My Shame 

My Old Man for reasons unknown to me my entire life was a racist. He despised black people, referring to them as niggers. We were not allowed to associate with, buy records or listen to music by them and we weren't allowed to talk about any sporting event they participated in. The Old Man wasn't very fond of Jews or the Irish either.
In the summer of 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. planned a demonstration to march in Marquette Park on the Southside of Chicago in early August.

The park was near my neighborhood.  There were actually early evening meetings in local Churches, American Legion Halls and on the front porches of homes discussing strategies on how to disrupt the march or stop it completely. Even the local clergy, police and community leaders attended the meetings in support of the cause. Kinda pisses you off when you think about it.
My philosophy concerning demonstrations is; if no one shows up to acknowledge the protest, or pays attention to them, the demonstration becomes ineffective.

Two years earlier my oldest brother Harold told the Old Man he was joining a civil rights movement with other College students to register black people to vote in Southern states. 
The Old Man became so enraged he excluded him from posing in the family photo.  He also cut off all college financial aid and my brother was not allowed to enter our house. The Old Man told him to kiss his ass goodbye because he was asking for trouble. There was a good chance he'd wind up getting lynched by the Ku Klux Klan.
A month before his intended deployment he found out his girlfriend was pregnant. They decided to get married which ended his involvement in the cause. A few months later three volunteers were murdered by the KKK and local police in Mississippi. The Old Man had an "I told you so" to justify his actions.

The day of the demonstration arrived with a large contingency of opposition assembled.  I followed the crowd of white protestors, including family and relatives, neighbors and friends to Marquette Park that August afternoon. The closer we got to the park the more vocal the group became. A man dressed in an Army type uniform started yelling commands. 

"Let's run these niggers out of our neighborhood." He hollered in a southern accent. When I got closer to him I saw a patch on his sleeve that said KKK Alabama. I don't think he even lived in our neighborhood.

 I remember feeling forceful and tenacious emotionally charged by the electricity generated from the crowd.
The Old Man with my next oldest brother, an uncle and two cousins were wearing expressions of venomous hatred.  There appeared to be a thousand white people gathered ready to do battle. I was caught up in the herd mentality.

The black demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr drew closer to where I stood.
They marched to a chorus of racial slurs and a barrage of bottles, rocks and bags of shit being hurled at them. 
"Fucking niggers get the fuck outta here." along with chants of, "Niggers go back to Africa" echoing throughout the park. The police stood idly by and did little to stop the crowd's harassment. 

I noticed on the ground in front of me a large piece of house brick. I knew this would cause serious damage. I have no idea what compelled me  to do what I did that day. 

I picked up the piece of brick, took aim and hurled it with force into the crowd of demonstrators. The brick struck Martin Luther King Jr. in the chest causing him to drop to one knee. He remained in that pose for a short minute then stood and continued the march acting unfazed by the incident. 

Instantly an emotion of intense remorse gripped my soul strangling it so tightly I became physically ill, wanting to vomit. My friends and others nearby began patting me on my back, giving me congratulations and laughing. I had to hold myself back from crying after witnessing the courage Martin Luther King Jr. displayed. He stood up, brushed himself off and continued the march.  He finished the march and even made a speech afterward without succumbing to the wound he had sustained.

I read about the incident the next day in the Chicago Tribune.
Here is the follow up article headline: Martin Luther King Jr. and supporters pause during a fair housing march through Marquette Park. 

King later said he had never seen “mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen here in Chicago.”

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of a car in Marquette Park on Aug. 5, 1966, he was met by a crowd in an ugly mood. That was nothing new for King. During his civil rights crusade, he'd often faced Southern mobs. The year before, police and sheriff's deputies brutally attacked a march he'd organized in Selma, Alabama. 

But he saw something even more menacing in the faces of the 700 white protesters who confronted him on Chicago's Southwest Side.

"I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago," King told reporters afterward. 

King and hundreds of demonstrators had scarcely set out on a march to promote open housing when he was struck by a rock. 

"The blow knocked King to one knee and he thrust out an arm to break the fall," the Tribune reported. "He remained in this kneeling position, head bent, for a few seconds until his head cleared." 

Aides and bodyguards closed in around King, holding placards aloft to shield him from the missiles that followed. King and the demonstrators had hoped to reach a real estate office on nearby 63rd Street, intending to demand that properties be rented and sold on a nondiscriminatory basis in the all-white Chicago Lawn neighborhood. Only a few of them made it before a riot broke out.

After reading the article I experienced a sense of guilt and shame that I'd never felt before. The act of hatred I demonstrated that day has haunted me my entire life.

I was viewed as a local hero for quite a while. My Old Man treated me with respect and kindness for the first time. He was proud of what I had done. However I resented every congratulatory remark and comment people made to me.
This story has never been told until now. I've kept it hidden inside for fifty-seven years. I was thirteen at the time and I will turn seventy this July.

What birds think of you

The content of the woods when you stop to listen
is you     listening      stopped

not that the birds do   stop   
not that the birds        mind

the contents of their minds for some minutes
look through you at worried mud

after all
              the content of the ground beneath
your feet carpets their dreams too

and you     leaning into the cut smell   of chlorophyll         
sprawled buzzing in            a heat wave of blankets

why can't you sleep


Sweating below zero

Through cracks in an outer pane woods glow
these echo what we leave in other people
when they die your eyes don't belong to you
when you talk to yourself you talk to them

You pedal for an hour but you're still home
the view changes even if you blink
and will continue to even if you get away
your breath stares back at you on glass

Moons drip over a desperation of sleeping roots
you fill it on nights that thin your time
owls listen for the crackle of fear in snow
before you go to where other people wait


Lake affect

Waking, Lake Erie piles up in her window. The cold green water swirls old shipwrecks open for her dream-gummed eyes to allow her dead husband to rise like white rocks from the waves. Algae blooms and a coal-colored pollen falls over all the rust. The face from her doll head cake turns on a scratched-in smile so that we may better see the chorus drowning with their hands tied. When we die we become the smell of liquor.

You who suffocate on your hunger, you who choke me up on the cold green cemetery lawn, how did the germs grow so fast to choke your heart?

On the form a blank hungers for his date of birth. His dead wife watches from her window as the shipyard rusts into the Black River, chocolate taste of lead on her tongue. Egrets reel. These days when I mow the cold cemetery lawn her mother's bitter lips tin an August morning surly with clouds. What you can do with a white bandana, with the smell of liquor, is near grace and almost grateful for how it coats everything, the cars, the lawns. Real egrets. Instead of going to you become. She is waiting for Lake Erie to fill her with ceaseless motion. She is suffocating with her mouth choked up on mercury and tin. The minnows' silver eyes dream in gum.

I towel the germs off and when she lifts me white from the tub spill them on the floor like a smear of cake.




The blizzard of '77

Ripples on the surface of the Black River chart the rise and fall of good times for egrets. With the frame smudged around her and with her face pinched to show her mother what she's made she holds the doll head cake out from the front of her body as if to hold it any closer would invite her mother's criticism. You pass through dusk with fireflies scintillating like airborn embers around you. Germs coat the windshields, the sidewalks, the lawn slashing the windows in the wood-paneling in the Blizzard of '77. In the back of your throat a small doll with her mother's face mutters crests into the troughs where egrets wheel and swoop.

War ripples across the continent, staining the Black River water the color of dead minnows floating belly-up against the splashed wings of egrets. Snug within the safety of the frame your father's smile points to the pins in his lapel. But no-one asked her to prom. Your white bandana makes you one of the good guys. On Marshall Avenue the grass sparks with flint light and the Blizzard of '77 plows your heart under, where a bag of warm takeout begins to think. I mow your lawn these days a hundred miles from the nearest pile of slag. In summer children climb to the top and launch empires into cold green waves. The Black River cups in their hand only the unlovely boats. Egrets repeat themselves in the sugar crinoline of her doll head cake and your heart coats the back of your throat like plastic. I'm porcelain. Ask your father to mow the lawn on Kentucky Avenue before these lengths of shadow choke him out into the cold green waves of derelict mustang grape. Have him look you in the face.

Germs scintillate like a porcelain dusk of misremembered fireflies that land on your arms and your shoulders and climb down your throat to choke your heart up. I dream in your ashes, another empire impaled on her mother's criticism. We're all scared.



The calligraphy of great lakes

In print you make your mark with my voice on hold
curved     the way my bones point in your direction

I wish I had listened to the roses     papering their season
in a room of no walls     you open every window
     to hear me tell it     from the street where our bikes

propellor     Are you trying to teach me     how to fly
or swim against your body slipping into spills greedy
      the light strained through     to colors      and so sinking

the sky can be worn like a hat     flotation device
toughening the sugar that clings to your fingers

     My breath the flavor of paper     in the sun’s plastic
streets where you lead me blind through the trees of your mark    



Count Chocula

With pollen in part as your throat, sprung cotton
among shag of light, at in instant oxidized, toxic
flavors of childhood’s improbably tomorrow

Their vehicles were trapped in what could carry
in legs, dried and picked off protein birds dare
colluding with information as murmurs as blue

The water invasion will vanish nights off
everyone waits to come out, carry dead out
to fields forever talking, long without breath

Imagine a wafer infestation of the host
resurrected, useless terms, tasting like
on the head of a pint, shrubs of printed word

Imagine the light vampire like your father’s
shame you could smell on the seats on hot
summer days catch the arrogance of dusk

BLOODLINE

  

Blood stains

the hard-packed snow

in the street

 

crisp cold air

creates a crust

on the chill white

landscape

 

and footsteps sound

like echoes

from distant hills

 

a cluster of children

hurry

past the mark

 

save one

 

a girl

with knowing eyes

 

who pauses

as if viewing a flower

 

then scurries on

cheeks stung

red as the stain

to join her comrades

going to the warmth

of somewhere



**********



BIGOT



hey faggot

he shouted

with venom and contempt

to a flamboyant

young man

across the street



to this

the flamboyant young man

with a toss of his head

and a different intent

said

how queer

to himself

and with sadness

and pity in his eyes

walked away from the words

without looking back



**********

all fluff 73*75


(lonely)

 

that night

like others, looking

for companionship

for someone

anyone

 

 

                (incredibly)

 

there you were

the shadows, flickering

enticing, exciting

we

                met

 

flashing dark

eyes showing

arrogance

sex

 

electricity

 

                (extraordinary)

 

temptation

sensation

elation

celebration

 

 

                (emotionally)

 

exhale inhale

in out

shout

wow

 

 

                (candidly)

 

for a while

very happy

 

some doubt

 

you stayed

                but

were you

there

 

I believed

in you & me

truly

 

 

                (retrospectively)

 

more or less

I confess

what a mess

 

you were pretty

but not elementary

 

 

                (specifically)

 

no loyalty

no integrity

just transitory

you used me

 

 

                (regrettably)

 

no surprise

so many lies

so unwise

no prize

 

 

                (pointedly)

 

you cheated

frequently

easily

blatantly

& everyone knew

but me

 

no remorse at all

you had a ball

 

never an apology

 

angry

 

sad

 

been had

 

 

                (ultimately)

 

you

me

we agree

                not to be

 

mercifully

 

you set me free

 

released from purgatory

 

                                end of story

Inconvenience

 

Such a bother,

Pain in the ass,

That's life? That's life? That's the best excuse they can selfishly reveal? 

Why. Cause. Your. Own. Headache?

You find yourself screaming,

Screaming on the inside,

Inner silent shrieks Of misunderstood loneliness.

Inner silent shrieks within yourself,

Misunderstood loneliness.

You really do. Not. Intend to.

Come, come on, please!

Prisoner imprisoned  in your own body.

Can they not see? 

They try, at least.

Waiting for some realization, actualization, condemnation to allure thought allowing this dove to fly.

Conveniently included. 

Living incoherently,

Incoherently living unjustly, inclusion when convenient!

Justified defiance? 

Will it ever come my way?

Never! 

If only people could understand 

They try, and get a sense of understanding,

That's all, a sense…

Unjust treatment becomes the normality

Title: Move On

Chorus

Move on (6CE)

Move on

Drive in

Get right here

Hit the Bull’s eye

Get on it

Don’t Give Up

Keep trying

Start moving

Study hard

Strive more

Be straight

Be Positive

See the result

Then Move On (6ce)

Be grateful

Expect problems

Fail forward

Don’t be afraid

Falter not

Keep to your words

Be hopeful

Don’t be discouraged

Refused to be depressed

Be patient

Keep the right friends

Then move on (6ce)

Verse 3

Keep learning

Study hard

Make sacrifices

Pay the price

Be attentive

Try new things

Be adventurous

Seek inspiration

Be creative

Stand out

Be yourself

Then Move on (6ce)

Take a breath!
the world is crispy,
Sun, hugs only its flowers.

I'm transparent,
Walking through cliffs.
But I'm not a wanderer.

Even Mangoes submit 
To apples.
For ' _apple-mangoes_ '.

The storm gets infuriated- 
rivers refuse rainbow popsicles.
My pupil, 
is not better than a lens.

So earth, the plain 
For toast and glass kisses?
Friendship and love might make it to heaven