June 2013
“When Willie Mae went down to the barber shop
to visit her boyfriend who cut hair there
I went with her. Walking beside her on the street
the men said hey and stopped to watch her just walk.
Boyfriend Barber cut hair and cut his glance at her
O, he could see the tree for the forest; he pressed
down the wild crest on a man’s head and shaved it off
just so he could watch her standing there by the juke
box choosing the blues she would wear for the afternoon.
Right there Little Milton would shoot through the store-
front with the peppermint-stick sentry twirling outside—
“If I didn’t love you, baby, grits ain’t groceries, eggs
ain’t poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man.”
And every razor and mouth would stop its dissembling
business. And Time would sit down in the barber’s chair
and tell Memory poised with its scissors in hand
not to cut it too short, just take a little off the ends.” —angela jackson, choosing the blues (for s. brandi barnes). (via black-poetry)
to visit her boyfriend who cut hair there
I went with her. Walking beside her on the street
the men said hey and stopped to watch her just walk.
Boyfriend Barber cut hair and cut his glance at her
O, he could see the tree for the forest; he pressed
down the wild crest on a man’s head and shaved it off
just so he could watch her standing there by the juke
box choosing the blues she would wear for the afternoon.
Right there Little Milton would shoot through the store-
front with the peppermint-stick sentry twirling outside—
“If I didn’t love you, baby, grits ain’t groceries, eggs
ain’t poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man.”
And every razor and mouth would stop its dissembling
business. And Time would sit down in the barber’s chair
and tell Memory poised with its scissors in hand
not to cut it too short, just take a little off the ends.” —angela jackson, choosing the blues (for s. brandi barnes). (via black-poetry)
“
I am the what-are-you.
I am the brown, the red, the white, the sometimes blue.
I got some Indian in my family.
I got some cracker, too.
Where I’m from, cracker is a badge
Men wear like nigga in some ‘hoods.
I am neither & both just the same.
My family owns the land
On which my family was Massa and slave.
The crackers don’t claim us anymore.
The niggas never did, too uppity for their shelved lives.
I do not know what tribe I’m from, Indian or African.
My family never thought it important to note,
& I cannot afford Dr. Kittles’ tests to answer for the latter yet,
But when I can & his people read my blood,
I’m going back to Africa, just like the crackers
In my parts told me to, to see
If my people there recognize me.
The Mascogos here already claimed me.
Though their people voted them away, too.
Although I’ve lost a lot of melanin
& some of my native tongues, I’m going to offer
My people are the ones I’ve remembered. I’ll tell them
Soy su negro hermano más oscuro.
Soy vasto. Contengo las multitudes.
They’ll understand. I knew that language
Before I knew I knew that language. It came naturally.
So did my crush on my high school teacher, Senor Herrera.
He called me his hijo. I never got the nerve
To call him Daddy, except in my dreams.
Dr. Herrera had a nice ass. I am an ass man.
No worries. I have never a nymphomaniac.
These days, HIV keeps me on an even keel.
You may have thought I didn’t know you knew
This truth was coming, but I know you did.
I am often left alone with my thoughts in my one good hand,
with this charge to keep, this god to glorify.
I am mastering the power of positive thinking.
I have had three decades of practice. I learned the power
of the mind when I ignored my left arm, hanging limp
Like a tattered flag in my pledge of allegiance.
I am your paragon, your darling geisha boy, I said,
With tennis racket, trumpet,
piano, pen, computer keys, backs,
cupped them, held them, watched them walk
away whole & leave me bereft & free.
Whatever the five fingers I could move caressed
Sang notes no one else could reach
& everyone in my path marveled,
Even my crackers & my niggas.
Then one night I met a lawyer,
Another inteligente man with a nice ass,
Who said I can’t get fucked by a cripple.
& I’ve been trying to un-cripple my mind
Ever since from wondering if Erb’s palsy
Is why Johnnie and Jason couldn’t
Love me outside our darkened bedrooms’ walls.
I speak there names because my god
Doesn’t get down on the elliptical tip.
I need to tell you something. I am not
Your paragon, your darling geisha boy. I am not
Here to entertain you. I am not dying.
I am not
Taking those antiretroviral concoctions
Because there are not designed with mutts like me
& Barack & you & you in mind, created
To make us addicts, to fund
An industry hungry for you & you & you
To come in, sit down, rest a little while,
Un-cripple your mind & body of its heavy burdens.
Come in. Lay it all down.
I do not want to be numb. I am not
Afraid of facing you, or me, or the notion
Of we the people anymore.
I am your darker brother
I am vast. I contain multitudes
I am the what-are-you.
I am the brown, the red, the white, the sometimes blue.
& I am all American.
What are you?
Play
“It features a peculiarly African-American twist on Marx’s and Engels’s observations about capitalism’s commodity-fetish effect—the transformation of a marketable object into a magical thing of desire. It is my belief that capitalism’s original commodity fetish was the Africans auctioned here as slaves, whose reduction from subjects to abstracted objects has made them seem larger than life and less than human at the same time.
It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased—an operation that explains not only the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proferred and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes, and bucks, in Donald Bogle’s coinage), but the American music industry’s never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, Pink, Eminem—all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure.
It is with this history in mind that African-American performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith once posed the question: Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?” —Greg Tate, Everything But the Burden (via wretchedoftheearth)
It is for this reason that the Black body, and subsequently Black culture, has become a hungered-after taboo item and a nightmarish bugbear in the badlands of the American racial imagination. Something to be possessed and something to be erased—an operation that explains not only the ceaseless parade of troublesome Black stereotypes still proferred and preferred by Hollywood (toms, coons, mammies, mulattoes, and bucks, in Donald Bogle’s coinage), but the American music industry’s never-ending quest for a white artist who can competently perform a Black musical impersonation: Paul Whiteman, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Sting, Britney Spears, ’N Sync, Pink, Eminem—all of those contrived and promoted to do away with bodily reminders of the Black origins of American pop pleasure.
It is with this history in mind that African-American performance artist Roger Guenveur Smith once posed the question: Why does everyone love Black music but nobody loves Black people?” —Greg Tate, Everything But the Burden (via wretchedoftheearth)
"If you always follow the right way to do a thing you will never be creative, because the “right way” means the way discovered by others. And the right way means that of course you will be able to make something, you will become a producer, a manufacturer, but you will not be a creator."
— Osho (via terramantra)
