Poetry After Leon Damas

Inspired by the Negritude Movement poet, Leon Damas, I've written poetry analyzing historical and contemporary aspects of the black community. Comments appreciated.

 

Bringin’ Back Sweet Memories (For Assata Shakur)

Of course I remember you

African Queen

with your tight curly hair

worn large and with pride

born before my eyes

were first opened

Your neck long

your hands proud

the hills were saturated with your breath

as your toes curled in the grass

Now

trapped in political asylum

bounty on your head

dethroned

you are called a cold-blooded

            murderer

Now

your neck twists

peering over the shoulders

that once held your head so high

your hands fidget, ache

nervously

waiting for them

to catch up to you

you, the domestic terrorist

you, the modern-day escaped slave

A daughter born in a prison cell

nurtured by her mother’s blood

spilled on the floor

waits for you

at home

remembering when you were free

free from rape

            free from persecution

                        free

                        free

                        free

Your toes will curl on the grass once more

Thieves in the Night

The television buzzes illuminating our homes

after the sun which nourishes

our homeland has been extinguished

stealing from us with every passing minute

riding this wormhole

into purgatory

Entertain me

but only in caricature

Represent me

but only in caricature

Idolize yourself

caricature

Steal my ambitions and desires

emasculate me

turn me into a fetish

I will help you succeed

no matter what it takes

Lead me

to my destiny

to my grave

to Babylon

But make it simple to do

fabricate a persona that is easy to digest

render me unconcerned with struggle

construct a pacified community

I am a beast that needs to be tamed

and you have taught me to hate myself

Oscar Grant

So many times I am stunned and disgraced

as we are treated less than dogs

scraping bones

that were already picked clean

dying in numbers left uncounted

We rage and we rant at the inequalities of fate

against brutality waged upon us

against the institutions that keep us

now and tomorrow from being

human

And no consoling words

we have heard those before

no words can simmer our hatred quite so much

as a majestic mass

of rubble

made

from the buildings of our

own neighborhood

taking the power of fate

out of your gun-laden hands

and into ours

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz

Our own black shining Prince

Facing east

Fighting for equality

           

Enough of economic exploitation

nightsticks busting our brother’s heads

cracking open skulls

to keep us in line

making money we never see

Enough of handouts

from hands outside our community

and colonialists in our government

and hypocrites in the churches

and leaders walking in circles

crying “We shall overcome! We shall

overcome!”

Our own black shining Prince

                        the ballot

                                    or the bullet

Enough brothers and sisters without education

chasing fast dreams

fading away as easily as our men

bling-bling

and prison doors slamming

Enough for a while

of the individual needs

of turning the other cheek

of

nigga this

nigga that

Enough sit-ins

Stand up!

Enough non-violence

Defend your body!

Enough!

Illusions of Oasis

Only after your car has been jacked

for its 24s

will you finally get it

I know you’ll get it

once you stuff our prisons with your body

for selling crack to our youth

smoking themselves stupid

day in

day out

without end

Only after you have been shot by

a car full of men

no different from yourself

will you finally get it

I know you’ll get it soon

when your inferiority

pans out

amongst their justice system from end to end

and when

you see yourself

living in a cell

no freedom to do as you please

no longer pointing that pistol with an itchy finger

at a black man passing by

instead

taking cold showers

instead

taking orders from guards

instead

taking it from your cellmate

instead

cold showers

cold guards

hot cellmate

then

you will understand

that you are not a man

something much worse

Washed White

There are children starving in Africa

finish your food

But why are they starving?

Sit up straight and silent

finish your food

Tell me why

Don’t talk with food in your mouth

finish

finish

finish your food

I need to know why

Put your napkin on your lap

drink your milk

there are children in Africa

who would love to drink that milk you have

Why don’t they have milk?

Damnit boy –

look what you did

spilled your milk all over the table

I’m sorry!

I was thinking about the kids in Africa

If you ain’t gonna act proper

you ain’t gonna eat proper

finish your food, milk and all

there are starving children in Africa

who would lap up this milk

like savages

Oh!

I get it

they’re starving because they’re savages!

The Paradox

"The paradox for every artist is that life flows and art must stand still.  But it must stand still like the hummingbird.  It must move and yet have form, because without form it is not graspable; without form it cannot be art." -Erica Jong

The Difference Is In Your Definition of Murder

The one black man that is alive in these pictures is only significant in that he is a means of accumulating money for others.  He is a capitalist, he is an entertainer, that is all. Give him his few concessions, let him say some stuff a lot of people may not like, let him say some stuff a lot of people may like, let him smoke some pot, etc., so long as the money flow continues. Let him, and other entertainers like him, represent the black community, the lower class, the underprivileged because only a handful will ever make it upwards from their position so long as he remains their idol.

I'd like to propose, and I'm surely not the first and most assuredly won't be the last, that blackness is only slightly elevated from the position it was in during the time of this lynching photograph. On a superficial level, yes, it is; but once the 25" rims and bling are discarded (to use a stereotype of black success), you have a race that is either exploited for entertainment purposes (sports, music, movies, etc.) or villianized unjustly (the uneven ratio of black men in prisons relative to every other race, the oft-assumed notion that black men are thieves, gangsters, etc.).

While a lynching may not be approved of in these civilized times, a "cultural lynching", if you will, stepped in to take its place. Or, was it there all along, never left, and the only difference is that a black man won't be physically lynched anymore while every other aspect remains?

I wholeheartedly welcome your comments/discussion/thoughts/criticism/etc.

Jesse Washington

Scouring the Internet for images of lynching victims for part of a project I'm starting, I came across the story of Jesse Washington.  The sheer barbarism and inhumanity stopped me in my tracks. 

A small bit about Jesse Washington

As jaded as I may be by violence in this day and age, just reading what atrocious things people did to this young man sickened me to my stomach.  I had been finding pictures of Iraqi civilian victims and saw a picture of an even younger boy with the lower half of his leg completely blown-off, and, as disturbing as that was, the story of Jesse Washington made my eyes swell with disgust and disbelief.

Well, it looks like this project is gonna be trying in one more way than I expected...


On a related note: here's some of the pictures I've been collecting from the Internet.  These people surrounding the corpses, wearing their suits and best hats, are supposed to be the civilized ones. The dead black men are supposed to be the barbarians.

I'll let you decide whether or not that's the case.

This is Jesse Washington

Graphic Lines

A Day Full of Accidents

What I get for entrusting my film to CVS.  Luckily, weird pictures were being taken.

What We're All Looking For

It really doesn't matter who these two people are, what their relationship is with one another, or anything else that exists outside the picture. What matters is body language; where a hand is placed, how an arm is wrapped around the other, how a head rests on the other's neck, etc.

These could be two strangers or a married couple; either way, the most important part is what their bodies say that speaks to something internal.

Someone's Temporary Truth

Casa Lucas

To See What It Looks Like Photographed

Female

Form

Flow

The End

"The end. All things come to an end where they begin again assuming a circle or a dog chasing its tail or eternity cognized which is incomprehensible and indefeasible. The end is a rabbit licking moonlight off the pavement, revolvers clicking automatically where the spine flattens into a bony globe. The end is the beginning of a circle before the periphery becomes paralyzed and coagulates into points which never existed and could not now exist were there no blackboards and what makes blackboards. The end is when every drawer has been ransacked and all that one needs can be put in a handkerchief or when you don't need initials in your hat anymore and the size is an empty equation. The compass points four ways and you can travel horizontally or vertically because it is all illusion -- tickets, depots, destinations, mileage, speed. When you say good-bye that's the end of it, a peculiar, unfinished end like a tapeworm feeding on itself. An end that comes to a lump in the throat or a sob, wheels grinding, soot, farms, faces, blank, blankness, faces, farms, memories, musk of memory, wheels grinding, bullets clicking, too late, everything too late, change, change your mind, stay, jump, go back, mist, farms, faces, blank, blankness."

-H. Miller

The Last Time

As time has passed and I am not sure as to the contents/context of this letter, seeing this scan I did and the words so elegantly written, I can't help but ponder: Who is losing something, the writer or myself? Which word? Will knowing that single word completely inform the contents of this letter?

It feels so dramatic and, yet, I don't want to go find it and reveal what's inside. That missing word will bug me for days and days. Do I use it anymore? Does the person that wrote it? How many "ripe full moons" have passed since it was used in the context of the letter?




Some things are better to just ponder.



Some things are best left as they are.







But...that word...that word......?

Dictated By My Environment

Transcribed from my yearbook from my senior year in high school (which I don't have anymore, which is unfortunate for these purposes). 

It was fascinating to read what people said to me, even in joking, and consider how I was perceived by others, what defined me to them. It's pretty depressing but I think significant nonetheless.

And the people almost can't be blamed because I can say unequivocally that I perpetuated this perception in my actions and my willingness to be perceived this way.  "Any publicity is good publicity", am I right? It was my shtick, just like the class-clown has a shtick. That's what happens in a homogeneous environment when you exist as an "outsider"; you are defined by that more than anything else.

And so:

“Blackzilla-

            I’m really glad I met you this year!!  You are an awesome Negro!  Soccer was fun, Vice was better!  We need to hang out over the summer!  You better call me! I <3 you more than I <3 unblack people”

“Yo Blackie its me Whitey (N___ the mediterrainin kid)  dude lets hang out”

“Jesse,

            Your such a Niger.  One day your monkey ass and me should smoke one day.  Hope you don’t turn out to be gay when you get older.  You should call me and we should chill.  Hope you have a good summer.”

“Jesse your black and that’s all that matters.  I love you and keep it real.  I’m gay??”

“Jesse –

            You’re a loser.  I’m like the third person to sign this book and it’s the last day of school.  Anyways it was cool having two easy classes with you and making fun of Phil, Eric, and Chasen.  Good luck where ever you may go to college.  Hopefully you will get some and in mass quantities.  Peace out my black-mexican friend.” 

This Is No Different Than A Picture Of A Cock

This Is No Different Than A Picture Of A Cunt

Which Question Does This Seek To Answer?

 

1) What is personal identity?

2) What is truth?

3) What is love?

And This?

1) What is personal identity?

2) What is truth?

3) What is love?

And How About This?

1) What is personal identity?

2) What is truth?

3) What is love?

3 Existential Questions

1) What is personal identity?

2) What is truth?

3) What is love?

Put forward by Cervantes in "Don Quixote", laying the foundation for every novel that would come after him. They may seem obvious questions to us nowadays, but in a time period where existential questions were answered for you by the establishment (i.e. the Church), someone had the courage to put the questions into the hands of an individual.

Today, it almost goes without saying that answering these questions motivates our actions, unconsciously or otherwise.  In some form or another, life itself is a struggle to put an answer on the other side of these question marks. Whether they are cliches or seemingly obvious, they are fundamental to being a human and must be acknowledged when addressing issues revolving around human nature and existence.



A photographic self-portrait asks all three questions.

A first date between two people is the beginnings of a struggle to answer the third.

The second is always changing, recreating itself, asking the other two within itself and, thus, being the most difficult (impossible) to answer. A photograph is not truth; it only searches for it.

Every photograph could be seen as attempting to answer one of these questions. Every photograph. To photograph is to ask an existential question.

Novelistic Thinking

"To emphasize: novelistic thinking has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters' lives; those lives feed and justify it."

-Milan Kundera


When I pick up a camera, I imagine I am picking up a pen.  Every roll of film is a manuscript.  Every frame is its own question that exists in and of itself while within the larger question that I couldn't formulate if I tried to.  Curiosity motivates the novelist and photographer alike; the artist points because they wonder, they marvel, and, in doing so, hope something is revealed.  "Writing with light": the phrase could not be more accurate.

The goal is the same, only the materials differ.

Cunts

"It's like this...There are cunts which laugh and cunts which talk; there are crazy, hysterical cunts shaped like ocarinas and there are planturous, seismographic cunts which register the rise and fall of sap; there are cannibalistic cunts which open wide like the jaws of the whale and swallow alive; there are also masochistic cunts which close up like the oyster and have hard shells and perhaps a pearl or two inside; there are dithyrambic cunts which dance at the very approach of the penis and go wet all over in ecstasy,; there are the porcupine cunts which unleash their quills and wave little flags at Christmas time; there are telegraphic cunts which practice the Morse code and leave the mind full of dots and dashes; there are the political cunts which are saturated with ideology and which deny even the menopause; there are vegetative cunts which make no response unless you pull them up by the roots; there are the religious cunts which smell like Seventh Day Adventists and are full of beads, worms, clamshells, sheep droppings and now and then dried bread crumbs; there are the mammalian cunts which are lined with otter skin and hibernate during the long winter; there are cruising cunts fitted out like yachts, which are good for solitaries and epileptics; there are glacial cunts in which you can drop shooting stars without causing a flicker; there are miscellaneous cunts which defy category or description, which you stumble on once in a lifetime and which leave you seared and branded; there are cunts made of pure joy which have neither name nor antecedent and these are the best of all, but whither have they flown?"

With a title like "L'origine du monde", I can't help but think that this one falls into the last category.

City Worker

Generations

Mah Jong, a newspaper, a laptop, an iced latte

Ceci N'est Pas Un Livre

Noir

Voyeurism

a simple google image search of "Rodin sculpture" brings up this gem of a voyeuristic tourist/porno cameraman getting in on the action of Rodin's lovers

Containers Of Sorts

After Stephen Shore (sort of)

Orange

A Glimmer of Wisdom

from "Clea", book four of The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

"Brother Ass, the so-called act of living is really an act of the imagination.  The world -- which we always visualise as 'the outside' World -- yields only to self-exploration!  Faced by this cruel, yet necessary paradox, the poet finds himself growing gills and a tail, the better to swim against the currents of unenlightenment.  What appears to be perhaps an arbitrary act of  violence is precisely the opposite, for by reversing process in this way, he unites the rushing, heedless stream of humanity to the still, tranquil, motionless, odourless, tasteless plenum from which its own motive essence is derived.  (Yes, but it hurts to realise!) If he were to abandon his role all hope of gaining a purchase on the slippery surface of reality would be lost, and everything in nature would disappear!  But this act, the poetic act, will cease to be necessary when everyone can perform it for himself.  What hinders them, you ask?  Well, we are all naturally afraid to surrender our own pitifully rationalised morality -- and the poetic jump I'm predicating lies on the other side of it.  It is only terrifying because we refuse to recognise in ourselves the horrible gargoyles which decorate the totem poles of our churches -- murderers, liars, adulterers, and so on.  (Once recognized, the papier-mache masks fade.) Whoever makes this enigmatic leap into the heraldic reality of the poetic life discovers that truth has its own built-in morality!  There is no need to wear a truss any longer.  Inside the penumbra of this sort of truth morality can be disregarded because it is a donnee, a part of the thing, and not simply a brake, an inhibition.  It is there to be lived out and not thought out!  Ah, Brother Ass, this will seem a far cry to the 'purely literary' preoccupations which beset you; yet unless you tackle this corner of the field with your sickle you will never reap the harvest in yourself, and so fulfil your true function here below.
     But how? you ask me plaintively.  And truly here you have me by the short hairs, for the thing operates differently with each one of us.  I am only suggesting that you have not become desperate enough, determined enough.  Somewhere at the heart of things you are still lazy of spirit.  But then, why struggle?  If it is to happen to you it will happen of its own accord.  You may be quite right to hang about like this, waiting.  I was too proud.  I felt I must take it by the horns, this vital question of my birthright.  For me it was grounded in an act of will.  So for people like me I would say: 'Force the lock, batter down the door.  Outface, defy, disprove the Oracle in order to become the poet, the darer!'
     But I am aware the test may come under any guise, perhaps even in the physical world by a blow between the eyes or a few lines scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope left in a cafe.  The heraldic beauty can strike from any point, above or below: it is not particular.  But without it the enigma will remain.  You may travel round the world and colonise the ends of the earth with your lines and yet never hear the singing yourself."

Phil, 2007

beh

I feel like I'm taking the same pictures I was taking in my beginning photo class...

I know it's not true, but that's just how it feels...




"Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel; that bothers me, that rankles." -H. Miller (of course, who else do I quote incessantly?)

At One Point In Time

A Single Street Not Unlike Any Other

On the outskirts of
Los Angeles
you can find this street.
It looks like
any other, but it is on this street
this street alone
that I, for lack of a better word
call "home".
I just sleep there,
if I must

If you think that
a man in the tough
streets of the city suffers,
come to this street
and witness a unique kind of hell
lives never lived, even partially
merely existed
acted
because nothing else
was written
in the handbook
of their lives

This street
taught me
depravity, betrayal, disgust,
in the form
of white fences
mowed lawns and
addiction, so long as it's behind closed doors

As a child I would wait
for my father
to drive down this street,
take me for the weekend
at every car light
my heart raced
my blood surged
excitement grew in me
only to be
disappointed
when the lights would
turn too early
bringing some other child
a father

Late at night
I would play hide and
seek with the
girl next door
anxious to find her
chase her
not realizing I was training myself
for life, for the game of
pursuit, catch and release
those are the rules
find them
they run
you chase
catch them and they wriggle
free
then, today, and if
you think I'm
wrong, tell me
but look me
in the eyes when you lie

Time and time
again, I stumbled back
onto this street
drunk, stoned
through that red front
door, under a rat-
infested roof
hoping my sister
didn't bring over a
guy to fuck
in the next room

The half-mile stretch
straight and true
ending in a bend
promising something
anything but these
9-5ers
accountants
housewives
policemen
real estate agents
money hounders
sycophants
murderers of the worst make
people with too much fear
and not enough imagination
or guts, to live

If I'm lucky
really lucky, some nights
I'll get to hear my
neighbor yelling at his son
wife sometimes too
the cops come
he gives them cigars
they laugh with him
the next day comes and
smiles, jovial fucking smiles
are slapped on their faces
while I stay awake in bed
thinking, secretly hoping,
I'll hear the undeniable
SMACK! of a fist
on flesh

I've seen the sun
rise, set on this
scabrous black asphalt
made love to
a few, and fucked a few
more behind that red
front door
the portal, gate between myself
and suburbia
every step outside
is another step closer
to death
to escape
further from this street
by the very
nature of this street

The funny part is
that I'll bitch
and moan
and blame the world
before I take responsibility
because I
get to lie on a couch, watch
television, and stuff
my face with beer, wine, and
everything else I need to
forget
day after day because
I am a
man of words, not actions

Choosing What To Look At