Message

When I attend UMass Amherst, I major in sociology.  I choose this major because I want to know the people's stories.  This is because even though I have cynical moments (ach, people, who needs them anyway), I love the people.  I am hungry for a good story.  What I am taught are phrases like abstinence syndrome.  Sociologists get lost in the syllables; we study studies, we study black dots on demographic maps.

These black dots represent people of certain classes, cultures, educational levels and other such groupings.  Sociologists like to look at groups with a good deal of distance between them and the individuals of the groups.  Perhaps they really believe that the dots and numbers tell a story.

In some ways they do offer some information.  For example, when the groupings have to do with poor people of color living in the projects, the black dots are crammed all together in the center of a city.  When the groupings have to do with rich people living in estates, there's more space and room for a person's life.

I take one day away from the university to visit a friend living in New York City.  I am a working class rural woman of color (which I don't realize then).  She is an upper class urban woman. At a drug rehab program I meet up with her; she once is a client and now is a member of the staff.  She introduces me to a young (actually we are all young) poor Puerto Rican woman.  We spend the day at the beach, all of us together.  We are able to converse with each other, enjoy the company of each other even though we come from different realities.

When day is done, we take Maria "home".  Rising from the ground is a cluster of sixty-story buildings in which thousands of people live.  She advises us to stay close with her and not to stray.  As we go up many stories on the elevator, she explains to us that the noise level is always 24/7 as loud as it is now.  I am sure there are studies that talk about the effects of constant noise.  We get off the elevator about midway up the tower and go into her apartment which is hermetically sealed; no windows open and all the sound is shut out.  I am certain there are studies about the deleterious effects of oxygen and sound deprivation.

We sit at her kitchen table and she tells me the story of her eighteen year life.  At fifteen she is a prostitute, at sixteen she is a heroin addict, at seventeen she is raped and all she can think of to say is:  don't mess up my new boots.  The way she tells the stories makes me listen with my whole body; I feel every word.  Then she asks me about my life.

I explain I am going to the university, that I have political activist friends who are working hard to improve the quality of life.  She gathers me in with her fierce ebony eyes and holds me very firmly with them as she says: I want you to go back to the U-ni-Ver-Si-Ty of Massachusettes Am-Herst and I want you to tell your Po-li-Ti-Cal activist friends that they don't know Nothin about My life.

She is not angry with me; she just wants to make sure I have her message and that I will deliver it.  She gives me my work for the whole rest of my life.  I am to tell the stories, mine and hers.  I am to stand at a bus stop and listen intently with my whole body as a perfect stranger tells me the story of life full of pathos and terrible things and profound courage.  I am to know that each dot represents a life.  I am to know that abstinence syndrome means puking up all the pain and sweating out the horror of a life someone has the courage to live.

Ultimately this life's work that she gives me is as described by the poet Muriel Ruckeyser:  time comes into it.  say it. say it.  the universe is made of stories not atoms.

Radical

In a recent trip to Oakland, I stand on a side street with three other queer women.  On this corner is a café nobody seems to know the name of but they know where it is and go there.  On the sidewalk all along the front and side of the café are tables and chairs, every single one full.  Among these people within and without the café there is a good number of old seventies Berkeley radical literati.  It has been oh… thirty years since I have seen them.

The seventies is a time of the Black Power, Gay Liberation and Women's Liberation movements.  This is a time of the Berkeley Barb, Black Panthers, Shameless Hussy Press, COINTELPRO.  This is a time when I choose to write sports for PLEXUS which is a small press newspaper of radical notions: producing a women's feminist newspaper, writing about women's sports. 

I am required to go to the news collective meetings which is responsible for reporting a great upsurge of urban political activism.  In the early seventies on occasion in places like New York City or Philadelphia some underground radicals have an accident with the production of explosives.  The resultant explosion takes out them and a tenement block.  There are robberies of large sums of money.  A rich heiress is kidnapped and turned into an urban guerilla (what's known as terrorist and looter in 2004 terminology).

The guerillas are few.  The rest of us are caught up in a high wind of creativity, activity, productivity.  There is an urgency to get it done.  We spend hours talking about what "it" is: feminist presses, women's coffee houses and bookstores, newspapers and magazines, and women's land.   We talk about woman hating, gynocide, music production companies, birth control, sexuality.  We are rushing to dream a new world.  We think we will get "it" done soon.

It is a time when we become aware that the federal government isn't benevolent.  Dissent is not a right, it is a threatening bother.  So the government moves to squelch even the hint of a threat.  It is a time when the government sends provocateurs to blend in with the restless, to stir up trouble where there is none.  It is a time when informants are rampant; if they don't get a good story, they create one.  The government initiates COINTELPRO.  Phones are tapped, people followed, groups infiltrated.

The tactics are aggressive, divisive, destructive, effective.  The social, political movements are set back by pressures from within and without the groups.  The intent is to divide and destroy lawful political dissent.  People lose their jobs; some people lose their sanity, faith, courage; and the lives of many people are unnecessarily shattered.  Not one CIA or FBI detention, action or list is lawful.  Still it happens all over the country.

The nineties are the sixties upside down.  We are suppressed and tricked by the smiley good will of Clinton.  The millennium is the seventies unmasked.  There is no Tricky Dicky (Nixon); we have Master George and Darth Dick.  What happens in the seventies illegally, is now made legal.  The government can spy at will on the citizens of this country and with the blessing of congress.

This is a dangerous moment.  The pretenses have fallen.  We see what we are looking at.  This is a delightful moment.  The reality has risen.  I have seen this before.  I  see what I am looking at.  We have an opportunity now to make this our world, not theirs.  Carpe diem: seize the day, seize the god.  Now is the time to set intention, pick a work, do it, and hold to knowing that it is "dark before dawn".

In this moment I work without fear of Master and Darth because what I know from the seventies is that it is they who are afraid.  In Star Wars the rebels have a long journey of struggle.  There are many scary moments and some unsavory villains.  In the end, the rebels, the Jedi, the Wookies, the robots, the Ewoks are all gathered around.  They are at peace in a great forest.  They drum, sing, chant, feast and speak sweetly with each other.  May it be so for us.

Witness

Of late I've been called to stand up with my understanding; be a poet, witness.  I watch, listen and speak what I see hear.  I travel a narrow passage between one side and another.  It's difficult to keep balance and not tip too much one way or another.  This isn't about neutral; this is about following the precipitous trail of truthfulness.

"I've found in poetry that it's better to ignore the facts and tell the truth."  (Ani DiFranco)

When I'm in high school we play various team sports in gym class.  During an inning of softball, I'm playing first base.  A woman from the opposite team smacks a powerful line drive toward the short stop who manages to field it, and she zings it over to me.  It's one of those sports moments when the action is faster than the humans playing the game.

The ball and the runner arrive at the bag at just about the same time with a whisker's width of a difference in timing.  The gym teacher who's umpiring has her view slightly blocked by my body.  She misses the play and doesn't know if the runner is our or safe.  She needs a second opinion.  The runner can't give it because she is only aware of when she hits the bag, not when I catch the ball.

The only person who can answer is the first base player; that would be me.  I know for sure because  I can feel both the runner touch the bag and the ball touch my glove.  The fact is that if I say she's out, my team gets the advantage.  If I say she's safe even if that's true, her team gets the advantage and my team gets even with me.  I could say I don't know, but there's no honor in that kind of obfuscation.  So I answer with what I know to be true from my view of the bag:  the runner is safe.

"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper."

(Adrienne Rich, Women and Honor…)

In the early days of my arrival in California I participate in a therapy group.  There are seven of us and the counselor.  One night the counselor throws a Kleenex box into the center of the circle.  She asks: What do you see?  We look at the box; we look at her.  We look at each other' we look at the box.  In the interim created by these silent glances, an exasperated incredulousness grows in us:  we're paying her forty bucks each; that's $280 for two hours worth of work; and here she is asking us the silliest of questions.  We look back at her and a few exclaim in annoyed unison:  It's a dang Kleenex box!

She asks again:  No, I'm asking, what is it that you see?  Now we're absolutely piqued to redness of the face:  just Exactly what is your point; it's a dang Kleenex box!  We fail to notice that this is a Buddhist lesson moment.  The point is actually at least two.  It's a Kleenex box because we, as a group, agree to call it a Kleenex box.  What each one of us sees of the Kleenex box is different depending on where we're sitting in the circle.

Two people sitting across from each other will see not only a different side but different directions.  My left and right is the right and left of the woman across from me.  We all see different sides and ends; and some of us only see extended corners.  These are blocked from each other's view until we describe them.  Even though we can all see the top, we see different angles of the box.  None of us can see the bottom.

I know what my view is; I speak it without alteration or apology.  If someone sees something different, the difference does not make either view untrue.  I don't have to change my view in deference to someone else's; I understand there are different views.  How we honor the group is to describe our view.  How we come into agreement with the group is in the naming of the dang Kleenex box.

Big House

Some time ago one of the Kulture Klatch writings talks about gay marriage.  That writing could leave the impression that I encourage gay marriage.  I do and I don't.  I do because it's a choice, and I encourage the right to choose.  I don't because it's complicity with structures that continue to institutionalize oppression.  Whatever truth is manifested by my life, the same has not ever been legitimized by the Big House.  I am not welcome there.

I remember the night of a fundraising dinner for a foundation that consists of the children of very wealthy massas who live in very big houses.  These children have broken from the strictures of their class and use their money to fund a wide variety of community organizations, the kind that scrap for every dollar and over and over make the miracle of the fishes and loaves.  The speakers include people from the neighborhoods who do everything they can where they live to save lives, create change, manifest dreams.  There are also luminaries such as Joan Baez and Alice Walker.

Surprisingly Harry Belafonte is there.  I first hear him in the sixties and this lesbian is sitting there in the eighties listening to him again.  In the first moments I'm adjusting myself in a time warp.  When we are all one in the sixties seems like a long time ago.  In the seventies separate groups partition into various branches of the liberation movements such as Student Liberation, Black Liberation, Black Power, Black Panther, Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, and Lesbian Nation.  These all evolve from the Civil Rights Movement in which "Freedom" is the power word.

Harry Belafonte is a radical man of the sixties Civil Rights Movement.  He begins his speech by recounting the changes that have occurred since then:  how many Black mayors, government representatives, fire chiefs there are now.  I have no idea where he's going with this statistical accounting.  I'm looking for the fire, some glimmer of the radical.  He drifts into a story from the Civil Rights Movement.

There's a night when Martin Luther King, Harry and some others eat supper together.  Martin is quiet all through the meal.  Afterwards a group of them remain and gather to drink cognac and smoke cigars.  Harry makes note of King's quiet and inquires as to the reason for it.  The Reverend Dr. King responds that there's a disturbing thought that sticks with him.  He considers all the work they're doing to get into the big house, and the thought occurs now that they're running into a house that's burning down.

I think of the houses that do burn down in the seventies with the bodies of radical groups buried in the ashes.  Houses are surrounded by scores of SWAT cops and federal agents who enter shooting.  Showing warrants, knocking on the door are unused formalities. These days are the beginning of the police tactic to shoot so many tear gas canisters into a building that it's set on fire.  It's easier.  The inhabitants will either come out and often be shot, or burn to death in the fire.

The power of the message rises as Harry chants a litany of causes, freedoms, rights and failure, massacre, genocide.  Each one is followed by the same refrain: we go to them for… and they don't get it done; we go to them for… and they don't get it done.  They don't get it done; why do we still keep going to them.

In the year 2006, it still is not done.  We go to the churches for our dignity and they do not get it done.  We go to the legislatures for our rights, they do not get it done.  We go to the nations for our lives and they do not get it done.  We go to the White House for our invitation and they do not get it done.  We still keep going into a house that is burning down.  It is still not done.  There is nothing inside worth saving.  Freedom is already out on the lawn and it stands inside each one of us.  Let the house burn down to the ground.  As we build anew, Freedom will sing.

Tapped

Sometime in the eighties I work in Tony Serra's law office.  (It's not on my resume).  Serra's firm is a gaggle of leftie lawyers.  That moment is similar to the moment in which I find myself now:  dedicating myself to giving up my routined life for the uncertainties of being the poet, performance artist.  I have part-time jobs mostly and fill in the budget deficit with odd jobs such as work as transcriber for Serra.

Their big case is an assignment from the federal government.  (The same government that recently jails him on the ruse of tax evasion.)  It's a spy case covered in the papers because it's a big deal.  The man supposedly sells secrets to the Russians.  The FBI goes into his home and steals, excuse me, appropriates all of his anything:  files of credit and utility bills, correspondence and tapes. The man and his wife correspond by tape.  It's my job to transcribe those many, many tapes.

There isn't often anything of much importance to the case.  This is correspondence typical of married couples distanced from each other including mundane daily details: I'm gonna be home on this date; I got the leaking faucet fixed.  Every once in awhile there's mention of kugerands which are gold coins.  This is subject matter due attention along with even seemingly insignificant dates because chronology is important too.

Even though it's for his defense, I feel disrespectful because I'm eavesdropping on private conversation.  Sometimes my mind wanders as I listen and type mechanically, shutting off any emotion I feel about the current circumstance of these people's lives.  Aside from some heartfelt political conversations, usually spoken on the porch or in the parking lot, I necessarily make it pretty humdrum work.

The humdrum is disturbed during a meeting even I attend.  It's a warning meeting to alert us to be careful of our conversations.  Some of the lawyers have met with the fed prosecutors who alarmingly exactly quote back to our lawyers, privileged and private conversations we think we're having with ourselves. It's apparent from these quotes that the feds have wiretapped our offices.

I sit there and all the chill and madness from experience with the FBI COINTELPRO action of the seventies returns.  Perhaps they assign this case to Serra as an excuse to get into Serra's offices.  Their true interest may not be a spy's defense; it may be an offense to spy on lefties.  It's hard to sit in my seat; I want to run.

After that meeting, I have an earnest conversation with one of the lawyers…in the parking lot although we're aware of the feds' capability of listening with electronic devices from parked vans.  I speak of the prickliness that comes from the heat of personal experience with government mad dogs.  I say that I'm not ready to give myself up, to have them jail me on extenuating circumstances, in-passing associations.  I don't return to work after that.

What the feds do now with the Patriot Act is what they do in the seventies; only then it's illegal, now it isn't.  If I'm ever arrested by the feds, I want to be sure it's clear why they're arresting me: because I'm a poet witness and they're afraid of what I know, what I say after I say what I know to a whole lot of people.  I hold to the seventies motto: we can't really stop them; we can make it as difficult for them as possible; work publicly so a lot of people know we act in good faith exercising our inalienable rights.  They can silence us individually.  Yet the sheer weight of collective poet witnesses' words will accumulate until our voices' vibrations change the tune and bring down the system.

I am a poet; for that I'm prepared to be arrested.  From that point let the six degrees of separation be created as I make it as difficult as possible for them to commit their crimes; I'm watching and saying what I see them do.  Whatever each of us chooses as our part:  choose it, do it.  Make it difficult for them until they're removed from their offices or even their offices are removed.

Rebellion

I own the DVD for Milk  and I recently watched this movie for the second time.  For a second time I have been given pause to consider then and now. Then Proposition 6 was the issue of the day, legislation designed to fire every teacher who is gay, and designed to fire everyone who offered support to gay teachers.  It was draconian for sure and in those days it seemed to be a shoe in to pass.  Yet it did not; it lost by a 2 to 1 voting margin.    We fast forward to now and Proposition 8 preventing gay marriage passes by a small margin, true; and still passes.  Surely this is an issue of civil rights and it still fails.  I’m not sure I understand that difference and failure.  So I’ve been thinking about it; and all I have so far are scattered thoughts.

In the sixties and seventies we revolted against the dark ages of the fifties.  The fifties were a time when the Jim Crow laws were still on the books preventing Black folks from sitting at counters, using bathrooms, having jobs, sitting in the front of buses, voting just like white folks do.  It was a time when the model and sole benefactor of privilege and rights was white male.  The cause for civil rights morphed into various liberation movements.  Our emergence through a constricted dark tunnel had a volcanic effect and was set off with the self expression of our political activist push for self expression and civil rights.  We were angry and passionate which gave us an edge and a focus.  Then days of rage built momentum for many groups of us to shout out.  Eventually there were a lot of us: blacks, women, gays, students, antiwar activists, communists, unionists.

Now sure it’s a good thing to talk nice to one another in even tones, be reasonable.  Yet underneath all this reasonable niceness there is something dangerous going on that inhibits us from having any kind of passion about what matters to us.  Late in the seventies the federal government engaged in COINTELPRO which essentially knocked off the various liberation, left groups -- finding grounds to kill or jail just enough of us to ensure our fragmentation, paranoia and niceness.  My generation suddenly understood that these persistent risks had become just too great.  We grew quiet from fear and from the Machiavellian bribes we were given as rewards for our silence.

That same federal government has continued to this day in an insidious and sinister manner to shore itself up and bind us up:  the Patriot Act, the “war on terror” being great examples.  Students these days are hemmed in by having to work and study; and later when they graduate are subjected to indentured servitude to repay their student loans.  The general population is being controlled, subdued and concerned by financial constrictions intentionally created by the  elite, obscenely rich few and their cronies to shut us up, put us in our place. If we speak out, there are many ways we can be killed, held against our will. 

We also have no plethora of eloquent and most importantly, passionate speakers like Martin Luther King, Bobby Seale, Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, John Lennon.  Oh right, they were assassinated; and let that be a lesson to us. It has been.   Now the air is being filled with the words of Limbaughs and Palins and Tea Partiers, CEOs, homophobes, bigots, and extremists; bureaucrats, politicians, economists.   Right now I rhave a need to hear more of what Rev. Jeremiah Wright has to say.

It’s not reasonable that people lose their homes, go hungry, live in fear; are indentured servants, denied civil  rights, decent and low cost education,  habeas corpus and justice.  It’s not okay that the US Constitution is still not made whole after being shredded.  It is not okay to be reasonable in the face of egregious hubris. complacent compromise or mercenary avarice.  Some passion, shouting, relentless demonstration, fierce risk taking  are quite appropriate.   Raise our voices, create unseemly coalitions, organize and disrupt, make our selves apparent. Come out.  Rebel.  Write. March.  Power to the people.  Si se puede; oh, yes we can.

Soup Nazi

With Soup Nazi the word “nazi” has become part of a thoughtless catch-phrase. Seinfeld should be ashamed.  Originally nazism was insidiously introduced into an environment ripe for some bloodletting, scapegoating  and derision of the cruelest sort.  It was sport to beat a Jew.  German society followed the brownshirts over the cliff into Nazi hell.  Now American society follows soup nazi to where…

I’m unnerved by nazi when used in such a casual blasé bumptabump.  To millions of dead people the word nazi isn’t a joke, wasn’t a joke, not even a bad joke.  Having someone operate without anesthesia as an experiment, isn’t a joke.  Being slowly starved and driven mad over time over years, isn’t a joke.  Being gang raped over and over and over until death is a kindness, isn’t a joke.

Statistics from the nazi and fascist era are appalling (or ought to be).  The minimum stats are: 15 million soldiers slaughtered each other, 18 million civilians were collateral damage in “the war to end all wars” (WWII).  Death totals go as high as 72 millions from battle, war related disease, famine, extermination. 11.5 million people including gays, the disabled, gypsies, catholics were pushed into ghettoes until sent to concentration camps to be starved, experimented on and gassed, beaten, tortured to death in horrific conditions. 

Six million were European Jews whose total presence in Europe then numbered nine million.  The task of exterminating the 11.5 million people took four years; in another year the Nazis probably would’ve killed all remaining Jews trapped in Europe.  Even though they knew what was happening, many countries including the United States didn’t allow  Jews to immigrate.  (Yes, they knew:  i.e., US corporations provided technology to Nazi Germany for identification systems, for gas chambers.)

The phrase most associated with the Holocaust survivors is “never forget”.  Never forget so that we’ll be ever vigilant against recurring rises of such horrible barbarity even though the truth is the Holocaust hasn’t ended.  Nazism didn’t begin or end with Germans.  Hitler based his concept of concentration camps on US government reservations of American Indians.  Not long after US entrance into WWII the feds created camps for Japanese, Italians, Germans.

That American tendency didn’t stop with WWII.  Ghettoes, barrios, the projects have been humming along for decades.  I often refer to these as concentration camps without electrified fences, barbed-wire topped walls. Today we’ve become entrenched in our fear of terrorists to justify the decimation of the Constitution and the establishment of Guantanamo.  The methodology of corralling is now far more insidious.  Instead of brownshirts mercilessly beating groups of people and forcibly removing them (pogrom) to a ghetto, we send them back to country of origin without reading them their rights.

American society is in danger of another flare up of genocidal government attitudes about the Mexicanos in our country.  Not long ago (near the time of Fortuna roundups), I was sweeping the gas station yard.  I noticed a van because it had “Homeland Security” painted on the side.  Outside it were two uniformed homeland security blueshirts with really nasty demeanors. They reminded me of Nazis.  I wasn’t laughing.

As far as we know these “illegal immigrants” (Germany’s designation for undesirables was “refugees”) are being transported to Mexico.  It’s comforting to dwell in our complacency; to cozy up to that comfort.  Yet there are many who harbor bigotry with a certainty of legal authority just as the Nazis did.  For now maybe they’re being sent to Mexico; I’m not so sure that’ll last.

There’s the belief that the fence being built on the Mexican border is to keep “them” out.  Sometimes I wonder if it could be used to keep “us” in.  Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote of the Nazi sweeps:  “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out -- because I was not a communist.  Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

A joke, it’s not.