Potato Popo

They give him 30 days in San Ber’dino

– Frank Zappa, San Ber’dino

“The suspect’s head looks like a potato,” types a patrolman.

The AI surveillance of San Ber’dino porches

train on adversarial images of potatoes,

earthy spuds with loam nuggets in their clogged pores,

roots creeping and skins greening

during their pantry stowaway concealments.

Every potato is a precious snowflake individuality incarnate.

Albert’s potato-shaped-universe could bang big over and over

and every time a different holographic mass would unfold

from the same unevenly distributed infinite premise.

The engineers who programmed the surveillance doorbells

used the same algorithm God did: deus machina, code is law.

The AIs try to generate the suspect’s potato.

They instead create inflationary suspicions mapped by reticulating splines.

San Ber’tato streets ravel like knitting around porch AI.

The Riemann-Gauss asymptotes of suspects arrive in police blotters

in batches of infinitude.

San Par’tato police BOLO infinite no-knock warrants,

wake the judges at 3am to cut a potato stamp like a grade schooler.

The judge’s inkpad runs dry.

With starchy stamps and fingerpaints he authorizes

the generative algorithms into creation.

The Popo pop potato people throughout the Pan-Par’tato suburbs.

One for the chair will fry. Another scallops a scapegoated caseload casserole.

One baked gives up his dealer. Many are mashed, hugging their ribs.

The suspect is still not drawn from the deck of possible perps.

The suspect is hidden in the precinct 52 Factorial

the faces of the public stare at curbside handcuffs, at spud-gun gunpoint.

The Pot’tato Popo having transformed the city of San Ber’dino

into the lumpen image of their search algorithms.

Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, MasticadoresUSA, Poetry Pacific, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Carmina, untethered, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows,Muleskinner,Brittle Star, MathematicalIntelligencer, Journal of HumanisticMathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Beatnik Cowboy, Delta Poetry Review, Stick Figure, miniMAG, and 100+ more. His litcritis in BeZine, Erato,Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, StudiesinSocialJustice, Rampike, Seeds, and The/t3mz/Review.  His Erdösnumber is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first 2 writing grants.

My Morning Conversation..!

Oh morning, my friend…

Good morning to you, and to all the beautiful things around us.

To you who returned after a long, dark night,

Good morning, my morning,

To the places where we laughed so much,

To every spot we visited,

To every café and every coffee cup,

And to every heart that carries purity in its soul — just like you, my friend.

Reach out your hand to mine —

One hand cannot clap alone,

But it invites you to enjoy a cup of coffee from my hand.

Let’s share stories and memories we once lived together

As we sip the warmth of morning coffee.

For in coffee, beauty shines just as you do.

My friend,

Good morning to you,

You and coffee remain my dearest companions.

You are the essence of nature and its comforter —

Without you, nature would not be as we desire.

And coffee — the icon of morning and the queen of warmth —

Lifts us from the ecstasy of dreams and thoughts

Into a world where we discover something new with your arrival.

You gather us,

And collect what scattered from us in the vastness of space.

My beautiful friend,

You steal your light from the sun,

You are the hope that erases the heart’s pain and burdens.

Let your morning breeze speak of the beauty of your soul,

So our morning may be filled with goodness and hope.

You are the garden of love that grants happiness and safety.

In you, souls are renewed with every creation.

Do you know your worth to me and to humanity?

You, the light-hearted visitor —

You are that morning, unchanged!

Yet every day,

You come to us with a new face,

Radiant, smiling, and more beautiful and elegant than before.

Because you are the morning,

You are the one from whom people draw their beauty.

Every day I greet you —

May God bless your morning with joy.

Know that I am with you, wherever you are.

Every day I thank God,

And I remember Him more,

So I may find happiness,

And so may you —

That your soul may find peace.

Good morning, my friend.

You are the rose and its fragrance.

These are soft and tender words I greet you with —

For they are lovely and kind.

Every night before I sleep, and at dawn,

I ask my Lord:

Will the morning visit me today?

Will a cup of coffee bring us together once more?

I send my peace and greetings to it with the scent of roses.

In the morning,

I search for my things,

My wishes,

And for someone beautiful like you,

Oh my morning… my friend.

Do you know, you who brighten the face of the day?

I am a person who seeks peace of mind and respect

With someone who values life, love, and kind connection.

Because, honestly,

I am just like you — light-spirited,

Careful, precise, clean, elegant, and organized.

I dislike chaos.

I’m looking for a woman who is beautiful, gentle, generous,

Someone with presence and personality —

A woman with pride, nobility, and radiance.

I wish to build this relationship

On mutual respect and trust between us, in love.

Would you accept me as a friend and a beloved?

That is who I am,

My beautiful friend…

Oh morning.

‘The Colour Purple is a treasure trove of racially and ethnically diverse backdrop of a protagonist’s double discrimination; Celie is a Black American gendered quester everywoman flustered and crestfallen into the quagmires of precarious predicament, tumultuous turmoil, herculean struggle and existentialist debacle surmounting the perils and animadversions of adversities and hindrances through the epistolary genre fiction corresponding between God and lately her blood relation Nettie.

Alice Walker, after all, surrealistically and poetically limelights the rhetorical statements foreshadowing Celie’s bildungsroman as implied in the newfound revelation of a transcendentalist triumphalism emerging as a gendered crusader evangelizing and divinizing heavenly celestial indoctrination: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear skies, dear people, dear everything.” Evolving herself as a veteran victor of Amazonian spirited independent beingness and body-polity corporeality identity consciousness personifies the struggles and tribulations of survivalism and existentialism from the ghettoization and otherization of stalwart patriarchal masculinity hegemonic misogyny of father Alfonso and husband Mr. ______ or Mr. Albert. Celie radically transforms herself as a womanist of colour in critiquing the viciousness and wretchedness of domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, marital rape, tormetns and tortures of widowhood and dowry, incessant painstaking manual labour of the barnyard farmwork, libidinization and fetishization of powerlessness and non-beingness.

As a civil rights era suffragette activist and feminist movement advocate the Southerner African American novelist Alice Walker foretells chronicles of epistolary sagas in the voice of iron-willed, impulsive, resolute, maverick, obdurate and curmudgeon feminine countenances such as Shug Avery, Celie, Nettie, Sofia and Mary Agnes that relegates and condescends veteran masculine figures into deconstructionist colloquial vernaculars of being ‘mad captor’ and ‘beastly dog’. Quintessentially quiltmaking craftsmanship of the peasantry trade embellishes the prospects of female empowerment although the framed meta-narrative allegorically symbolizes lioness spirited Black Womens’ resurrectionist redemptive emergence. Racism, sexism, collourism, ethnic cleansing, racial apartheid and so forth intertwines story-telling motifs and themes.

Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ is a feminist bildungsroman epistolary chronicle of women’s fictional life writing that navigates an odyssey of stories and poetry such as the relationship between men and women and the relationship between parents and children. The canonical womens fictional novel spotlights the human condition: loss of innocence, quest for individuality, the nature of human suffering and the triumph of the human spirit. Furthermore Alice Walker’s rhetorical statements illuminates captivating enchantment to the tastes and fashions of contemporary modern readers: “I’m committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and triumphs of black women.” 

Albert Johnson’s racist patriarchal misogyny implores imperative hierarchical zeitgeist of power, dominance and control through teachings and preachings to the heirloom Harpo. Harpo harnesses the spirit of antifeminism by downcasting and dehumanizing behavioral etiquettes with his wife, Sofia as substantiated by these dialectics: “I’m getting tired of Harpo. All he think about since us getting married is how to make me mind. He don’t want a wife, he want a dog.” Notwithstanding companionship amity blossoms into fosterage of loving partnership between the foiled duo couple Samuel and Nettie being entrusted with the spirit of equality. Equanimity and egalitarianism is further advanced by the progression of the womens libertarian social justice and freedom for emancipation movement in the artisanal craftsmanship of quiltmaking. Quintessentially Smithsonian depiction of crucifixion symbolizes the historic legacy of anonymous black women more than a century trademark, Celie’s entrepreneurial proprietorship in Memphis towards financial independence of the heroic protagonist.

In ‘The Colour Purple’ iron-willed and obdurate declarative: “I make myself wood. I say to myself Celie you are a tree” symbolically metamorphoses towards enlightening transcendence as emerging victor cator of the destructive and dehumanizing microcosm. Celie disgruntled oppression and objectification through these unflinching and unwavering declarations. Moreover, the womanist fictioneer projects Celie’s alienation and estrangement through personality. Womanist of Colour, Walker furthermore crafts the farewell valedictorian quoteworthy speech as epiphanic emergence of transcendentalist triumphalism: a song of glory, the revelation of newfound harmony between the heroine and the universe within and without: 

“Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear people. Dear everything. Dear God.”

The Fourth of July Celebration is both festive and jubilant since Nettier’s husband, Samuel and Celie’s long-lost children reunites: “White people are busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don’t have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other.” All the divisions between people which plagued and tormented the characters during the epistolary fable have concluded in comical relief.

The epistolary womanist fiction chronicles the harrowing survivor of dysfunctional family household; Celie’s existentialist emergence as a bildungsroman emancipatory voice of Black woman through formulation of letter correspondence between God and later to her sister Nettie. Parallel to these events of the plotline, Alice Walker foreshadows curmudgeon relationship conflicts amongst Mr. ____ or Mr. Albert’s daredevil and sexist son Harpo and his soulmate, Sofia, as a formidable, amazon-like woman who dramatizes the plight of the female in rebellion. Being a woman’s rights’ movement advocate and liberations struggle emancipator, Walker highlights racial undercurrents of American society visa-vis the polarized binaries between black-white male/female consciousness and/or beingness. Celie is the object of male gaze who underscores nothingness and powerlessness; being undermined by despotic whims and idiosyncratic desires of the patriarchal houselord Mr_____or Mr. Albert. Despite these tumultuous turmoils Celie’s association with the libertarian Sofia and Shug ushers doors into the world of agency, autonomy, self-individuality and self-fulfillment.

Celie discovers newfound identity and female selfhood corresponding with the community of women: Avery Shug, Nettie, Sofia and Mary Agnes, thus radicalizing liberty and freedom from the captivity and enslavement of patriarchal dominance and/or male brutality and/or conservative Chrisitian orthodoxy. Both infantilism and maternity bond emerges following episodic erotic orgasmic relationship between Celie and Shug: “And God love all them feelings” salvages spiritualist quest merging with archaic, preoedipal, prephallic and preverbal fantasy desire fulfillment and/or ideal ego formations during the mirror stage. Mary Agnes as the alter ego Doppelganger reincarnate of Celie; janitor or warden’s daughter escapes brutal subjection of the oppressive tyrant father within the post traumatic torment of the resultant limpid, disfigured robes, heels gone missing from her shoes, repudiates derogatory names of “Squeak”; ultimately these victors transcends enduring oppressions by bolstering powers over men with daggering denunciation. 

Sewing or weavings evolves as quintessentially women’s transformative powers that transplants renewal and regeneration in puritanical patriarchs: “Now us sit sewing and talking and smoking our pipes” symbolizes eradication of gender and class status quos, thus expediting gendered racial egalitarianism of matrifocality within the community of kinship network. Walker (1982) used quiltmaking as a metaphor of bridging and mending differences and ameliorating interpersonal dynamics fostered among the brethrenship; thus quiltmaking facilitates a metaphor of subversion to conventional and parochial gender roles and stereotypes. Despite dysfunctional family dynamics, characters reconcile to each other as encapsulated in Walker’s words: “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” 

After all, Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ is the penultimate testament to critique the survival of African American community as genealogical isolates and /or natally alienated beings; the epistolary fiction furthermore reiterates ‘sisterhood as a tactic of survival and springboard to freedom’ . “My whole life is [there]…they are all [there], my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates.” Alice Walker’s Corrine is the harbinger for the spectrum of creative possibilities embodied by language and sewing, clothworking and letterwriting, quilt-making and correspondence. 

“A needle and not a razor in my hand” ——Celie’s comrade Shug Avery bolstering of creative and productive choice rather than a vengeful, destructive choice; Shug furthermore fosters empowerment for Celi’s rebirth, renewal, regeneration, resurrection, reincarnation, redemption  and new life through Easter Sunday family holiday excursion. Mystical moments of spiritual promptings coincided herein “going to church, singing in the choir, feeding the preacher and all like that.” 

Alice Walker’s womanist prose declares the very essence of commitment to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. The womanist novelist epitomizes herself as the feminist of colour in love(ing) the spirit and love(ing) herself. Natural scenery of the sublime and the beautiful awakens Walker’s heroines to the sense of intimate interconnectedness of all life. Wily Shug’s ministrations regains the possession of letters by Nettie from infamous and malicious Mr______/ Despite World War II torpedo of Nettie and her family; nonetheless Celie’s reunion with her children from fostered parentage reunites at the novel’s conclusion thus culminating in the novel’s denouement following nineteenth century Victorian bildungsroman as “a Black Jane Eyre.” 

Tyrants, desports, captors, conspirators, oppressors, suppressors and tormentors  of patriarchal stalwartness radically reconciled as redeemed figures through gender role reversals. Mr ______ sewing, house-keeping, home-making and collection of sea-shells pontificates the substantive reconciliation and renewal. The apocalyptic vision of the novel is offered by the resolution which establishes a peaceful kingdom by anthropogenic questers in seeking for love and justice.

Black folkloric indigeneity ballads of heritage and culture is in fact contemporary African-American writers access to their racial heritage, not only as a content of struggles for freedom, liberty, justice, emancipation, egalitarianism and equality but also as a form of dialectical experience, practice and self. 

From these discussions Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ popularizes Victorian bildungsroman as a sitcom of the black American diaspora by sadomasochism of the masculine stalwart legions of patriarchy and misogyny.

Abe, We Need You!

Lincoln said it—November 19, 1863—

GETTYSBURG, Pennsylvania

“. . .the government of the people,

by the people, and for the people,

shall not perish from the earth.”

With these words—

inspiring, articulate, immortal–

Our elected President

 summed up America’s Civil War,

A massive effort to keep

America’s democracy

  Alive!

Yet today—161 years later—

America elects a convicted felon,

One who cares NOT

About America, NOT about democracy,

But only about himself.   

One whose words are Laughable,

Mean, Bumbling, immoral.

One who surrounds himself NOT

With experts dedicated

to the American people,

But with loyalists,

Dedicated ONLY to him,

With very minimal

Legitimate qualifications

For their governmental assignments.

After all these years, can our Founding Fathers

Still roll over in their graves?

Image of a blue glass toy fish.

AQUARIUM

My grandchildren and I

Went out to visit four aquarium stores

To see marine and freshwater fish

Pet and bird stores

To see if we could buy a species or animal

That would delight them

For their and our amusement.

In one of them

There was an old man with a very ugly face

Who looked like a deranged priest

Who, when greeting one of my grandchildren

Saying:

-Hi, what a nice kid!

He put his hand on his ass..

I didn’t know him at all.

 That’s why

When he told me he was from Tolbaños

From the province of Ávila

North of the Ojos Albos mountain range

In a granite peneplain

Crossed to the southeast

By the Berrocalejo stream

Also called Bernuy or de la Mediana

I pushed him so hard

To avoid kicking him in the balls

That he hit his head in an aquarium

Without breaking his fucking temper

Demanding the store employee

To kick this pedophile out of the store

Which he didn’t do

Because he ran away himself

Exclaiming sulkily:

-There’s nothing for true love

Like becoming a priest

Unning away.

 A saying that reminded me

Of the Archpriest of Hita (Juan Ruiz)

From the late medieval Mester de clerecía

In his “Book of Good Love”

In which he recounts his love affairs 

With various women

All of different backgrounds:

Nuns, Moorish women, Bakers

Mountain women

Women of high and low standing

And procures like “la Urraca”

Better known as “la Trotaconventos”

 (The Convent Trotter).

The store clerk

As we said goodbye without buying anything

He said to me very solemnly:

-They already know this man

At the local police station.

He’s a pedophile named Don Melón

Married to Doña Endrina.”

-Daniel de Culla