Hey You

Fireworks every night, firecrackers that sound like bombs.

I hear skateboards on the pavement at 4 AM.

The adult infant sucks Cafe Bustelo from a hot ceramic breast

and confronts the blank tablet.

At night all tablets are blank but the brain fills them with dream pictures and messages.

Should I be composing an agenda? A dissertation? A business plan? Doing my taxes?

What is required of me? 

What do I require of the world and myself?

I have been reading the instructions for the first bardo,

for the state in between life and so-called death.

The main thing is to remember where you are.

Hey, you.

You are in between.

It is dark but the clear light of reality shines upon you.

Reality is staring in your face but you keep averting your eyes.

Hey, noble one, now is the time for your kind to drop and die,

for your ego, the sterling silver mastermind of the mess you call life, to collapse like the hollow statue of a Confederate general.

Your master race is a disgrace to humanity,

your founding fathers are dust and their legacy is shame, you know it’s a mess, and you’ll never get these scrambled eggs back into their shells.

Hey, white boy, hey white boy

Who are you talking to?

Are you talking to me?

Are you talking to me?

Are you talking to me?

Hey, you.

Pan-demos Panels 1-16

Pan-demos Panels

acrylic and ink on paper mounted on wood

2020

1. 10” X 10” December

2. 10” X 10” January

3. 10” X 10” January

4. 10” X 10” January

5. 10” X 10” February

6. 18” X 18” February

7. 10” X 10” Fevruary

8. 10” X 10” March

9. 10” X 10” February

10. 12” X 12” March

11. 12” X 12” March

12. 10” X 10” April

13. 12” X 12” April

14. 10” X 10” April

15. 12” X 12” April

16. 12” X 12” May

Household idol

We had a lawn jockey. I don’t know why. I don’t know if someone gave it to us. Or if my father bought it. 

But there it was at the entrance of the driveway holding an iron ring you could hitch your horse to. Dressed in white with a red vest, black face. We had it in Jupiter and brought it with us to Palm Beach Gardens and it stood at the entrance of the driveway.

A few years later, maybe 1968, someone left a note on it saying it was racist. I would’ve been 13 or 14. I’m not at all sure of the year. People were becoming more conscious of racism and even we were becoming aware of racist words and symbols. Instead of getting rid of it I proposed changing his race. I painted the face beige and the jockey kept his position as a hitching post for nonexistent horses. Now that the jockey was beige we could convince ourselves that we were not racist and never were.

Then he was gone. Someone stole the beige jockey and it was gone for a long time. Then it returned with a note saying he had run away, needed a change of scene, had a good time, many adventures, but missed us.

A newspaper writer and a photographer came over and wrote this pointless human interest story. A few years later it disappeared again. Then a different jockey, similar but different, appeared at the entrance to the driveway. I knew who put it there. It was two teenage brothers who had heard about the jockey and said they had it. They had stolen it and still had it, they said. But they had stolen a different jockey and now we had it. The strange jockey had also been painted over, deracinated with white paint, not with my beige, and it had a different base.

This is a stupid story about a stupid object we were stupid to have. Maybe it reminded my parents of Kentucky. I don’t know. It was a household idol. When we came back from a road trip it was there to greet us. Here’s home! Dad would say, as he pulled into the carport. I don’t know what became of the second jockey.

Another household idol we had was an iron Robert E. Lee figure, about ten inches tall, that my father kept on a table by the front door to use as a weapon if someone attempted to invade our home.

This object was purchased in 1965 during the road trip we took visiting Civil War battlefields. It was the Civll War centennial. We weren’t Confederate sympathizers. My ancestors had fought in the Union Army, but we picked up this souvenir of someone we had been told was an honorable general. I had a picture book that said he was honorable. I was told Civil War stories in which brother fought against brother and now we are at peace and try to work together.

Now that Confederate monuments are coming down in many places I think about that little idol, that little Confederate monument that stood in our entranceway and I can’t explain it. 

I wish I’d forgotten it.

Good white people

Good white people,

if you are good,

listen to black people.

If black lives matter,

listen to black people.

Good white people,

if you are good,

don’t be silent.

If black lives matter,

say “Black Lives Matter,”

and don’t be silent.

Because when a black life doesn’t matter,

no lives matter,

and you don’t matter.

When Breonna Taylor’s life,

or Eric Garner’s life,

doesn’t matter to the police,

no lives matter,

because black lives didn’t matter.

Good white people,

don’t be silent.

Black lives matter.

You are right,

good white people,

and the racist is wrong.

Introduction to reality.

Reality would like to introduce itself to you.

I'm afraid the next phase in this adventure will be around June 20 when many will be stricken down by the virus.

When the next wave of the pandemic hits we will be completely dependent on social media and we have to seriously attempt to communicate with each other. This is an emergency and our information needs to be true and our messages clear. 

We will depend on social media and the few essential workers -- who we need to take care of and more than compensate.

We burn trillions of dollars to the war god and we have the worst healthcare system in the world.

We give our treasures to the defense contractors and we militarize the police, but we cannot mobilize to provide healthcare workers with the equipment they need.

The American healthcare industry cannot take care of everybody because it is an industry with the aim of increasing profits. Healthcare should be better funded than warfare. Healthcare should be universal.

Everyone should have enough to take care of themselves and the time to more freely create themselves. That should be what a functioning economy should provide — the means to survive and the means to grow. To have more free time at home or traveling or migrating — to be treated with compassion, to have compassion be the reasonable and expected response, when one is suffering.

To agree on what is a threat and what is not a threat. To come to a consensus about what is real and what is not. To not point our guns at people. To not shoot first and ask questions later.  Cops and citizens cannot be so trigger happy, so quick to hurt somebody. And we can’t be so quick to hurt ourselves.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean you don’t defend yourself. It means you don’t set out with the intention to hurt somebody. It means you are not a ticking time bomb because you recognize you have anger issues. Nonviolence means not being set to panic or attack. Nonviolence means to have the courage of your moral autonomy. Nonviolence means to not be trigger happy but to have a good aim.

We all saw what the policeman did to George Floyd and we all agree it was wrong. It is good we can agree about that. We cannot heal this nation with a police state. Can we agree that there is no military solution? Insurgencies go on forever until the empire gives up and goes home. 

We are the Empire. We are the United States and we were designed to adapt, and to become more just, but “in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds.” Like it or not, we inherited an empire and it is up to us to make it the empire of Caesar or the empire of heaven. It is time to be transformed. It is the moment of metanoia. We are storming the gates of heaven.

The world is being reset. This is an apocalypse, a sudden catastrophic awakening to the necessity to wake up and stay awake and see what needs to be done and keep everybody calm. What would Jesus do? He said Love one another. What would bodhisattva do? They become awakened when we awaken, they come alive when we come alive.

Hosanna

We ask that everyone calmly go to the exits and leave the building. There is a fire in the building and we need to evacuate. We will be alright. Do not panic. Do not be afraid. The building is on fire and we need to leave.

Uncle Lars loves you.

Altar call

I saw The Reverend Doctor William Barber preach at Riverside Church in April 2017, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s revolutionary speech at that church. 

Rev. Barber read passages from MLK’s Letter From A Birmingham Jail, such as: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” It was clear that King’s call to liberal Christians to put themselves on the line was still urgent, that it was time to show up. I heard that call and needed to respond to that call and join the Movement, but I didn’t know what to do.

The second time I saw Rev. Barber was at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village on the last night of something they called a Revolutionary Love Conference. I returned the following Sunday and immediately felt at home, or felt I was someplace that could become a home, a community, a place where I could get involved in the movement. I started going every Sunday and hadn’t been going long when Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, the senior minister, asked for volunteers to go to Washington, DC to commit an act of civil disobedience and likely get arrested. 

King’s call from the Birmingham Jail was summoning me. “One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” is what King said. I had nothing to lose. I was unemployed, and no family responsibilities at all, so I joined a group of 31 clergy, medical professionals, and other activists to disrupt the Senate Republican effort to do away with affordable healthcare. We were arrested and charged with the crime of disrupting the crime of robbing people of healthcare. I didn’t go to jail, I had to do community service.

The experience was an initiation, a baptism into the Movement, and I officially became a member of Middle Church the following Sunday. I fulfilled my community service obligation at Middle, doing clerical work and helping hand out sandwiches to the homeless people in Tompkins Square Park and Sara Roosevelt Park with the Butterfly meal program. I continued with the Butterfly mission after my community service hours were done and got more involved with Middle, going to protests and rallies, book groups and support groups.

I joined Middle Collegiate Church three years ago. Two years ago Rev. Dr. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis founded the New Poor Peoples Campaign and I signed up. They were taking up the revolutionary movement MLK had started in 1968, one that unites blacks and whites and Asians and everybody else who labors and who are heavy laden and not getting a living wage, who are without healthcare, who are serving in a system that rewards those who exploit workers, punishes the poor for being poor, and punishes the sick for being sick. 

A system that punishes the black for being black.

I joined this campaign because it was evident we are now in a revolutionary situation and we need to get our values straight. We call this a moral fusion movement. We know that poverty is not a crime and is not natural selection but conditioned by an economic system that concentrates too much wealth in the hands of the few and that fails to provide enough for the essential workers. And all workers are essential in an economy. 

From quarantine to curfew in three easy months. Two years of preparing for the big June 20 rally in DC and now we are reinventing it as a virtual rally, but who knows what will be happening in two weeks? I was ready to get arrested in DC on June 20. How can we really put ourselves on the line? How can we turn this moment into a movement and this uprising into a revolution?

I stand with this call:

“Building a movement to overcome systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the war economy. Everybody's got a right to live. #PoorPeoplesCampaign”

#STOPWHEREYOUAREMONDAY

Join us: June2020.org

Brief

Life is brief.

What should I do today?

I wanted to walk to Lower Manhattan yesterday, the third day of June. If there is a rally at Foley Square, or anywhere, I would go to that and take pictures. I want to defy Covid-19 to show solidarity with the protestors, but the forecast was for thunderstorms all afternoon. The virus continues its, work, expands its work, and I attend to the work of making revolution and saving humanity by posting things on Facebook and going to virtual rallies on Zoom.

I don’t really know what to do. There are plenty of chores I need to do, eventually. I won’t list them here, they would bore you to death, as they are boring me to death. I can’t concentrate on them because now something is happening all over the world. The virus is all over the world and now a movement, a demand for life. 

The virus of revolution has come to us.

Darryl’s memorial service is on Zoom this afternoon.

zoom zoom zoom

Life is brief. 

Brief like a word, transient I mean, a breath,

a sound gasped by the lungs and shaped by the mouth,

articulated by tongue and teeth,

in the primal act of signifying,

an evolutionary adaptation created in our Mother Africa,

the womb of humanity,

Eve Herself, 

Mother of Life,

embracing and embraced by the othered,

in the primal creative act of uniting and separating.

Children of Unity at play.

This is only a poem about Life. 

Capital L to signal a vocal emphasis, if read aloud.

We are children of Adam, children of dust, and we have been given Life giving breath,

we have been given Life to give and to share.

A life is brief but Life is ever-lasting, infinite, and never forgets us.

The tree that falls in a forest makes a sound that is heard by the forest,

and that tree does not die but is transformed and remembered by the forest.

A brief life that falls and stops breathing is swallowed by

the all-embracing Life system that watches over me,

that is my holy Mother of God,

Guadalupe

Guadalupe is made of wood and stands in front of me.

Candlelight throws her brilliant dancing shadow on the wall.

Only a projection, I know, of an object you and I found in a gift shop in Williamsburg, and we loved her and we named her 

The Sweetheart of the Rodeo.

The Deacon called me this morning and told me her father died.

She tried to call me last night and the phone was in the other room and I was in bed and had turned off the light and I wanted to sleep.

I’m so sorry, I said.

Her father had moved back to Birmingham last October, and bought a house.

Yesterday he sat on the steps in front of the house and died.

He went home to die, I said.

Her mother died seven years ago on June second and her father died on June third.

When my father died I fell into the abyss, but my father’s love and my mother’s love still manifest themselves to me. 

Your love manifests itself to me in tears.

How can I explain this to anyone?

A life is brief, but life is everlasting and love is as strong as death, I think.

I wish you could meet the Deacon, 

you would love her.

Breaking News

The day after Memorial Day I visited a strange city that looked exactly like Manhattan except there were fewer people outside and most of them were wearing masks. The same buildings were there, or buildings that looked like the buildings of Manhattan, but the stores were closed. Maybe it was a movie set, where they could film stories set in Manhattan, but it wasn’t Manhattan, it was a strange city.

It took me thirty minutes to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge to Delancey, avoiding people, maintaining social distance, suspicious of the unmasked. I had an appointment to get a vaccination for pneumonia. Full disclosure: I am a pro-vaxer and I wear a mask and I tend to think Dr. Fauci has a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about and that he is not behind a plot to overthrow America by injecting microchips in all of us. 

The doctor’s office is on 8th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues at a Mount Sinai facility. It took about an hour and twenty minutes to walk there. The doors are locked and there is a note to ring the doorbell. Inside, someone has a box of masks. She says I can put one on over the one I’m already wearing, one I made from a T shirt. I didn’t see any other patients. A nurse gives me the shot and then he draws blood for the lipid panel and gives me a hearing test and a vision test. This was the most physical human contact I’ve had in two months. My doctor stops by. We had a tele-visit last week and had only met in person once before and now we are both wearing masks. I can see by her eyes that she was smiling under hers.

In Brooklyn, Manhattan is referred to as “the City” by old timers. Brooklyn is part of New York City, but Manhattan is “the City” you go to for work or to visit a museum or to go to a concert or bookstores or to just walk around looking at people and things and to be part of the City, to be a New Yorker. This trip to the City wasn’t like that. I had to go there to get this shot and do these other things the doctor needed that we couldn’t do in a tele-visit. I didn’t go to the Strand and I couldn’t eat breakfast at Cosy’s and I didn’t sit in Washington Square Park and write in my notebook.

After my vaccination I went to the West 4th Street subway station, took the latex gloves out of my pocket, put them on, swiped my Metrocard, and got on an M train. The car was clean and there were two other passengers. This Manhattan isn’t the City at all, it is a dream of the City, a memory, a souvenir of the City I used to walk to, a city now far, far away, maybe in the future.

That was the day after Memorial Day. On Memorial Day George Floyd was murdered by a police officer and by Tuesday the videos began to circulate. Now the cities are on fire. We (white people) need to examine ourselves and stop telling ourselves we aren’t racists. The virus is still disproportionately killing people of color. Most essential workers are people of color. I don’t know what to say to my black friends, let alone to black people I don’t even know. I go to book groups about white fragility and anti-racism, but I still don’t know how to be anti-racist. I have no doubt that the racist power structure will come to an end, but it won’t come soon enough. It should’ve ended 400 years ago.

Our system is still programmed for white supremacy. We (white people) are still the privileged race in this racist system. That system is coming down one way or another. The president is well aware that there is a multitude who would be happy to see his White House go up in flames right now, and there are more than enough people to make it happen. So he hid in his bunker and threatened us with “vicious dogs” and “horrible weapons.”

This City, not just New York City, but the American City, has always already been a foreign city. We were already strangers here. We were already trying to find our way to our home, but there is no Normal to return to. I believe there is a way to a City of Peace and we need to follow that way. The City of Peace is within us, among us, to the extent that it is possible to build community and take care of each other and abolish the system of estrangement that puts us against each other.

We are walking through a dark wilderness now that could become a forest fire and we need to summon all wisdom and courage to get out of here alive. Divine human grace, the clear light of reality, can guide our path, if we let it be so. So I believe.