poetry is not a luxury

you already know.

durian: everyday valentine

from dictionary.com:
— n
1.	a SE Asian bombacaceous tree, Durio zibethinus, having very large oval fruits with a hard spiny rind containing seeds surrounded by edible evil-smelling aril
	2. the fruit of this tree, which has an offensive smell but a pleasant taste: supposedly an aphrodisiac

"i use my mistakes for successes," "it's never too soon!"

and other gem-tastic words of wisdom from one of the most visually stunning poets i've come across. plus his poems got that sweet thick-honey drip.

"He smelled what a tree smelled like when it was first cut into, the wood blood from the first wound of the ax."

--Edward P. Jones, The Known World, p.101

"Don't suck on your long black braid and weep."

--Marilyn Chin, from "The Survivor," The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty.

honey and sting

this is the summer of the bumble bee. i've been buzzing incessantly, and my little bumble-wings are pooped. i've been spending a lot of time building up my relationships with old (nuclear family, highschool and college friends) and new (organizers and romantic bumble bees) important people in my life; organizing around old (police brutality, accountable development) and new (street harassment and gender violence, food justice) issues; and it's been thoroughly fulfilling, but exhausting. more, i've seemingly lost my ability to pump my bumble-brakes--the honey i've been feasting on has been so delicious! almost to the detriment of my personal health. after something like my tenth consecutive night without sufficient sleep, two things occurred to me:

1. i love sleep. and balance. but i've not been tending to either of those. and my heart and body know it. this hyper-busy lifestyle has got me always playing catch-up, a little on edge, stinger all poised and ready.

2. i haven't taken enough time over the past month to really reflect on my (mostly beautiful, but often trying) experiences, meditate, write consistently, or spend any time with myself. i've just been zooming through, sweet and tired.

so here is where i declare: enough. a friday pledge to more balanced living, to celebrating my own-ness, to more honey, and less sting.

i came across this poem from the devastatingly old-man-beautiful and time-tested derek walcott that made my bumble-brain gleam in anticipation of getting some alone time with myself. enjoy.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

golden nugget: harryette mullen

one of my favorite things to do is to read aloud and listen to people read aloud. what can i learn from myself when i speak, distinct from what i learn from myself when i think? in what ways might someone else's voice enrich my day, my life, a single moment? the possibilities are increasing, and might never end!

here's a gem from harryette mullen. she's reading a poem called "Dim Lady"



before she reads, she shares with her audience a bit of writer's advice. what makes it golden is that what she shares is really advice for people, everywhere. she says:

"you don't always have to face the blank page; you can start with something already written."

for us writers, who often struggle with the frequently daunting task of beginning a piece, with finding the best way to articulate that exciting idea in our brains, this is good news. but for people, and activists in particular, this might be even better news to zero in on. for the world we're trying to create, for the change we envision and seek to manifest, we don't have to start from scratch. though humans are still relatively young in this world, we have a rich history to draw from!

we can build on the work that's already been done, build on the long trajectory history has offered us of people committed to liberation. in that way, writers and activists, and people of all persuasions can get the strength we need to do the important work we're invested in doing from already existing sources.

viva the wheel! and not reinventing it!

a traveling man, moving through spaces.

june has graciously carried me to new locations both physical and intellectual. i was fortunate enough to be able to spend a week in bermuda at the home of a friend of a friend. while there, i gained much insight about the country's history--of slavery, of colonialism, of tourism, of change and status quo. i played scrabble. i slept late and lovely. i beach-bummed and sun-funned. i also read a lot.

one of the books, consequence: beyond resisting rape by loolwa khazzoom, managed to shift my already radical perspective on the urgency around violence against women. khazzoom discussed the relationship between street harassment, gender violence, and law enforcement. she assesses that relationship as one in which the state--and more specifically the legal system--systematically fails to adequately and appropriately punish street harassment against women, and accurately link street harassment to gender violence. in response to that intentional absence of protection and deterrence, khazzoom suggests that women begin to create consequences for the men who harass us. some are physical consequences (self-defense, and what i'll term proactive self-defense--responding physically to an aggressive verbal threat), and some are social, but all of her ideas (packed snugly inside personal anecdotes) served to begin a conversation on shifting away from a dangerous norm towards women's safety, autonomy, and self-determination.

shortly after returning from bermuda, i spent a week in detroit at the u.s. social forum. the workshops, cultural events, marches, demonstrations, strategy sessions, formal and informal social networking, and the celebrations! that made up the forum were all incredibly inspired. the week was energized and hopeful in the face of the desolation the city of detroit faces--along with far too many other communities of color. we covered damn near every modern and historical problem marginalized folks have ever encountered. we were almost 20,000 deep. and we were solution-oriented.

the issue-based intellectual work i did at the forum was ultimately not as important to me as the personal work i ended up engaging in. specifically, in addition to all the bonding and deepening of friendships that occurred, i had an emotional (and principled!) conversation that epitomized ideological struggle around the definitions and manifestations of sexism, patriarchy, and male privilege with a male comrade. even though he left the conversation with pretty much the same perspective he had come into it with (that men can be the targets of sexism in a patriarchal society), it was fulfilling for me because of the tedious, exhausting, but committed way! we were able to dialogue with one another.ultimately i think what mattered was the way we were both invested in listening to and understanding one another. i'm positive that the ability to engage in that way--patiently and lovingly--with each other is one of the first steps to building a new society that redefines the way power works.

my journeys have treated me well. and finally, i'm home, with no complaints. but i have a friend who is currently embarking on a road trip from detroit to oakland. from what i understand, his trip thus far has been adventure-heavy and first day of summer sweet. he's been kind enough to keep me updated on his travels and send me the occasional sunset.

<---utah!




missouri! --->



so to him, and to travelers and people everywhere who believe in the power we have to create a new and beautiful world with love and committment, i'm dedicating this poem by harryette mullen:

Roadmap
for J.R.

She wants a man she can just
unfold when she needs him
then fold him up again
like those 50 cent raincoats
women carry in their purses
in case they get caught in stormy weather.

This one has her thumb out
for a man who's going her way.
She'll hitch with him awhile,
let him take her down the road
for a piece.

But I want to take you where you're going,
I'm unfolding for you
like a roadmap you can never again fold up
exactly the same as before.

"one of the best acts of my entire life was to take a sack of oranges to langston hughes when he had the flu, about two weeks before he died".

--alice walker, "duties of the black revolutionary artist," in search of our mother's gardens

practice practitioner

last year, i completed an organizing fellowship that, among other things, equipped new paid organizers with practical and time-tested skills central to effective organizing. we learned about various methods of outreach, different styles of doing one-on-ones, various aspects of campaign and leadership development, various methods of centering, and on and on. all of these intensive trainings were always infused with a focus on intentional practice. intentional practice is what we constantly focused on, as distinct from default practice. the difference here is not a shocker: default practices are what we do without thinking--deep-rooted behaviors that we rely on and rarely question--while intentional practices are what we do when we make conscious informed decisions about the way we want to think, act, and engage with the world.


here's an excerpt from an article one of the organizing trainers wrote on practice:

"When we begin to look at our own practices and then practice on purpose, the first thing we want to ask ourselves is: “What matters to me?” “What do I care about? “What am I committed to?” The answers to these questions become the guide for taking on new practices."
--Ng’ethe Maina and Staci Haines
"The Transformative Power of Practice"

so it should come as no surprise that i've been thinking a lot about my personal practices, both the ones already embedded in me as well as the ones i'd like to pick up. in the latter category, i've been making some progress with daily practices of stretching, meditating, and writing. one i'd like to get in the practice of is:

reading beautiful shit aloud
(rbsa)

maybe out a window, maybe in the morning, or before i go to bed at night. but there's definitely something affirming and enriching about having feel-good words roll off the tongue. hearing your own voice repeat sounds so well-crafted and enjoyable to say, they make you tingle--creating a new space in the universe filled with positive, aurally incredible speech. that matters to me. a small intentional counter to all of the negative words, music, and sounds i'll likely come into contact with throughout the day.

let's practice! here's a little piece of rbsa from arundhati roy's the god of small things:

suddenly the skyblue plymouth looked absurdly opulent on the narrow, pitted road. like a wide lady squeezing down a narrow corridor...within minutes, the road was swamped by thousands of marching people. automobile islands in a river of people...the sound of a thousand voices spread over the frozen traffic like a noise umbrella.

found poem

yesterday i rode my bike to a birthday dinner for my uncle and upon my arrival, my father realized--much to his dismay-- that i hadn't worn a helmet. today, he sent me the most beautiful email, conceived in concern and executed with love. i've set it up for you below.

as a refresher, poets.org describes "found poetry" in the following way:

"Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.

A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet."

subject: bicycle helmet

zakia, though i know you are grown and can do any darn thing you want to.

that notwithstanding,

you have a responsibility

to stay around as long as you can to share

the awesome gifts you have.

though there is no particular value

in longevity, i think the intensity

of one's sharing of gifts

one has been born with and honed

is what counts. but why chance

shortening the time one can share

for no good reason? surely following

the police around, organizing

and struggling for change

have their dangers,

but those are chances worth taking.

riding without a helmet

is just exposing yourself

to unreasonable risk

for no good reason.

please don’t! love, daddy.

on passion

more than ever, i'm in the practice of constantly considering how i can engage each of my passions equally, simultaneously, and meaningfully. my two passions, only slightly distinct from the subtitle of this blog, are:

1. poetry, and
   
2. liberation of all oppressed people, with a particular focus on blacks, women, and queers :)

i'll be starting an MFA in creative writing in the fall while attempting to continue to develop professionally in the field of paid community organizing. in the meantime-in-between time, i'm trying to immerse myself in both liberation struggles and poetry on a daily basis.

through my job and my volunteer organizing, i'm a part of the take back the land (tbtl) movement. it's a coalition of community based organizations and individuals from across the country who believe that housing is a human right that should be granted by any means necessary--but mostly through direct action and civil disobedience. given the reality of the homelessness epidemic, the foreclosure crisis, the gentrification boom--including the unprecedented number of luxury condos emerging in low-income communities, and the national attack on public housing, the logic behind the movement is simple:

people don't have permanent housing--distinct here from simply shelter-- not because they're poor or because they're unemployed or fell behind on their mortgage payments or because they spent all their money on their drug or alcohol addiction or got sick or have bad credit. people don't have permanent housing because in our society, housing is a commodity, not guaranteed as a human right. period. the people and entities who own the land and the housing--mainly cities, banks, and developers--would rather make a profit than provide a place to live to everyone who needs one. more than this being simply a sad capitalist fact, this is a human rights injustice.

one of the guiding tenets of the take back the land movement is borrowed from the civil rights movement: when a policy is unjust, it's the responsibility of the people to change it. so when the south was desegregated because all those beautiful courageous folks decided to sit at those lunch counters and ride those buses in a humane way, it certainly set a precedent.

the point is, i was in the bronx two weeks ago, participating in a three-pronged direct action event with tbtl-affiliated organization picture the homeless. i was utterly immersed in the scene as a part of the security contingent. by all accounts, it was a successful action but by the end, i began to feel guilty for not having once distinctly thought about poetry. where was my poetry? where did it fit?

it was everywhere. the poem was happening and it was up to me to capture it's necessity, it's urgency, to bring awareness to it, to prove it. then i considered that age-old question: if a poem occurs on a bronx spring day, but no one is there to name it, did it ever really happen?

legacy and lorraine in the closet

"love's the only engine of survival"
-leonard cohen

my parents, in their infinite and beautiful wisdom, named me after a woman who had real jewels for a brain. in addition to being the first black woman playwright, creating work that would have resonance for blacks and humans decades later, and being incredibly thoughtful and critical and beautifully articulate about it, she was bisexual.



i discovered this last fact only recently and the news left a residue of gloom and hopelessness in me. it's painful to come to terms with the reality that one of my heroines thought it best--and likely, safest--to remain publicly closeted for her entirely too brief 34 years.

imagine what more she could've done had she been able to be her full self--her best self-- all the time!

her era and it's people failed her--shirked their responsibility to her to allow her the space to be her best self.

and how much further along are we, as a community of thinkers and women and men and humans today?

enter gloom.

also, enter soapbox.

queer people of color in communities of color continue to be under attack within their communities. it's disheartening to be engaged in the same conversation today that people have been engaged in for the past fifty years. what's different?

what's different when two black men jump out of an SUV in the hood in brooklyn because they see two latino men holding onto each other and assume they're gay? what's different when they scream homophobic and anti-immigrant epithets while beating the two brothers, beating one of them to death? what, when the black men are sent to prison, but not for a hate crime?

what if we had allowed the sucuzhanay brothers to be their whole and best selves? what if hakim and keith were taught to be their whole and best selves? their loving selves? what if we all began to take responsibility for one another, for the type of world we're creating with our interactions?

what then?

lorraine's legacy is newly bittersweet. one that both inspires and cautions. while she publicly championed civil rights and self-determination for blacks in the political and cultural spheres, she felt that she could only anonymously champion the rights of women and gays. she was forced to siphon off her identity into digestable and acceptable pieces in order to survive. her complex analysis of the way sexist and homophobic oppression are linked was by all accounts visionary, and years ahead of her time. it's phenomenal that despite the climate of homophobia she lived in, she found a way to communicate her analysis and concern. but it's heartbreaking that her contributions to such a radical, accurate, and useful gender analysis have been largely ignored, along with her sexual identity altogether.

finally, lorraine hansberry and malcolm x share the same birthday, may 19th. though malcolm was five years her senior, they both died in 1965, a month apart.


what types of lessons about legacy does history want to teach us with these two?

was malcolm allowed to be his full and best self in ways that lorraine wasn't?

why?

should some new-age, technologically savvy lorraine and malcolm emerge from these times, how might we treat them differently, here in the future? to what new heights might they travel, and how might we all benefit?