photo by Alex Lear
Sometimes when i hear
thunder, i think of you
your shuddering
intensity
shaking me
like embracing
rumbling
summer thunder
the lightening
of your spent smile
tenderly tattooed
into the hollow
of my neck
the feel of you
beneath the pulsing
rain of my rhythms —
rocking
like waves
wetter
than water
—kalamu ya salaam
Why I Don't Leave The Apartment Until After Ten Some Mornings i like to lay in the curve of your physique you breathing into the black of my hair the pressure of thigh to thigh the beige softness of your inner hand slow moving across the tubular darkness of my arousal my left arm reached back massaging the supple flesh of your lower back for long minutes quarter hours spent with nothing but skin & pleasure between us _____________________ 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
A Gun In The Hand Is Worth...
it was a cliche
in a sad sort of way, the way
these weird, oppressive social
games are played
it happened in a community center (so called)
a food stamp office
she was old, tired,
had an injured hip, a
pillow and a cane,
and was number two
hundred and one
when the cut-off was
two even, brother man
on guard dumbly overdoing
his duty invited her
to stay out, she asked
to rest inside, he denied
then like a saturday poker game
with a newcomer taking all
the chips, it turned unnecessary
nigger ugly, "bitch, if-in
you wasn't so old
i'd go upside yo haid,
this here office is closed
i said,"
"son, what did you say?"
the repeat hissed snake like
cross his teeth, calmly
her old hand went
inside her old bag
and came up with her
old gun and with her
old voice she slowly
repeated an old phrase:
"well play like I'm
sweet sixteen and
hit me...!"
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
all that's black ain't brother
1.
white people
come in all colors
their systems sink
past skin
anchoring into bone, mind
flesh, heart and soul
it is geno-suicide
to minstrel aliens
but some of us do die
strangled by our own
hands
2.
some of us
selfishly think that
self starts
and stops
with i
dream not of peace
but money, don't
dance, hate
our energy
and lust for
an equal opportunity
to turn the screws
see that
black boy over there,
he's white.
—kalamu ya salaam
Haiku #133
no heart can be whole
til its been broke, mended &
then — re-used again
—kalamu ya salaam
flushing before finishing
before i was finished urinating i flushed the toilet. it was like my father was standing beside me. i know where i got this habit from. big val used to do that. he used to flush the toilet before he was finished. and they used to call me lil val. i don’t remember whether it was because we had the same first name, vallery, shortened by most folk who knew us to val, or did i really look like him, act like him? was i really a new generation of him?
there is no easy answer.
a few years ago i was commissioned to write an essay about family. i choose to write about the spirit family of the secondline. my words did not even mention my father, yet, something strange happened. well, not really strange, now that i think about it. but at the time i just went along with the unusual request and thought nothing about it, until months later someone made a remark that has left me wondering. “you look just like your father.”
what was the request? the photographer said, can i shoot you without your glasses on? i’ve worn glasses since i was in third grade—even when i sat on the first row, i couldn’t read the blackboard, and i was a good reader. so, i took off my glasses and patiently waited for the photographer to finish. afterwards, i forgot about it.
my daddy didn’t wear a beard. i’ve worn a beard since the seventies. yet, the older i get, the more i look like my father. what gives? did my unique and younger genes loose the fight with the older genes passed directly from my father? do we really change how we look as we grow older? am i a unique case? what’s up with looking like my father?
as i finish urinating i am forced to admit i don’t know how much of me is me as opposed to my father living in me; which, of course, begs the question how much of me is in my sons and daughters.
i used to think it didn’t make sense to flush the toilet before one is finished urinating, especially as sometimes relieving one’s self took longer than one initially thought it would and one would have to flush the toilet a second time to clear out the lemony-colored water from the bowl. and even more infuriating, sometimes, if it was one of those old house toilets, you had to wait almost two full minutes for the toilet tank to contain enough water in order to flush a second time. and yet, as stupid as i used to think it was to continue the habit of flushing before finishing, today i do it, even after congratulating myself in my youth for not following my father’s example. i do it and i know exactly from whom i got this habit.
what i don’t know is what all else i got from him. i’ve never done a complete inventory and the reason i never did this inventory is because even though i have one of his habits that i often thought didn’t make sense, and even though i look like him, today i am forced to admit i never knew him well enough to know whether there are other aspects of him that i keep alive. most of us never really know our parents personally as individuals, we only know them as the older people who had us and who, if we are lucky, took good care of us. yet is it not true that there is no future that is not intimate with the past?
whether we know our parents and forbears, whether we look like them, whether we have their temperament or proclivities, their way of walking or talking, way of bearing pain or grudges, whether we love them and talk with them often, or could care less and have not seen them in decades, whether they live now or have transitioned to ancestorhood, whatever, whether whatever, the simple truth is: an essential part of all we are is shaped by whatever our parents have been (even if we don’t know who or what they were)—their influence on our fate is inescapable.
—kalamu ya salaam
NICENESS
(for the girl in the next block)
There was a time when beauty was so beautiful. Those moments before the rose wilts, the flame turns to an ember, when you smiled because you could see that I was happy to see you and that made you happy. We were going somewhere. Winston and his girl were in the front seat driving, you and I were in the back, hanging on to each other like a delicious cookie in the hands of a two year old. Both of us were newly past the age of majority, able to go anywhere, do whatever, and at that moment the “whatever” was your hand lightly on my knee, and, to my great delight, palm pressed lightly on the inside of my left thigh, that same hand that was now making haste very slowly up the arc my legs, which I opened slightly to make room for your fingers.
The night was no longer young. We had been dancing and drinking, and neither one of us was ready to let the other go, and rather than romantically kiss me you leaned back, your right cheek resting on my chest just below my goateed chin, then you sighed contentedly and simply said: it’s a nice night.
I knew what you meant. I hadn’t kissed you yet but it was nice—I don’t often use that square word to describe the sublime but within the confines of the car that warm night, the windows down, the darkness of our breathing synchronizing like birds and bees, “nice” was a just right way to describe what we felt for each other. We was nice. I hadn’t much even touched your breast or anything, but there was a knowing in our closeness, and more than closeness there was a palpable intimacy hovering over us even though we were not alone in this car speeding through the night. Everything was niceness.
—kalamu ya salaam
Janis Joplin/poor white-refuse
refugee running for cover of rock,
like a baby with an hereditary
birth defect, i didn't ask
for this white skin privilege;
this maximum security
with guards everywhere
and the wall so far off
so high, so hard to scale
minefields of twinkling consumables
studding the distance between
me and the rest of humanity,
a spiraling bob of drugs at the top
and i ain't asking for no
mercy neither, no pity, none
of yall tears, anyway,
i'm going to kill myself
or at least die trying
they say i'm so wild
cause all what i need is a man,
a real man, a hard on
but like once a man was in me
and said "god, you so ugly
i can't look" but so what
is his opinion anyway but
a thirty second commercial
he thinks he's a man
he thinks niggers stink
he thinks i'm a piece of meat
he's my father, my brother
and this is no gentle incest
nor any human touch
so i will do these insane acts
i will sing in the night
say what i want
drink and be driven crazy
put a tombstone
and real flowers on
a black woman's grave
and have no regrets, no
regrets
—kalamu ya salaam
MURDER
our sister is thin. she is leading her whole family down the street. her four year old is just ahead of her. she and her little man, two year old malik, walk hand in hand behind skipping and giggling sekou. she is not paying any attention to things in the streets: the cars, trucks and busses whizzing by in both directions. they had missed the bus they needed. the evening was nice. warm. so why not walk and why not take a short cut down napoleon avenue, a thoroughfare what used to be one of white folks' big streets?
a camera swung innocently on her hip beneath the medium sized windbreaker, which enveloped her. although out of sight, the camera was at the ready because she liked to shoot. most of the time without film. she would "see" a scene. compose an artistic comment from a chance encounter. but not being able to afford as much film and processing as she would shoot if she had the green to match her ambition, she would just flash the camera and capture the still in her mind's eye, the image frozen in her brain as the sound of the shutter-click indicated the shot was complete. some people did not understand taking pictures without film. they either were not deep into art or else they were not poor. but poor artists know, you've got to practice your art anyway you can.
cause she was on a family outing. listening to her boys be themselves. actually coming back from standing in line paying a bill and headed to the house that barely qualified as shelter, not to mention was a poor stand-in for a secure and loving place she could accurately call home. because her braids were in place and would not need rebraiding for another three or four months. because the essential bills were now paid. and she did have thirty dollars in her pocket for two weeks of food. because sekou was singing "space is the place..." his favorite sun ra song -- oh, she was proud that sekou dug ra. i mean, what parent would not be proud of a four year old with the sensitivity to embrace sun ra? because she was making sure she was walking slow enough so that malik could keep up but fast enough so that sekou would not outdistance them. because malik was just getting over the flu and she kept hugging him from time to time both to cuddle and to take his temperature. because she was enjoying her kids. and had taken fifteen shots of them already today. the last one a little shaky because she didn't use a flash and the shadows were getting long, which meant shooting at a slow shutter speed and her hand had shook a little as she focused on the look in malik's eyes and saw the man whose seed spawned malik. the hand shake was not out of hate or even any particular rememberance of love or passion, but rather because this little man looked so much like that big half-a-man and she could not help but wonder would little man grow to become the whole man that the older man was destined never to be. she knew that was her task. to somehow teach these little sweet knuckleheads to become men, somehow, in the absence of a steady man on the scene. if you are a young woman. attractive but not gorgeous. black in color and consciousness. poor as a welfare queen, except not even food stamps stuffed into your bra. proud in the classic "we may not have much but we're going to make it" way, estranged from your birth family because you have become, some-terrible-how, exactly what your upbringing and college education was supposed to prevent: a poor, single mother of two, head of household, fatherman long gone. if you have struggled with being a statistic for three or four years running. cooped yourself up. did odd jobs here and there. hung on by a thread. managed to hold on to your decency -- i.e. declined to live off of ocassional dollars left on the bedside by dawgs who liked the way you jocked their dick -- managed to stay physically clean of diseases (and you have found the easiest way to suffer sexual deprivation is to do without completely, except, of course, for the casual hand job in the tub or a particular good spliff of reefer every other week or so), so you’re clean and have managed to hold on to your pride. no begging back to mama. no buckling under to stern papa's patriarchal nonsense. if you were wearing synthetic clothes even though you prefered cottons and wools. payless sneakers when rockport walkers were really what you needed, especially given that you walked most places you had to go--a buck a throw to ride the bus added up to a tremendous deficit in the pocketbook, and besides, it was usually three bucks to ride because it was cheaper to take family outings then to even think about paying one of the kids in the block to be a babysitter, besides what sense did it make to let kids who were little more than babies watch your babies? if you had finally sold some photos to some magazine for less than you hoped but for as much as you could expect, cashed the money at the corner, paid your electricity bill, paid the rent, and still had thirty dollars and change left over to buy food for two weeks until next payday, because of all of that, if you were shooting a photo of your youngest son and you saw the last man who dispassionately screwed over you staring out of your son’s two year old eyes, your hand would quiver too. all of the above is why her hand shook a little trying while squeezing off that slow-shutter-speed shot.
because of ruminating on all of that and because she just never would have expected it, she wasn't paying attention to the brother walking toward her until he stopped in front of them. went down into his pocket and began pulling out a pistol that was so long it seemed like it took two hours for him to keep extracting it from its hiding place. he just kept coming up, up, up with that thing.
why was he showing her his gun? was all she could think of at first.
brother was tall but not overly tall. just regular ghetto brother tall. tall enough to be playing ball instead of pulling a gun on her. was moderately attractive, except she did not pay too much attention to his looks because she was faced with the fascination of a lethal weapon about to be aimed at her chest. he maybe weighted as much as her whole family -- sekou was no more than forty-some pounds, malik was only about twenty-nine pounds, and she weighed ninety-eight pounds wringing wet -- she had weighed herself the last time she took a bath at her girlfriend's house, her girl friend, whom she hadn't seen or talked to in months now, kept a scale next to the tub, so when she stepped out, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, to hop on the scale and give it a go, the scale registered ninety eight and a half pounds, she had deducted half a pound for the water dripping off her and for the towel she was clutching and rubbing across her body as she dried herself -- so 98 plus let's say 30 was 128 plus say 45 was 163, no 173, yeah, he looked to weigh 200 or so pounds. shit. he didn't need no gun to rob her. he could have been like most men and just threw his weight around. but she couldn't help paying attention to that gun.
a gun is a funny thing when it's aimed at your chest, when it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't give a damn about your life, when it's loaded and maybe also loaded is the person holding the piece. a gun is funny in the macarbe sense that even though she was a statistic of poverty she had never thought of herself as eligible to become a statistic of homicide until she was confronted by a little piece of specifically twisted metal, phallic shaped and capable of spewing a metal projectile that can rent flesh, shatter bone and easily cause fatal harm.
we had embraced when we met, the huge of my bear hug almost wrapped completely around her twice, my right hand on my left elbow, my left hand vice versa, her living flesh encased against my chest, i could feel her breathing, her small breasts, the slenderness of her back, the top of her head not fully up to my chin, she didn't look sick or anything, or feel weak, but no one would mistake her for being at the top of her game, she had a semi-nervous gesture when i asked how she had been, both hands went to her hair and tugged the braids back on her head, hands over her ears like she didn't want to hear the question, and she looked down, away from me, before answering that she was just kind of coming out of seclusion. while she made those silent sad gestures, i was thinking about her children being sequestered in a cramped shotgun double, and, of course, trying to be a bit sensitive, i didn't ask how she was caring for her kids, i mean i was just another man who was not going to support her two young negro males, and if you ain't going to solve the problem what right do you have to tell a young mother that she ought to take better care of her kids, doesn't she know that every day she gets up, dresses them, feeds them, as best she can? i guess if i were she i too would have been in seclusion. and then she tells me that she almost got killed.
but that's life in the waning moments of the 20th century, everybody is almost getting killed, life, especially in new orleans a recent statistical murder capital of metropolitan america, life is murder. i could tell from the quiet, unhysterical, deliberate, clearly ennuciated, without eye contact at first but then the quick glance up into my eyes, i could tell that life is sometimes death from the way she said the word for the day around our way: killed. i could tell this was not an exaggeration.
you know the old saying, what goes up must come down? it's not the lift off that's scary, nor the arcing descent, what is scary is surviving the crash. i'm beginning to understand the anxiety of survival. sort of like how it felt surviving the middle passage. what am i living for? how come i'm still alive? when friends and kin fall all around you, you wonder why you're still standing. in this case, i was also wondering how she was still standing.
i mean it was difficult visualizing her on the sidewalk, pulling malik close to her with a firm hand that just moments ago was leisurely linked to his little palm. or how did sekou, big eyed and backed back against her thighs, how did he look while some original gangsta practiced his mayhem tactics on this family trio. sister got less than nothing--all the cash she will beg, borrow, earn and steal this year will not cover her annual debt, and some hardleg is trying to jack her up. what a tremendous disrespect for life this is. what kind of parasite would ripoff a whole family whose liquid cash is probably less than the cost of the bullets and the gun being used to rob them?
sister laughs nervously as she relates to me how big the gun was, pantomiming the gun being pulled on her, coming up out the dude's pants, she uses her hand with finger and thumb stiff at a perpendicular angle and just keeps raising her hand higher and higher until it's over her head. i imagine when all the money you've got is thirty dollars and it's secreted on your person, and your two young boys are scrunched up against you silently waiting for you to do something, and there's this big dude standing in front of you about to rob you or whatever, i imagine, at that moment, the gun do look like it will keep growing in size, bigger and bigger and bigger.
"i told him, you know you wrong for that. you see my kids..."
i could not imagine being bold enough to tell a robber he's wrong for robbing. but beneath the stress of crisis, she rose to protest the moment of her assault.
"i had to tell him, man, you wrong for that. and then i kinda instinctively backed toward the street. before i knew it, we were standing in the street. a car came along. the driver hit his brakes. leaned on his horn. swerved around us and kept going. i was yelling at the car: stop, stop. the dude hollered at me: give me your money or i'll shoot you. but by then i was standing in the middle of the street, my arms around my kids and then another car was coming. they was just going to have to hit me and my boys, or stop. fortunately the car stopped. i jerked on the passenger front door but it was locked. roll down your window, i begged. help me. please. help me. i pointed at the dude at the curb: that man is trying to kill us."
i watched her unconsciouly re-enact the escape as she narrated the scenario of resistance to assault. the unsentimental starkness of her words connected me to her like a fishhook in the flesh, each syllable held fast and pulled me closer because it hurt to back away from her. when i had asked how she had been, i had no idea how near she had come to not being and how out of it i would feel as she related to me the tale of her near demise.
although each one of her quiet words conjured up an image in my mind, everything i was thinking was abstract compared to the knot of feelings wrenching my gut as i stood transfixed by the mesmerizing sight of her pantomime, her body jerking through the survival motions: the desperate pulling at the car door, her braids thrashing as she frantically grasped for an opening; the fearless pointing at the assailant, her arm extended, ending in an accusatory finger aimed at some spot to the right of me; the protective collecting of her children, the hugging of open space with right arm and left arm, the hunching over, making a shield out of her body. i was hearing her words with one mind and watching her body with another mind, and both minds were marveling at what they witnessed. she sang and she danced. her words were warrior song, her motions, warrior steps. and yet she was unarmed, all she was doing was defending, defending her right to be, to be woman, to be mother, to be walking down the street with her children. you know we're in bad shape when a single mother and two children are viewed as easy prey, when a literally poor woman who obviously doesn't have big bucks can't take a family stroll through the afternoon without one of her brothers pulling a gun on her, threatening murder, demanding her money or her life.
i was simply standing there listening to her story, painfully aware that i was doing nothing but listening. she was not only doing the work of telling the tale, she had also first done the work of surviving the murderous maze of choices facing her that fatefilled afternoon. when a robber puts a gun in your face, most people's minds shut down and they become incapable of making calculated decisions, incapable of making any decision. most people freeze up and simply do what they are told. but this sister in the flash of a few seconds figured out how to be a survivor. threaded through the labyrinth of violence and somehow found a path to avoid the palpable possibility of getting murdered. this sister refused to go silently into the book of urban armed robbery and homocide.
i was emotionally exhausted as she continued the story of a murder that didn't happen. since she was here telling me about it, i knew that the story did not end with her murder, but as she revived the terror of the moment with the sound of her voice and the intensity of her movements, i felt the helpless chill of realizing just how fragile we all are in confronting the callous brutalities of contemporary life.
even though it would have been a tragedy had she been shot, the greater shame is that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, unbelievable about this story. if i didn't know it before, i knew it now: the realities of late 20th century new orleans had predisposed me to accept murder as a normal way of life. i wondered what i would have done had i actually been a witness to the attempted robbery. how would i have reacted if i were a passerby? would i have driven away, like the driver of the first car that almost hit them, or would i have simply stood motionless as a tree witnessing a black on black lynching, a black man assaulting a black woman?
"it was an older black man at the wheel of the car that stopped. i pounded on the window. i looked over my shoulder at the dude standing on the curb with the gun still out. please, help us, i shouted. the man unlocked his door. i pushed my kids in first."
then she addressed me. reminded me that i was not innocently an uninvolved spectator. by directly addressing me, she did not allow me the simple escape of observing her as though she was a television or a movie screen. she reminded me that i, a man, was looking at her, a woman. what was the relationship of my manhood to her? as "a man" i could be a perpretator or i could be a helpmate. she reminded me that manhood was no abstract choice. day to day, incident to incident, relation to relation, one on one, one to many, one to none, each man had to choose how he related to each woman. i didn't say anything as she interrupted the narrative flow, looked directly at me and made a parenthetical remark as she continued. what could i say?
"man, it was some shit like in a movie. it was happening so fast. but what was i going to do? i didn't want my kids to see me getting shot or nothing. or whatever that man with the gun intended to do to me." the awfulness of "whatever" hung in the air like the scent of foulness in a slaughterhouse. i said nothing and just waited for her to hurry up and get away from the man with the gun.
"at first i was going to tell the kids to run but they wouldn't move. they just kept clinging to me. so when i pushed them out into the street, they kinda was resisting. but it was the street and maybe getting run over by a car or else standing still and getting robbed and maybe getting shot. lucky for us, a car stopped. so after i got the kids in the car, i jumped in behind the kids. the man who was driving asked me what was wrong. i said just drive please. please drive. and he drove off. i didn't even look back. to this day i couldn't really describe that dude to you, but i can still see that big-ass gun."
and then it was over. she stopped talking. went into herself for a second or so to lock down whatever emotions that retelling and reliving the tale had set loose.
once she was back to the present, she looked up and into me in real time, swung her attention to my presence and calmly met my gaze without the terror of the past beclouding her bright brown eyes. she was no longer back at the scene of the crime, she was now standing in safety before me, a slight, very slight, smile creasing her face. silent. and then she said: "i'm alright now, but i been kind of staying inside, yaknow." and then she giggled nervously. i mumbled something about being glad that she was ok, and then recognizing that i had nothing substantial to add, i changed the subject.
days later, i find myself facing the question: what are you going to do about it? it's over but it's not over. murder marches on. armed robbery careens through our community unabated. no matter how i twist the combination of causes and effects, proactions and reactions, i don't come up with any great new insights into the problem.
in terms of dealing with our very real social problems, i am a beggar standing lonely outside a banquet of the damned. i don't possess any secret solutions or even any short term suggestions. but i know i must say something. so i raise up these few words and shout out to all my brothers: hey, my brothers, if you see a young sister, reed thin, dark skinned, walking down the street with two big-eyed kids, hey, please don't fuck with them. and brotherman, if you find them in trouble, please help them. that's the least a human being can do. help, and, most certainly, do no harm.
—kalamu ya salaam
I APOLOGIZE FOR THINKING
(to/for Thelma Thomas)
The last time you saw me you were looking at my back as I walked away. Were you aware you would never see me again? Was I aware that over fifty years later I would want to tell you this face to face? And those two questions are the major realities of life—does either person know how significant and long-lasting a particular moment will be when those fleeting minutes are going down? In the moment we can never know how deeply events will affect, indeed, not simply affect but even accurately foretell our future; nor, in that moment, can we predict how long we will carry those specifics with us in our rambles through life. Like a swift razor slice leaving a keloid scar and in this particular instant the knife was me dipping out and the face was what should have been my heart but instead was your murdered silence. I heard nothing as I left. What did you hear? This is an apology on paper. I wish it were delivered in the warm air between my mouth and your ears as we looked each other eye to eye. If I had not been such a barbarian, I could have been a real man rather than an unfeeling block of flesh thinking…
—kalamu ya salaam