I woke up to the sad news that Richard Pryor is dead.

His honest comedic take on the craziness of life continues to inspire me. He was, as was Redd Foxx in another way and another era, a great writer. His characters, his subtlety and brashness, came from a brilliant mind that occupied and took us to spaces of imaginative insight.

R.I.P.

Apologia, anyone?

NYT, art thou not complicit? Judith Miller spewed all the Administration's denials on your front page!

haiku

licking dry her moist
peach cream thick and sweet as hot
bread sliced by candy

the way it works is this:
i stop, breathe, take in
workmen digging up streets;
re-routing my path.

i corkscrew through
broken concrete and
tunneled asphalt looking
for a foothold.

--

Okay, I'm buggin'. Here's the poem I'm working on. That other stuff is just chaff.

whites seat from the front, colored from the rear

on a chill night when tens of thousands
exercised the right to shiver, I stood
in a mile-long line with my wife.

friends met us there—not dogs
or hoses, vitriol or spit—as we
honored and cemented

the memory of a woman whose
sitting down spurred uprising.
snaking through streets, parking lots

and the Mall, shuffling and waiting six
hours, sometimes singing spirituals,
parents with children months old

inched toward history. no church
hosts more sacred occasions
than our vigil for Rosa Parks,

trained at Highlander to moot the
sign above the bus driver’s head
written in black and white.

jails lost their power as cells became
crucibles; emboldened ordinary folk
changed from set apart, to set free.

fine tune-age
Here's another copy of "spit"; still trying to decide where i want to locate the poem. Top two contenders right now are El Salvador and South Africa. (It started out in El Salvador, but I'm open to other possibilities).

spit

they came with
mortars, torches, and death.
papi fled as planned.

his bullet pierced mami’s temple;
blood dripped like her spit down
the soldier’s face. neither flinched.

And.. another death-infused poem for your enjoyment...

I'm in a poetry workshop at the moment. Our last assignment was to write a poem in blank verse. Check it. I went the iambic pentameter route.

needle, vein, death.

a second left and all I want to know
is how the blade felt sliding through your ribs

I carved a turkey with a duller blade
but sharpened this one just for your demise.

I guess that makes you special; mi amor,
in death we reunite; I’ll see you soon.

work in progress

spit

the soldiers, or were they soldiers?,
came at night with no insignia:
just mortars, torches, death.

as we planned, papi fled to the hills.

his bullet pierced mami's temple;
her blood dripped like her spit
down the soldier's face.

neither he, nor she, flinched.

Work break WTF? moment of the day

John Aravosis posted this.

Amazing. The leader of the free world? Maybe he is back on the sauce. (Okay, it's from the Enquirer, but check the link in that story).

Anyway, I made up my own quote. To wit:
"When I look at the lives lost to Katrina and the war in Iraq, I think, 'The terrorists wish they could do this. But they can't.' I did it. (Pauses to reach under lectern for a shot of Stoli) I take responsi- sike! Who wrote this sh*t!" (Reaches for another shot).

Far-fetched? Maybe so, maybe no; liquor sometimes does give you a sweaty back.

Okay, I can't actually confirm the alleged drinking or link said allegation to the sweaty back. I just like the picture and wanted to post it on my blog.

Crispy Bacon (Cross-posted here)

There are things that, when done well, need no explication:
a good poem
a funny joke
crispy bacon (for the pork-eaters like my Self).

Frank Rich is crispy bacon, minus the grease and fat.

Jomo
(P.S., Link from NYT-- may require subscription).

Randy Newman via Aaron Neville

Louisiana 1927

Luckily, my family in Washington Parish is okay. So, too, my kinfolks in Baton Rouge and Hattiesburg, MS.

Praise Be.

Katrina

I learned just last Thursday that my "kinfolks" in Angie, La. are okay. But it will be a long time before power is restored and water is available.

Now I hear the Mayor of New Orleans has authorized forced evacuations. I don't know how I feel about that. On the public safety level, I see the point. On the personal liberty standpoint, anyone who made it this far has probably got more sense than the government that was supposed to protect them.

In any event, the money quote from the article above comes from Jefferson Parish President, Aaron Broussard, of Meet the Press fame:

(snip)
Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard was even more blunt.

"Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area," he said on CBS' "Early Show." "Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don't give me the same idiot."

Word.

eyes on the un-claimed prize poem

untitled fragment (screed)

I roll thru streets where
Black Power sits threadbare
in folding chairs propped

against crumbling liquor stores.
revolutionary lore forfeited
by its electees, who: (a) got power

and (b) bullshitted. once (c) keeping the role
trumped all else, (d) patronage raised
its color-blind head; (e) people

showed their true colors (i.e., (f) their ass).
now, (g) what benefits have we reaped
from one of the most amazing

movements in human history? the
meek may well inherit the earth, but
(h) right now they still catch hell

in Detroit, Chicago, D.C.(HIV rate on the rise
for Black women—hello!), Los Angeles,
NYC (Black male unemployment at 50%,

motherfuck!), never mind the plight of
the Black farmer— see (i) Zimbabwe or
(j) anywhere in the United States.

Excuse Me, I'm Not a Book Burner

Ratzinger vs. Harry Potter
So the Vatican's score is:
Against- a work or fiction
For- clerics who sexually molest children

Because God said so.

Got it.

for Grandpa Johnny Will "Shoot Ya" Jones, Sr.

a shotgun house, bedsprings in
every room rusted by crop-raising,
braces for the summerstorm season.
the scrap-dog took cover under
flood-pillar-raised floorboards
soon as the wind started blowing
thunder clouds questioning Grandpa's
zinc roof and caulking this way;
no need: Johnny Will Jones, Sr. built
a house for fifteen children. instead of

setting a price for his family's
labor he gave away early peas, okra,
yams and potatoes like he gave away
a gangrenous leg to war. war his
sons fought, too, before setting out
for worlds un-plowed by part-Whiteness
or Jim-Crowed darkies. wars, his
daughters fought, too, against
his controlling nature and wounds
that may or may not ever heal.

weathered badly, no crops sewn for
a generation, the house still stands
a short drive from the main road
on a gravelly lane named after Grandpa.
summerstorms won't knock it down, long as
we stand as a family. having survived
many wars; we pray he rest in peace.

Mississippi Burned

Forty years later, justice served.

some haikus from '99 or '00

1.
generations know
survival means: dry season
sweats blood young and old

2.
still pond mirrors moon
footpath marked by lantern ligh
i hold you hold me

3.
why waste mourning for
what was while what should be is
you free to be you

4.
sometimes you just turn
my world west to east, sometimes
i wake up dreaming

5.
we packed memories
tenderly as night fell we
dueted goodbye

6. (for Gil Scott-Heron: 2000)
the pint? it makes it
possible to contemplate
the revolution

untitled (for Dad)

scene: interview of father
setting: patio lit by dusking sun

"who are you?"
"no one told me."

simple dialogue;
improvisational lore.

"how'd you find out?"
"i asked",

the playwright wrote;
the roles reversed.

I had a "first" today-- two, actually: I read "The Wizard of Oz" on my PDA. It takes a little getting used to, but I think I've warmed up to the idea.

The software came bundled with the Palm OS. Nice features, easy to navigate. I like the idea of taking digital notes as I go, especially since I am loath to skribble in books these days, and all the post-it notes I tack in ruin the aesthetic of the original design.

But how much am I willing to pay for the privilege of sitting in my doctor's waiting room, or on the metro, with my gadget? What's the going rate for convenience?

Being back in Cali for the week gives me time to hash it out.

On the subject of Cali, my state rocked me with a 6.4 mag tectonic shift this evening. Dorothy said, "There's no place like home." Trudat.

Word.

Digital Window Shopping

Time to blog? I think so.

I've been in a blog-reading loop for a few weeks. So much so that I haven't set aside time to write. Guess that's a feature of the blogosphere: digital window shopping galore.

Being in this ether doesn't require much more effort than the ability to click. Real-world window shopping involves a different level of effort-- the actual movement through time and space. Clicking through blogs, I have a sense of the ultimate and encouraging interconnectedness of the Web, but lose that all-important (to me) tactile experience of "fog on glass".

In my junior year of college, I took a class called "Utopian Political Thought". The professor included works by authors who posited "dystopia's" as well-- basically, anti-Edens. I had never considered the genre before, though I had become familiar with it (being Black).

A part of the blogosphere/Web clicking sensation reminds me of a story from that class that I have to dredge up; I believe it's by Borges. Anyway, it's one of those sci-fi tropes where technology performs most functions of daily life except human interaction, so that we become isolated. Isolated, ultimately, from ourselves.

The kicker is, of course, we've isolated ourselves by creating technologies that we hope will bring us closer to one another, make life easier, lighten our load.

Or maybe identity is shifting and I'm in the transition generation. I'm lamenting a loss of something that the next generation may deem quaint. There can be deep and sincere digital bonds, the same way there are shallow and deceptive relationships offline.

I don't know.

Nostalgia's a pendulum that swings non-stop between "what I knew" and "what I hope". When it hits the mid-point, I write-- like now.

So, another report that the U.S. rationale for the invasion of Iraq was a bunch of crap. (Note the Orwellian logic used in the last two paragraphs).

According to the Washington Post: "The report, which refuted many of the administration's principal arguments for going to war in Iraq, marked the official end of a two-year weapons hunt led most recently by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles A. Duelfer. The team found that the 1991 Persian Gulf War and subsequent U.N. sanctions had destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities and that, for the most part, Hussein had not tried to rebuild them. Iraq's ability to produce nuclear arms, which the administration asserted was a grave and gathering threat that required an immediate military response, had "progressively decayed" since 1991. Investigators found no evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."

Administration officials have emphasized that, while the survey group uncovered no banned arms, it concluded that Hussein had not given up the goal of someday acquiring them.

Hussein "retained the intent and capability and he intended to resume full-scale WMD efforts once the U.N. sanctions were lifted," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said yesterday. "Duelfer provides plenty of rationale for why this country went to war in Iraq."