Stella

In that store
twilight reigned.

Brick corner building
caged windows
caged-doors
scissored-open
in the daytime.
Buzzer locked door
for foiling robbers
and shoplifters.

Her wide yellow
face
framed by short
black
curly hair.
There was an energy of
menace in her
that nobody except
me
seemed to notice.

If left in her
care  I was
assured confusion as
I was introduced
to a world and
reality
so counter my own
that I could feel it
as this time-stopping
malaise and anger
overlayed with yellow
sunlight.

Yin-Yang two-face
smiling slash scowling.
This clearly evil
yellow woman
married to a simple
black-faced
man.
Running this prison
of a ghetto
store.

Comics in packs of
three, wrapped
in plastic
mastheads torn off.
Even as a kid
when you read them
they felt dirty.
You felt dirty
and wrong
like scoring with a
homely girl with
zero personality
felt
ten years later.

Sour, curdled
Yoo-Hoos in the
cooler.
Expired lunchmeat
ready to expire chips
bread
everything perishable
really.
It was like she
was teaching a
Master-class on
the cheapness
of life.

This yellow-faced
vampire
living on Nigger-
blood
was family
and somehow
respected.
Despite all the stolen
TV's
radios
bicycles
in the store's
back room
she was respected.

Old TV's
radios
appliances
that were obviously
the belongings
of some
very poor
people.
And I'd like to think
that she was
a secret
angel
taking old coffee-makers
and turning them
into food
but
those curdled Yoo-Hoos
and illegal
comics... no...
If she was trading
food, she was
trading it for
blood.

She always looked down
her nose at
me and my
mother
as though we were
suspect or
less than.
My mother the poor
country girl
from a criminal family
who married into
THE family.

The blessed family
locking arms against
outsiders like
perverse royalty.

The insanity that was
her existence
 filled me
as a child
with dread.
As a young man
a sense of perverse
spectacle.

In the end I thought
of her
not at all.

except...
She wouldn't die.


she held on for
years, "living" in a
nursing home
in a semi-vegetative
state.
Ambulatory but
empty.
A zombie living
on pudding and
the life force
that my grandmother spent
during her frequent
visits.

But in the end
there was
an end.

And with it, all
those kind empty
platitudes
about Miss Estelle,
Sister Martin, or
just plain "Stella", went
into the frigid earth.

As was her character
when she
decided to
go
she went during
a brutal
Chicago
February
ice-storm.

Secret of the Crimson King

5x6" stickers, and 20x24" prints available.

13

I am that kid
Standing at the mouth of a suburban-sidestreet,
looking down the
tree-lined block.

Memories of past
Summer-adventures
as insistent
as the blazing sun
over my head.

A block of silence.
My generation. Turned.
New kids being born.
Still in the nest.

The concrete friends of
summer yesteryear
evaporated
as they
have started
combing their hair,
and giving a shit about
looking-, "neat".

Cars burst out of bycicle's-
coccoon.

I am the
last
boy standin.

Mad-Maxxin'...

American Nightmare

It was just an accepted fact, that Black people had to eat shit, as a matter of survival. Accepted by the black people who had to eat that shit.  Whereas white people have sheltered themselves from the awareness that a lot of people have to eat shit to survive. All those people eating shit, so that there could be such things as, whiteness, racially pure suburbs and schools,  a legal system that supports them, and unlimited beef on the grill.

School shootings, President Donald Trump, code-spewing talk radio Nazis (playing a verbal game of "I'm not touching you!", just to sell gold, vitamins, and survival-rations to stem the inevitable tide of brown DNA) are all symptoms of what happens when white people taste shit. They've done all of that, and they haven't even gotten a good mouthful, yet... The proof being, in that I have to qualify this statement with saccharine words like "in general", just so supposedly strong, and righteous, white-people will listen, and not run off in an hysterical tizzy, because their fragile reality was tilted.

There is a chasm between how white people see themselves, and what they really are. For generations, they managed to fill that chasm full of dead Indians, stolen-land, tortured, enslaved and mutilated black flesh, (and even the collateral of poor, dumb white "trash"), all floating in the river of red blood, drained from the corpses of yellow and brown babies.
They filled it with John Wayne, Elvis, Shirley Temple, Corvettes, Pilgrim-myths, Bibles, and other clean, heroic, overblown-bullshit. But now that abyss is too wide for them to ignore. They now see that the world is seeing them; stripped-naked.
It is this abyss of reality, this void of truth, screaming like Bloody Mary from the mirror, that is fueling all the sad-but-horrific acts of White-terrorism, that get ticked off as "mental-illness".  These tantrums of Trump-rage, are filling the campus-bloodbaths.

There are none so blind... The Germans were quick to denounce the Nazis, after the war, and they have remained ever-vigilant. Let's see how long it takes, until the mixed-blood descendants of Europe, denounce Whiteness.

Knight School

From re-watching these Speed Racer cartoons, through my third-eye, It has become apparent to me; that a good chunk of Gen-X, were programmed daily, in Eastern ideals of honor and self-sacrifice. The kids that were outside with the sportsballs, are the ones that learned to compete, and win. They own this America, we live in. But their competition, and therefore gain, is without honor, and has led us to a reality of President Trump, just being an accepted-thing.
This is the core of nerd vs jock. The jocks have hunger, but the nerds are self-aware, and therefore able to distinguish between honorable and dishonorable actions. More plainly, the nerds take psychic punches, from the jock world, and at their core, the nerds still prefer discomfort and ridicule, to outward material-gain that has been taken dishonorably.

The kids that werent paying attention, are now the mass, that fuels the mindless sportsball-competition, and thoughtless consumption of goods.

Punk-rock poetry, or philosophy, or something else? Please enjoy a photo of a car, decked out for the dishonorable, and bloody sport of "car-wrestling". Driven by a man who wears a lucha-mask and is known only as "X",  that still retains his honor, because the proceeds go to feed his family.

Ps:
Which brings us to out final meta moment:
Speed and Sparky are stranded in the desert, during the final race, because speed gave a can of their gas to an opponent that had run out earlier (involved story). Sparky notes that if Speed hadnt given gas, they wouldnt be stranded. Enter Racer X, who stops and repeats the mistake to Speed, telling him that as a professional his responsibility is to win a race, not to enable others. He then says, "You will remember this day for as long as you live." and drives away.
Speed falls to the ground and admits his weakness and that he is ashamed.
Sparky notices, a can of gas in  sand, left by Racer X.
Speed, raises his head, and vows to X "or whoever you are", that he has learned, and vows to make X proud in the future.

As  child, i didn't get this. I think I may have blocked it out because it conflicted with Western pre-programming from the Christian Church, (teaching that eternal suffering is honarable) and therefore created dissonance.
Had I taken that lesson to heart, in conjunction with the earlier lessons, my life would have been a lot more smooth.

Family-Weekend, 1978

Forced to watch fish
Slowly suffocate on the ice
in the
Styrofoam cooler, my
breath
Became labored.

I mentioned it once
but they
Told me i was acting like
A "damn-sissy".

Which served as the
Bell, beginning
 another class in
Outlasting  sissy-horror
101.

Engineering

Some of you, know.
Everyone else
doesn't matter.

But I can remember hearing
spurs
in the jingling of
my boot-buckles
and horse's-hooves
in the echoing
"tock"
of my heels
bouncing between
the brick-streets and
adobe-walls.

How many miles did
those boots take me
before I
unceremoniously
cut out the steel-toes
to see
what they looked like?

And trying to walk
in boots
without toes, is
like knife-fucking;
It doesn't last long.

I had them for 10 years.
I walked through
high-school and
University
in that pair of
boots.

I walked past a thousand
shoulda-suicides, by
looking down at
the cool-assed boots
on my feet,
which other people
(the turds in my punchbowl)
were too dimwitted
to recognize.
Listen...
...the sound of broken
windshield-glass
when you step on the
bits,  sometimes they
"SKWEEK!"
...

The quick-release of
snow, that's
 clumped-on there
freezing your
toes,
cause you can just
kick a wall
dead-on.
Snow..?
What kind? How much?

If it's the slushy-stuff
that's been thawed
and refrozen, a few times over
then you tuck your pants
in
to keep off the salt.
Powdery stuff is
fine, until it
 acccumulates,
then you gotta
fold your jeans
over the top of
your boots
so you don't wind-up
with snow in your
socks.

Sand...

The sand on
Chicago's
North-Shore Beach, is
coarse
mostly pale-colored
with
smatterings of
brown and black bits.
just like the
people.

In Lubbock, Tx
sand is
red.
Red like the back
of a knot-headed
cotton-Farmer's
creased neck.

And there, they
call it
"dust".
But it ain't.
it's fine
red
sand.

Hourglass-sand.

I spent an eternity
 in
West Texas
once.

JC Penney
Engineer-boots
can provide a bit
of support, when
you start twisting
your ankles
from stepping-in the
prarie-dog holes that
lattice the
campus.

And when you
get to them, (because of
your art-major)
you can scrawl-

FUCK YOU

with your boot-heel
on the off-white walls
so that when you
finish
talking to that guy
and walk-away
he will finally
understand what
"Meta"
means.

It's really
 a damn
shame
that it's taken
this long,
to recognize something
I've been stepping-over
for so many
 years.