This is What Happens When I Wake Late and Don't Write/Mediate/Write Until the Afternoon

1/11/19

The smile of a child to light your life

Right in front of you he sits, nervous at first,

Made to read for a score, and you wonder

What he thinks, for the two of you have never met

So you tell him this is to build his reading

To make him stronger, to give him more power.

Whether or not he believes you is unknown

He reads through the story while the time counts down

And you mark the only word he misses, turn to him

Once he finishes, and you say,

“Now, there’s sixty seconds in a minute. How many words

Do you think you read?” “Sixty,” he says.

You say, “What would you think if I told you it was more than sixty.”

His lips curl. Skin beside his eyes lifts.

“What would you guess?” He tells you seventy.

When you tell him that he read 84 words it is as if you

Told him that NBA Young Boy would be picking him up from school.

This is what needs to be known by those I have heard say things like

“They don’t care” or “They don’t try” or “There’s nothing you can do.”

There is wonder and desire inside every child and it is irresponsible when adults don’t find this

For we have been given the power to help others, not to cram down their throats

But to meet the children where they are, not to judge but to understand,

To ask questions, to talk to parents, to realize that all want the best for their child

And know that in all of this there is a struggle that must be acknowledged

There is a society that you do not know because you have no experience

There is a presumption that will serve nobody, there is your own sight

And in this sight all that you see is tainted by your own experience

You do not know that the same man, were he black, and raised the same as you

Would have less opportunities; for a long time

You did not even consider the very blemnish caused by the color of skin

You did not realize that this very mark is a target

That there has been a constant struggle, that you

Simply as one with white skin “benefit” from this struggle, but truth is

That when their is success that depends on the backs of others, there is no success

All of this is false in a world where there are people thriving on the pain of people

This is not part of the animal kingdom and this is unnatural.

The this to which I refer is the fact that the United States has made gains from the beginning

By making some people second-class citizens, or less than second class, not in the same ballpark, so take away the musts and write about your own experience and your own struggles in mind, meaning the conflict that exists in the witnessing of what has shaped the United States, in seeing the poverty that stretches around the blocks where you live and at the same time being a part of this eventual gentrification which is taking place throughout the United States. Are you to pack up your things and move or are you to give what you can with the understanding that life fluctuates in cycles, yet you are a part of the class of oppressors that have come in and claimed something. Hard to sit with this when most of those that you know are the ones being pushed out, the ones that have sat in your yard and you on their porches, but even in this there seems a distance that lives somewhere in the subconscious, a separation, a sense that both of you are outsiders in the other’s world. You have a need to be less worse than other white people, to stand apart from what your black neighbors know and sense, to take on the affectations of the very people that are descendants of slaves and yet never to discuss this.

Consider those of Creole Ancestry, those with the still partial separation from the others and the notion that they are part oppressed and part oppressor and how does this sit? In the genes of the DNA those that came from Africa were brought because of a resistance to malaria, an adaptation to the environment and yet that was used against them, the very connection and adaptation to the earth was used to oppress. What a sick business. What a sickness that has spread in the name of myth and then required the creation of other myths in order to keep the first going.

Perhaps a bicycle is in order. Perhaps the direct reporting from the 9th Ward, the dirt, the way the world is turning, the struggle within your own mind to understand just where you fit in all of this, to take care and to love without trying to take from and be the only one: all of these twisted definitions and confusion about what might be the next right thing

After meditation:

Any thoughts written are only this--thoughts--yet for so long there has been the fear of sharing because what might people think. This notion falls right in with the same sin that causes people to rely on the praise of others and to want to look good; there is along with this the notion that I don’t want to get caught for thinking the way that I think. It should not matter what anybody thinks because this is only a synapse trying to protect something that does not really exist, meaning that the nature of the ego is to be supported by or brought down by other egos. The truth of this blessing that sparked during sex is that there is an energy that was put into a body along with a mind. The scientific facts I’m not sure of, but it is what is within that connects all. I hate to say everyone and everything or each and every one of us because that is not the truth. The truth lies in every. That said: it does take a mind to come to these kind of conclusions.

There must be wonder and curiosity in order to begin an examination. What I see happening is a squashing of energy, an attempt to calm kids down so that they can learn. Would not both we and they be better served were we to harness this energy and trust that the universe will bring out whatever is meant to come? We are teaching to a test that does not exist once children become adults. We are not teaching the ways of communion.

Take for example the notion of restating a question. This makes sense when one has to write an essay and wants to begin in a way that can be understood. It also looks appropriate to the eyes of the scorer. What we have missed in all of this is the gift of allowing a child to figure out what the question means, to rewrite it in his own words, to examine what is being asked. There happens a hang up with the determination of regurgitating exactly what is asked in the correct format. We have missed the curiosity. We have missed the wonder.

So sit alone in a room and think and breathe and wait

For there will be more, and nobody knows everything

Including the people that know more than you.

Take a silent heart and a silent mind and grow both

Find those that believe in connection and realize

There will always be difference in the attempt

To collect people together and break bread

In a nation where I believe there is a need to go back to neighborhood

I believe in the need to share low hanging fruit

And I believe that taking care of self should never take place of taking care of others and now writing just to write because the free form paragraph is harder to manage than the structure of a giant stanza and maybe that is what I could call my own quote unquote poetry: The Giant Stanza. Or One Giant Stanza. Great works by the man who tried to love everyone, who failed and tried again, for when there is nothing but a room I always seem to draw back to Proust, to the brick, to the spirit of racism that exists so strong, right here against this brick, less than fifty years ago. Hard to believe that television screens captured the violence and were objective, the same as the way textbooks report the Civil War. What happened outside the doors where Ruby Bridges first stepped has never been discussed, as if doing so would make visible the painful truth of the present.

How to look at the truth and expose the hidden wounds of whites and the scars of blacks and realize that there needs to be discussion in order to move forward. Maybe I need a black wife and black children and the fear of them driving to school or walking through a nice neighborhood. What a crazy deal that Obama invited the white cop and the black Harvard professor that he arrested to the White House for a beer. Even the notion of capitalizing the White House or businesses or our own names. These are proper nouns, somehow more important than cheetah, badger, or grass.

The deconstruction of language is a way to use the mind in order to get closer to spirit. Examine what thoughts and parts of language need to be stripped away in order to connect. The snake does not get coats and jackets to protect his snakey ways. This cold blooded creature sheds, and when we living from this cold blooded ego there need be shed after shed after shed until the raw rub of a reindeer nub begins to grow. This is what will fix the state of the nation, first realizing that there is no nation, only land claimed by egos.

Nobody told the trees. The birds will never say which state they live in. This is our responsibility as the thinking-most creatures, to respect and protect rather than pillage and plunder. A hard idea to sell when the opposite is hardwired in our brains.