WordUp - kalamu's words

POEM + AUDIO: SHARING IS HEREDITARY

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Sharing is hereditary

my four foot-eleven mother was world wise yet unburdened

by the cloying cynicism sophistication so often suggests

she projected a generous spirit adeptly balancing gifting

and keeping her nose out of other people's greed, and

equally, my burly country bred father taught us

the eternal lesson: regardless of how you looked

or what others thought, there was no wrong in doing right

the curatorial joy of their prescient caring shaped three

strapping sons who continue to strive to match inola's

exalted social statue and to embody big val's prophetic

folk wisdom, our parents offered the treasury of themselves

and thereby ushered our entrance into the sanctuary

of responsive and responsible manhood wherein we fulfill

ourselves by emptying our hearts into the life cups of others

_____________________

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Wolfi Schlick – reeds

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Mathis Mayer - cello

Georg Janker - bass

Michael Heilrath - bass

Roland HH Biswurm - drums

Recorded: June 14, 1998 – "ETA Theatre" Munich, Germany

—kalamu ya salaam

POEM: WE ARE ALL AMPHIBIANS

We are all amphibians

breathing beneath

water, initially encased

in a placenta

contained

within maternal

flesh until

we outgrew

the pond

and dove to birth

to walk upright

on earth

no matter our solidity

the moon maintains

its pull on us

and we all long

at various

levels of awareness

to float in the tranquility

of a human sea

land is cool

but after all

there is an undertow

we can never escape

it is our nature

we are all amphibians

—kalamu ya salaam

POEM + AUDIO: HARD NEWS FOR HIP HARRY

Hard_News_For_Hip_Harry.mp3

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HARD NEWS FOR HIP HARRY

(for Nefertiti, new word journalist)

it was like

cowboys & Indians

and he was the whole

10^th cavalry

diving down

into her ravine

raising dust

in a surprise

swoop attack

that left her laying

there bent back

her thighs all aquiver

with convulsive

love spasms

and when

the big guns

went off, his

coming was like

a gattling

tearing her little

target apart

each time

they got down

it was always the

same, a rerun in 3-D

the kid riding

rough and ready

into town

turning it out

at high noon

taking swift

car of business

ah, they should

of ought to

have made a movie

out of his moves

til the day

she wouldn’t roll

with his punches, didn’t

feel like faking it

anymore, refused to

be the stunt man

taking dives

and doing what

she didn’t do

     she knew

there was no easy way

to release it to romeo

without putting his

love lights out,

so she simply said

“Harry, this is no way

to make love”

like a silent star

in the age of talkies

unable to learn new lines,

like a sky diver

whose parachute

was shot, falling over

committed to a point

of no return,

Harry didn’t know

what to do

so he called her

“frigid”

but it was finis

for his toy balloons

the film had rolled

to the end of the reel,

Harry’s hard humping

had become a fantasy

that no one would

any longer pay

to see

yet Harry sat

nonetheless

incredulously

contemplating

a blank screen,

unable to figure

out why the show

wasn’t going on

(he had always

thought sex

was like what

he saw in the pictures)

“Harry, talk to me”

—kalamu ya salaam

___________________________

THE WORD BAND

Kalamu ya Salaam - poet

Ginger Tanner - lead vocals

Anua Nantambu - backing vocals

Kenyatta Simon - percussion

ESSAY: WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN

when a man loves a woman

i don’t know why i was immobile, just standing, caught between moving forward and backing away from some horror that was not my nightmare. i mean, why wasn’t i doing something, why couldn’t i think of anything to do besides be a voyeur, an onlooker, saying inside my head: this is none of my business, yet, steady gawking at the timeless tableau?

i didn’t see him wind up, but i saw the fist smash. they were half a block away. she cringed, or crumpled, or slumped, or something, against the brick wall of the white-painted old warehouse. too far away, i could not hear anything. but from the way she staggered, the hit must have been hard. no love tap. no heated argument slap. but a fist. to the head, or maybe the heart, the middle of her chest, between her breasts. i don’t know. from where i was, i could not really tell.

a moment before, i had been at my desk. and someone, i forget who, someone had rushed in and said a man was beating a woman, outside. i remember there were at least three of us, standing at the corner, just beside the front door entrance to the black collegian and edwards printing company. it was butch and me, and i forget who the third person was, probably bill, but i’m not sure. and by the time we got there, what may have started as an argument on the street, and probably included some cursing and even perhaps a shove, or maybe he grabbed her and she tried to jerk away, or could be she swung her purse at him trying to back him back, or something. i don’t know.

i don’t remember exactly how old i was, but since i left the magazine in 1983, i had to be in my early to mid-thirties, old enough to know better. i had not yet been to nicaragua, but by then had been to cuba the first time, and haiti, and jamaica, and tanzania, and china, and japan, and korea. i had been a lot of places. seen a lot of things. stood with progressive forces, even ventured into a few situations where to be caught was possibly to be imprisoned, if not straight up killed. some would say i had been fearless. some might say bold. going gladly where most folk feared to tread.

so why was i not moving forward this time. why was i just standing and looking. i told myself i did nothing because it all happened so fast. like liston going down in the first behind an ali punch most people didn’t even see, the fight was over before i could re-act. but i saw her body take the blow. and i did nothing.

immediately afterwards he looked like he said something to her. and they walked away. together. away from us. down the street. and the three of us went back inside. well. the old street adage: don’t get in the middle of lovers fighting cause you could end up getting jumped by the both of them. or, the other old saw: he might have a gun, she might have a razor (which was reinforced by the fact that most of the men in our office were gun owners, and lorraine, our first secretary, carried a straight razor). and the projects where those kind of people congregated was one block down the street in the direction the couple was headed. but i knew better, and besides, i have faced down police and soldiers—a pistol or a knife was nothing, comparatively speaking. no, the truth was, i wasn’t afraid for my own safety, the truth is, or was: i had been socially shaped not to respond to violence against women, and i was simply doing what i was trained to do: nothing!

trained by movies and television that are not only forever showing a woman being slapped, or smacked, battered or bruised, but the media has made violence into an acceptable form of entertainment, something we watch and enjoy, watch and laugh, watch and take pleasure in someone else’s pain.

seasoned by the callous lassez-faire of street life that essentially said: i don’t tell you what to do with yours, you don’t tell me what to do with mine.

encouraged by the army, especially in terms of all the shady dealings that went down with the women we sexually and economically abused with impunity—a lot of people don’t know that the word hooker came from the name given to the prostitutes employed by general hooker during the civil war; oh, yes, i’m aware general hooker didn’t directly pay the prostitutes or even officially condone the sexual laisions, but that’s the american way. the leaders always have maximum deniability even as the status quo works its nefarious show.

conditioned by a culture that said a fight between lovers was nobody’s business but theirs.

assaulted by the literature—i never forgot native son bigger bashing bessie with a brick.

not to mention pornography, the all-time top grosser among americans, even in the state of utah which is supposed to be so righteous. the violent sexual exploitation of women and children, our number one form of entertainment.

violence against women was reinforced by damn near everything i could think of. and the reinforcement was incremental, no one thing guiding it all, but the preponderance, the cumulative effect, like one rain drop does not a storm make, but a multitude steady falling will flood us out, wash us away, cast us adrift, like i was, hesitant, unsure on that sidewalk. where was mr. bold black man that day?

even though violence was never practiced in the home where i grew up, and even though it was unthinkable that i would personally hit a woman, nevertheless, in ways, until that day, i was not totally clear about, i  now realize that yes, i passively condoned such violence, and if not condoned it at least tacitly accepted men beating woman as the way it was with some people, a sort of twisted status quo. and, perhaps my passivity was birthed by an even more sinister moral equivocation: it’s ok to be my brother’s keeper, but that doesn’t include stopping my brother from giving my sister a beating—oh, sure, in the family, somebody you know, your mother, sister, daughter, lover, auntee, oh sure then jump in and break that shit up, but some sister on the street we never seen before, i don’t know, you never know what the deal be and ain’t no sense in getting caught up in some edge of night drama.

protecting an unknown sister‑no matter what i said in the abstract, when my face was pushed up in it in the real world, her back against the wall, some huge dude all up in her grill‑i hesitated.

there had to be some reason, some reasonable explanation for why i simply stood there. it took me a while to realize the main reason was that i live in a patriarchal society, a society within which violence against women is not only deeply embedded, but also a society within which violence in general, and violence against women in particular, is so broadly accepted that it becomes invisible even though it is ubiquitous. how can something so obvious be so ignored?

the weight of acculturation does not easily budge and can keep us from moving forward even as we believe that it is backwards to stand still.

afterwards, not minutes, but in the days that followed, i said i would never be silent again. that moment of stillness turned me around. i would never be uninvolved again. and truth be told, i haven’t, but on the other hand, i have never been tested like that again. never been within shouting distance of a man beating on a woman.

yes, i have stopped young people who got into inevitable fights and tussles with each other. it really, really saddens me that so much play-fighting is accepted as a form of affection among many of our young people. their seemingly harmless mock violence is ameliorated by genuine affection or, more likely, rather than by affection, by pubescent desire; whatever, the result remains the same: in more cases than not, what began as a seemingly harmless activity actually ends up being a predictable  preparation for them accepting violence as part of the package deal of personal relationships, thus violence is fatally intertwined with what too often passes for true love.

i can not imagine any of my daughters or sons either accepting or perpetrating abusive violence.

i have marched. i have campaigned. i have written essays, plays, poems, made movies. but ever since that day, i have never been caught standing around simply looking when a man beat on a woman. nor will i ever again revert to letting aggressive violence go down without at the very least shouting out against such abuse, without doing something to stop the violence, and if not bring that violence to a “squelching halt” (to quote my father), at least intervening or in some other effective way opposing and lessening the negative effects of such violence.

cause when you get right down to it, a true love of one has to also be, to one degree or another, a love for all—and if we can not love others, especially those whom we see as the “other,” whether that be a gender other, an ethnic other, a racial other, a sexual-orientation other, whatever other, if we can not love an other and yet claim to love a particular individual then we are cutting off part of our own selves—the part of our selves that is also a part of the other. we are restricting our lives, constraining our souls, diminishing our spirit, and this is especially true when we are dealing with the questions of violence against women.

when a man loves a woman, truly loves a woman, he will not silently condone nor, through his own inaction, allow any man to do any woman wrong. because, while there are those fortunate enough never to be victimized by violence, in general there are no exemptions: each woman in a society shares some of the essence of every woman in that society. when a man truly loves a woman, he must love all women or not really love any woman at all.

—kalamu ya salaam

ESSAY: THE MYTH OF SOLITUDE: NO WRITER IS AN ISLAND

THE MYTH OF SOLITUDE: NO WRITER IS AN ISLAND

>>No writer is an island.<< No writer creates alone. Even those who withdraw from human contact -- the Salingers and O'Toole's of literature -- are actually shaped by their social development, or more precisely, in the cases just cited, by their social deficiencies. No matter how technically brilliant such writers may be, unless under-girded by social exchange and observations thereon, their writing will not stand the ultimate test of greatness: is the work relevant across time and across cultures?

In order to achieve both linear (across generations) and lateral (across cultures) greatness, writers must be both immersed in a specific era/culture and conscious of that era's relationship to other eras and other cultures. It is not enough to report on or even analyze the news of the day. The ultimate meanings of human existence transcend the specifics of any given moment.

In practice achieving greatness means moving beyond topicality, requires that we insightfully deal with how and why humans are shaped by social and environmental forces, and deal with how we respond to our specific shaping processes.

>>As writers, our goal is the expert use of words<< to convey ideas and information, emotions and experiences, dreams and visions. On the one hand we must study, and study hard, the development of our craft, but, on the other hand, we must never forget that craft without content is meaningless. Beyond the craft/content argument is the more important question of writing for whom? Who is our audience? Are we connected to others?

An audience is the single greatest determinant of the shape and relevance of one's craft. How is this so? This is so because as writers our whole craft is based on communication and, quiet as it is too often kept, communication requires an audience.

Some of us insist that we write to please no one but ourselves. But does that mean we write for an audience of one? No, it does not. When we write only with ourselves in mind, we are implicitly trying to communicate with the social elements that shaped our being. Indeed, who does not want to be understood by their parents, their children, their siblings and peers? Besides, if we were writing literally only for ourselves as an audience of one, we would have no need to share our writing, no need to publish or recite our writings.

In the contemporary United States, "audience" has been collapsed into the concept of consumers, people who literally buy whatever is marketed. That is ultimately a very cynical approach to determining who is one's audience. To write for and about a specific audience does not necessarily mean writing to sell to that audience. What it does mean is using the culture of the intended audience as the starting point (and hopefully an ending point) for our work.

Writing well in English presupposes that we deal with the history of English-language literature, a significant part of which includes use as a tool in the historic process of colonizing people of color. As able a craftsperson as Ralph Ellison was, craft is not what distinguishes "Invisible Man." Rather, Ellison's insightful handling of an investigation of the anti-humanist effects of exploitation and oppression on those who are victimized by a dominant and dominating society is the significance of that novel.

Ellison, understands at a depth few others have so thoroughly presented in the novel format, that both those who fight against their subjugation and those who are not even conscious of their condition are twisted by social forces. However, Ellison's novel is not merely a political screed because Ellison is more concerned with the range of human responses to social conditions than he is with advocating a specific social order. Moreover, far more than many books that on the surface seem to be more political, Ellison's novel is grounded in the cultural mores, the folklore, of mid-20th century African American life. Invisible Man can not be fully appreciated without an appreciation of Black culture.

A horrible truth is that too many of us are unprepared to write significant literature because we have no real appreciation of our audience as fellow human beings, as cultural creatures. We know neither history nor contemporary conditions. We talk about "keeping it real" but have no factual knowledge of reality. Thus, we glibly bandy generalizations, utter hip clichés as though they were timeless wisdom, and inevitably offer instant snapshots of the social facade as though they were in-depth investigations of the structure and nature of our social reality -- in short, we lie and fantasize.

Moreover, unless we consciously deal with our conditions, we end up replicating our oppression in our literature. When we are poor we write admiringly of being rich -- when we get some money, we write guiltily about poverty. What is this madness? This is the psychology of the oppressed captivated by their own oppression.

If this analysis sounds extreme, run the litmus test of examining works of popular literature and see if this is not the case. Look at the rap videos, notice the lifestyles portrayed. Look at the movies. At some point, we need to be aware that videos, movies, televisions, all of those media employ scripts -- these scripts are our popular literature. The absence and/or low level of craft in popular literature, both in publishing and in electronic, broadcast and video mediums, points to one of our real problems -- many of the people who are scripting for the media, can't or don't write well.

Moreover, I understand that the majority of scriptwriters for Black-oriented projects are not Black writers, however, the lack of Black writers in the dominant and dominating mainstream media underscores rather than invalidates my premise. A major part of our problem has nothing to do with craft and everything to do with consciousness — our consciousness and the consciousness of our fellow humans in the United States of America.

Our daily lives are shaped by our social conditions and the consciousness that emerges from those conditions. A significant percentage of writers who are craft conscious are also writers who are psychologically alienated from their own culture. Indeed, for the person of color, the act of acquiring education and expertise typically is also an act of alienation. It is unfortunately generally true that mainstream training in craft is simultaneously a directive to distance one's self from the culture and consciousness of our Black communities. Explicitly, to become professional means to emulate the other and eschew the Black self, the working class self, and, for women, to an even greater degree than many may realize, becoming a professional also means eschewing the self-actualized female self.

Thus, it is no surprise that once we become professionals, we insist on the right to be seen as autonomous and self-defined individuals who desire to live beyond the restrictions of race, class and/or gender. Indeed, we are often proud as peacocks strutting around glorying in our individuality -- look at the beauty of my butt feathers! We disdain groups, assert that organizations stifle our creativity. Meanwhile, people who are organized control the production and distribution of our creative work.

The status quo system loves those of us who think we can make it as individuals precisely because individuals are dependent on the status quo for life support. When you don't have a community of friends and comrades, you end up going to your enemy for supper and shelter, both literally and metaphorically.

>>The challenge for conscious and self-identified writers is both external and internal.<< External to the individual, we must build community by working with and achieving an understanding of the people with whom we identify. Internally there is the individual quest to develop a craft that reflects and projects our individual feelings and ideas about ourselves as well as about the world we live in. This struggle for social and artistic development is not an abstract concern. In practical terms such development requires that we who identify ourselves as Black writers:

1. Study Black music and Black history.

Music because Black music is our mother tongue -- the language through which the deepest and most honest emotions of our people have been expressed in the rawest and most "unmediated" manner. More than in any other sphere of social activity, African Americans have determined our own musical expressions and have communicated with the world through that form of expression.

History because if you don't know yourself you will inevitably end up betraying yourself.

Is it possible to write without a working knowledge of Black music and history? Of course it is. Is it possible to produce great literature without such knowledge? Probably not, and certainly none that would be considered Black literature. Ultimately, all literature is a product of culture, whether that culture is one's indigenous culture or an adopted culture.

2. Study the craft of writing.

One certainly would not claim to be a carpenter without learning how to build, nor a farmer and be unable to raise crops. Moreover, we also need to tackle the development of our own approaches and the development of a theoretical foundation.

During the Black Arts Movement, this process was called the Black aesthetic -- the development of an aesthetic is still needed. Craft is the concrete manifestation of philosophical aesthetics. If we don't consciously shape our own aesthetics, our craft will invariably and often in a contradictory and conflicted manner reflect someone else's aesthetic, generally the aesthetics of the dominant social order.

3. Join with like-minded colleagues.

We should join writers associations, guilds, organizations, both formal and informal. Workshops are important in one's formative years. As one develops, peer associations become extremely helpful both in terms of career development and in terms of craft development. We literally find out what's going on by being in touch with others. We become inspired and get ideas from interacting with others.

The internet is a major source of community activity for young writers today. There are on-line workshops, resource web sites, informational web sites and specifically, a number of Black oriented literary web sites. A young writer who is not on-line is literally "out of it" -- outside of the ebb and flow of ideas and information. With the advent of public access through libraries, arts organizations, schools, and relatively inexpensive commercial services, there is no excuse for not being on-line.

>>Writing is not just the words on the page.<< Writing is documentation of social praxis. There is both an art and a science to writing, a feeling and a thought.

Not only is no writer an island, it is up to each one of us to develop as social creatures (i.e. men and women) and as professionals. For our ancestors, for our selves, for our children and those yet unborn, let us as writers come together and create a literature that is as persistent and profound as our people who outlived centuries of chattel slavery, segregation and degradation, and who stand now on the verge of creating a new definition of what it means to be a free, proud and productive people.

—kalamu ya salaam

SHORT STORY: FOR YOUR OWN GOOD

For Your Own Good

By April Vincent & Kalamu ya Salaam

It was a routine day, I mean I was just making my rounds and nothing unusual was happening except my partner was out sick, which really was a good thing. I don’t mean him being sick was good, I mean I liked rolling by myself and getting a chance to talk to people like Mrs. Andrews, who had twelve children but looked like she was a brand new mother with a small baby. I mean she was kind of slim, still had a sparkle in her eyes and… what the hell!

Is that guy beating up on somebody? I flashed my siren. As I got closer I saw him hit the young girl one more time and then look up at me coming toward him. He turned and walked away slowly like nothing was happening.

The girl couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen. She had a bundle of clothes strewn all over the sidewalk. I got out and tried to talk to her. When she looked up at me and peeped my badge hanging around my neck, I could see fear in her eyes. This was stupid, but I understood it. She was more afraid of me, a cop, than she was afraid of that guy who had just been beating on her.

“You ok?”

“I’m fine officer, I was just trying to get some laundry done.”

“The sidewalk ain’t no washing machine and that dude sure wasn’t giving you no soap powder.”

I stared at her and she stared back. Not looking away or nothing, the fear was gone. Maybe I was wrong, maybe she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t answer me, at least not with words; just sort of threw her hands up like as if to say ‘whatever.’ She let out a brief sigh and then bent over and started picking up the clothes. When I stooped down to help, she started talking like she knew me.

“That was my baby’s father, he lives with his mamma but he does the same thing every week, come over here, acts like he’s the king of the world, starts a foolish argument, and leave. This is the first time it’s gotten this bad.”

She was crying. Silent tears rolled down the side of her jaw. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and started picking up her clothes.

“You sure you ok?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know why he thinks just because we have a baby together that I have to be with him. But to be honest with you, sir, I am afraid.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.” She wouldn’t look me in the eye. “You want to press charges on him?”

“No.”

Why would I press charges on the father of my child? That would only make things worse. Is that what this cop wants?

Damn, these girls always be protecting the dogs that end up biting them. She picked up a pair of green shorts. I saw a little pack of weed laying there. She saw me see it and that look of fear crept into her eyes again.

“How old are you?

 “I’m almost 17.”

“You ought to be in somebody’s school.” She turned away, grabbed up an arm full of clothes and started to walk away. “Where you going?”

“I have a baby to take care of, you know.”

The weed was still sitting on the sidewalk. She saw it and she knew I saw it. “You’re forgetting something.”

I know he don’t think I’m about to take a charge for Doe.

“Oh…that’s not for me.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“Well I know you don’t have good reason to believe me, but I can assure you I would never even think about smoking weed. I can’t even afford milk and diapers.”

“Get in.”

“No!”

“Girl, get in and let me take you wherever it is you going. And pick that weed up off the sidewalk, enough for somebody to come along and get the both of us in trouble.”

“I’ll come with you but I hope you don’t expect me to tell you any more of my business. I don’t want to turn my life into an investigation.”

“Somebody need to help you figure out all this mess.”

I could look at her and see the whole story. High school. Fell in love. Hooked up with this dude. He turned her on to getting high. Got her pregnant and now is tired of her. And here she is afraid of me when she should be afraid of her whole damn future.

I may have to deal with a few problems, maybe more than the average teenager, that don’t give you the right to call my life a mess. Nobody’s perfect.

“Look, I’m going to help you out. I might be wasting my time but then again you never know. Come on, let’s go.”

“What makes you think I need your help?”

“Those tears running down the side of your face. Get in. I’m doing this for your own good.”

-end-

_____________________________

[this is actually a writing exercise from school year 2007/2008 in a students at the center class at frederick douglas high school in the ninth ward of new orleans. i asked april if she wanted to write a story together. she said yes. i told her you pick my character and i will start the story, plus you write your character's dialogue and inner thoughts. she smiled mischievously and said, you're a policeman. she was messing with me. i said, ok, and based it on an actual incident that had happened a week before.]

POEM: FOR LIFE / FOR MAISHA

FOR LIFE / FOR MAISHA

(my advice to my niece)

i love

you & have

nothing but encouragement

for yr life in my missive to you,

yr life, not mine, what you see & be,

how you shape yr space & escape

from the restrictions earlier generations

have created, over their walls

into the wilderness yes, but free

free, & that's the real, to be free

to be everything or nothing like

what has been artifically erected

by those who want young people

to be old images, regurgitated thoughts,

& rather stupendously stupid

reincarnations of realities

this world would have been

oh so much better off without

such twisted combinations

you know

& i know you may not know

where you're going to

but you know

you're never going back to

those bruising and battering befores,

those false images of stability enforced by fists or

incapacitating  inhibitions

& above all, never back to pick up on

all that emotional baggage

standing on every corner

of the small town called crescent city

it is so difficult to be young in this old world

so strange, so frustrating trying to find community

when every individual thinks

they are a king or a queen

or for sure that you should be their slave or knave

co-dependent or some other

reduction ad absurdum

there are firing squads outside,

paddy rollers in the woods

ghosts riders in the sky

& a million good reasons to stay

holed up inside, be careful but don't be afraid

even if you can't find the key to the combination

at least climb out the window and keep going

the only way to be really free is to never surrender

so that's it, this letter is to let you know

not everybody back here wants you back

as a little brown girl

reliving what never happened anyway

except as some male orchestrated fantasy

& i guess that is the essence

—since life is real and finite—

if you are going to be somebody's fantasy

you might as well live & be yr own dreams

regardless of the cost or

how you may loose yr way sometimes,

live & be, live yr dreams & be yrself

however difficult or confusing it may be to discover

yr life lived to the fullest is the best & only

value you can give to a world already overflowing

with frightened and repressed children dressed up

in adult years, live & be maisha, live & be

yrself

—kalamu ya salaam

POEM + AUDIO: GHOSTS

Ghosts.mp3

(download)

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Ghosts.mp3 (12.67 MB)

GHOSTS

i have the smile of my great-grandmother seeing the end of slavery

& you have the hairline of an uncle/an aunt

who never pressed nor otherwise chemically altered their hair

only fools don't intimately know ghosts,

the dna of humanity, leaping like porpoises slick out of the sea

and back into our walks, our mannerisms, the way we giggle

when nervous, blush when aroused, or spit fire words

in sputtering ocher anger facing back the cannibalism of capitalism

ghosts are

just spirits fluttering angel breaths thru our corpuscles

the wing hum of hummingbirds motivating us to sound

snatches of remembered songs, lyrics formerly unheard

in this lifetime, psychicly transmuted across eras,

mali melodies maintained, aural treasures from our undying befores

face east young people, face east

imagine each line in your hand an ancestor

how well do you know the thoroughness of yesterday,

the arching influence of the previous century, the retrograde

of rationality, so slow compared to the velocity

of history smashing into the protons of personality

imagine, your voice is the texture of sun yat sen singing

a freedom song, your social erectness the reincarnate posture

of sitting bull standing barefoot his clear eyes kissing dark earth,

imagine, your breath the aroma of emiliano zapata biting the bullet

of revolution and spitting fire on the butts of robber barons

and dark-faced overseers who are the psychological sons

of simon legree in their twisted brutality towards their own people,

the definance of your unsurrendering war stance could be ghana’s

yaa asantewa hurling up the west coast facing down british bullets

confient that the religion of resistance will always outlive

the technology of repression, you could be the heroics of history,

a phantasmagoria of sacred strugglers vivifying the surge

of timeless protoplasm which careens through your veins

and gives substance to the willfulness of your animated engagement

with the omnivorous enemies of the planet earth

ghosts are

sacred illuminations coloring our stratagems and meditations,

they are the realization of sanity, the moment we truly understand

just how wicked the west actually is, the translucent

lights on the front porches of our spirits beckoning, guiding our

soft footsteps on the path, heading back homeward bound

dancing into the social circle of our collective selves

ghosts remind us

each individual is more than one, a communal hope chest

of ancient dreams actualized in the present

i believe in ghosts, i do

because i would be soulless matter otherwise

i would be some french rationalist trying to intellectually manufacture

& market the focus of life as the ego of thought, would be

some compassionless corporate ceo with spiritual arthritis

uninformed by the blessings of sharing, while pretending

that material possessions elevate morality as if you are what you own

rather than are what you do/be in relation to others and the world

ghosts

do not like vaults and crypts, nor fences and forts

real ghosts prefer sensitive personalities and wild open spaces,

every time we inhale a leaf shakes,

a tree or a weed offers us breath

give thanks to the grass for our daily inhalations

i am not a mystic

but i know there are ghosts

in the fecund topsoil which progress

callously covers with concrete,

i understand the reality that dust and dirt are airborne bones

pulverized by time into tiny particles

a rose by any other name is still the collected essence

of our forebearers grown through the life cycle into a fragrant state

of petal soft beauty on a bud whose shape is nature's re-creation

of the vaginal portal, whose redness is an honoring

of feminine life force and the blood value of matriarchy

if you do not believe in ghosts

where do you think your spirit will be

when the corporeal temple of your familiar

crumbles into seemingly insignificant pebbles of peat, or

when your temporal sanctuary dehydrates

once disconnected from the moisturizing of life's cosmic juice,

when the way station of your flesh altar no longer receives offerings

& when you revert to what you were before your human being

was conceived and made flesh via the union of your parents,

won't you be a ghost then?

there are literally millions of lives in your little finger

the karma of colonialism will not be undone

not unless and until the ghosts that reside

in the hosts of color worldwide can find a culture

which resonates daily contentment,

there will be no end to the wandering search for the promised land

unless and until ghosts can live

inside the wholeness of beating hearts synchronized

in embracement, respecting the healing touch

of every manifestation of life no matter how small, obscure,

or ostensibly insignificant,

no calming the tempest,

no mediation of the disruption of our heritage

not unless and until ghosts can emigrate

into a peace filled community of souls such as we

ought to be, vessels of awareness, responsible in our openness

to offer wholesome residences for the motion flow

of history seeking future,

there will always be a wailing issuing out our mouths

unless and until ghosts can live and

comfortably reside, live, and rest inside, rest

in peace, rest in us

ghosts

peace

ghosts

rest

ghosts

in

ghosts

peace

ghosts

rest

ghosts

in

ghosts

us

 —kalamu ya salaam

______________________

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

POEM: YESTERDAY WAS SO BEAUTIFUL

YESTERDAY WAS SO BEAUTIFUL

(and its passing so sad)

when the day transitions

it goes to night

first, before

there can be another

day

sometimes

a day has been

so beautiful

that in the night

instead of looking

forward

to another day

we can only grieve

for what is gone

but each day

is its own being

each being

has their own

day

whatever beauty

we find missing

tomorrow, whatever

we might miss

from yesterday

well, that beauty

we must become

tomorrow

we must be

as beautiful

as the departed day

we mourn in the anguish

of night

—kalamu ya salaam

POEM: LONELY WOMAN

LONELY WOMAN 

to be thot by the world as nonattractive

is so cruel a twist of birth

to be told yr weight is too much or not

enuf, yr face shape "ah... well, unique"

not to look like tv & cable

not to walk like magazines

not to smell like designed aromas

is so much

the way life really is

despite tons of pretty people

crisscrossing this century

beauty remains a rare thing, as rare as

infant eyes in an adult head

somewhere after high

school (& a prom nite that shouldda been my first

abortion) u wonder: is there any

            one

            in this whole wide

            kaleidoscope who can truly, truly...

            what i mean by "truly" is

            be sincere in feeling, &

understand how that mustard spot spilt

            on my blouse may be several days old

            but i'm not a filthy person, yes

            a bit uncaring abt neatness but you

            could eat off the floor in my kitchen...

                        (that's a joke...)

            i don't have any chairs in my kitchen

            & sometimes when i come in late at night

            i sit on the floor & eat chinese in the semi-dark

            ha-ha, ...

love excites me & loveless sex turns me off

is that confusing? like a lake

at high tide i totally open

myself to someone i love & if i don't

i only want him to hurry up & be over

although i never kiss & never tell

them that--we all know

there is such a thing

as too much reality

but if i could find a man somewhat

like my cat, i could touch him & talk to him

tell all, focus on sanity

& share slices of apple & my dimpleless

smile, the strange odor of my hair when its

wet by the silver rain i've walked into

to forget the dryness of days

at work they train me in congeniality

show me how to smile at strangers

with money in their hands

my mother told me never to do that

if you saw my chronology

you would look at my finger

nails and shake your head

the bitten edges confirmation

that loneliness is

a compulsive eating disorder &

what i do with my hands

a blues connotation

did i mention i'm black?

well dark brown really (smile...)

& female once a menses,

i'm ramblin' aren't i?

on a job application

for a position i never got

i once put down "ornette coleman"

as kin to notify because of that song

he made: "lonely woman"

i'm sure he stole those sound-tears

from someone he had hurt, made cry--

cause

            no man

            has ever

            really felt

            like that

—kalamu ya salaam