voice back to those people and things that have been rendered voiceless. Martin Luther King not only fought for civil rights in the U.S., he also fought against war and oppression around the world. He advocated for human rights to the lowest peasant in the most oppressed regions. He encouraged his followers to extend the fight to those so oppressed.

A little more than ten years after Martin Luther King's assassination, Carolyn Forché travelled to El Salvador. The witness of her poetry is never more powerful as when she recounts her conversation with...

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

May 1978

-- Carolyn Forché

2010-03-31T01:18:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

30 March 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile Contributing Poetry Editor

A picture may indeed, be worth a thousand words; but if done with precision, a poem wouldn't nearly require that much verbiage for an image to occur. This week's poet, Tracy K. Smith, sets the camera focused on a crowded yet expansive vista. She adjusts the timer on the camera, moves and stands before it. She is determined as she raises her hands high and wide above her head, a moment before the time-trapping whirr and click of the shutter:

Self Portrait as the Letter Y

1.

I waved a gun last night
In a city like some ancient Los Angeles.
It was dusk. There were two girls
I wanted to make apologize,
But the gun was uselessly heavy.
They looked sideways at each other
And tried to flatter me. I was angry.
I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury the pistol,
But I would've had to walk miles.
I would've had to learn to run.

2.

I have finally become that girl
In the photo you keep among your things,
Steadying myself at the prow of a small boat.
It is always summer here, and I am
Always staring into the lens of your camera,
Which has not yet been stolen. Always
With this same expression. Meaning
I see your eye behind the camera's eye.
Meaning that in the time it takes
For the tiny guillotine
To open and fall shut, I will have decided
I am just about ready to love you.

3.

Sun cuts sharp angles
Across the airshaft adjacent.
They kiss. They kiss again.
Faint clouds pass, disband.
Someone left a mirror
At the foot of the fire escape.
They look down. They kiss.
She will never be free
Because she is afraid. He
Will never be free
Because he has always
Been free.

4.

Was kind of a rebel then.
Took two cars. Took
Bad advice. Watched people's
Asses. Sniffed their heads.
Just left, so it looked
Like those half sad cookouts,
Meats never meant to be
Flayed, meant nothing.
Made promises. Kept going.
Prayed for signs. Stooped
For coins. Needed them.
Had two definitions of family.
Had two families. Snooped.
Forgot easily. Well, didn't
Forget, but knew when it was safe
To remember. Woke some nights
Against a wet pillow, other nights
With the lights on, whispering
The truest things
Into the receiver.

5.

A small dog scuttles past, like a wig
Drawn by an invisible cord. It is spring.
The pirates out selling fakes are finally
Able to draw a crowd. College girls,
Inspired by the possibility of sex,
Show bare skin in good faith. They crouch
Over heaps of bright purses, smiling,
Willing to pay. Their arms
Swing forward as they walk away, balancing
That new weight on naked shoulders.
The pirates smile, too, watching
Pair after pair of thighs carved in shadow
As girl after girl glides into the sun.

6.

You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
I am invisible here, like I like it.
The language you taught me rolls
From your mouth into mine
The way kids will pass smoke
Between them. You feed it to me
Until my heart grows fat. I feed you
Tiny black eggs. I feed you
My very own soft truth. We believe.
We stay up talking all kinds of shit.

-- Tracy K. Smith

2010-03-24T00:35:00.000-07:00

Voices and Soul

23 March 2010

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile Contributing Poetry Editor

If poets and writers are lucky enough to get a note in the many rejections of their work, they are advised both to "write what they know" and also avoid writing from too much personal experience. It would seem one would cancel the other. Sharon Olds takes these suggestions and turns them into an exercise of literary rebellion. She embraces the personal and in so doing, gives voice to history, family and community. Her argument of the personal arises when the manuscript is returned and "red-penned" to...

Take the I Out

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

-- Sharon Olds

2010-03-22T11:23:00.001-07:00

From: Black Kos Week in Review 19 March 2010

Justice Putnam
Black Kos Contributing Poetry Editor

"As much as things change, things remain the same." "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

How many times have we heard those refrains? Yet, are they any less true if we had heard them but once? Or a lifetime's worth? It may be human nature that requires us to be constantly reminded of that which went before; or it may be the affliction Gore Vidal coined, "American Amnesia".

Langston Hughes wrote the following that has the eerie echo of events just happening. But he wrote it when jackboots were beginning a goosestep across the Polish plains; when an American Corporatocracy consolidated wealth in the hands of a distinct few, while tens of millions toiled for pennies a day; when a respected journal published an...

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-- Langston Hughes