109 Social justice poems

(Jesse Helms & others...) I'm coming up out of the tomb, Men of War Just when you thought you had me down, in place, hidden I'm coming up now Can you feel the ground rumble under your feet? It's breaking apart, it's turning over, it's pushing up It's thrusting into your point of view, your private property O Men of War, Censorious Ones! get ready big boys get ready I'm coming up now I'm coming up with all that was hidden Get ready, Big Boys, get ready I'm coming up with all you wanted buried, All the hermetic texts with stories in them of hot & dangerous women Women with lascivious tongues, sharp eyes & claws I've been working out, my muscles are strong I'm pushing up the earth with all you try to censor All the iconoclasm & bravado you scorn All the taunts against your banner & salute I'm coming up from Hell with all you ever suppressed All the dark fantasies, all the dregs are coming back I'm leading them back up now They're going to bark & scoff & rage & bite I'm opening the box boo !

Now you are strong And we are but grapes aching with ripeness. Crush us! Squeeze from us all the brave life Contained in these full skins. But ours is a subtle strength Potent with centuries of yearning, Of being kegged and shut away In dark forgotten places. We shall endure To steal your senses In that lonely twilight Of your winter’s grief.

A woof reversed the fatal shuttles weave, How slow! but never once they slip the thread. Hither, upon the Georgian idler’s tread, Up spacious ways the lindens interleave, Clouding the royal air since yester-eve, Come men bereft of time and scant of bread, Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead, Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve. What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so The clear Republic waits the general throe, Along her noonday mountains’ open range. God be with both! for one is young to know The other’s rote of evil and of change.

Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. "The spirit of every age," writes Eric Schlosser, "is manifest in its public works." So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed. This is the spirit of our age. "You won't be back will you," asked the inmate who told me he wanted to be a success. + + + Try to remember it the way it was. Try to remember what I wore when I visited the prisons. Trying to remember how tall was my boy then. What books I was teaching. Trying to remember how I hoped to add one true and lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration. Something about the extra-realism of that peculiar institution caused me to balk, also the resistance of poetry to the conventions of evidentiary writing, notwithstanding top-notch examples to the contrary: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Wilde, Valéry, Celan, Desnos, et al. After all, I am not them. She asked me to come down, my friend the photographer and I went, and then I wanted to see whether my art could handle that hoe. Trying to remember how my skin felt when I opened an envelope of proofs of Deborah Luster's intimate aluminum portraits of the inmates at Transylvania (the site of East Carroll Parish Prison Farm, a minimum-security male prison, now closed); then Angola (the site of Louisiana State Penitentiary, maximum security, ever-growing); then St. Gabriel (the site of the Louisiana Correctional Institution for Women, the LCIW). I was electrified by the first face—a young, handsome man blowing smoke out of his nose. Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. On the phone my friend had described to me the rich Delta grounds of Angola, 18,000 acres. Angola, where the topsoil is measured not in inches but feet. The former sugarcane plantation lies at the confluence of rivers and borderland of the vermin-and-vine-choked Tunica Hills. Grey pelicans nest on the two prison lakes; alongside the airstrip are the grading sheds, the endless fields of okra and corn. Then there's the prison museum, the prison radio station, the prison monthly magazine; the tracking horses and tracking dogs trained by inmates... and the tree-lined neighborhood of free-world residents, their children bused outside the fence to school. Then the immaculate cinderblock buildings that house the inmates, the administration building, and the death house; the greenhouse and extensive flower beds—take away the fencing and it resembles nothing so much as a college campus. The men in maximum number more than the men who lived in my hometown. Then there's the geriatric unit, the award-winning hospice program; the caisson the inmates built to bear the dead in the hand-built coffins to one of the two graveyards inside the prison. In the old burial ground most graves are not identified by name. The caisson is pulled by draft horses, French Quarter style. When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmate's uniform was "retired" to the prison museum. Everything about Louisiana seems to constitute itself differently from everywhere else in the Union: the food, the idiom, the stuff in the trees, the critters in the water, and the laws, Napoleonic, not mother-country common law. The prisons inevitably mirror differences found in the free world. Where they came up with their mirrors is another mystery. (In maximum, they are made of metal.) The definition of the face is a memory. Vivid to me is Debbie saying that at the trial of her mother's murderer, she looked around and saw the people sitting on separate sides of the courtroom, the way they do at a wedding, the bride's people, the groom's people, and she tried to take in the damage radiating through the distinct lines—the perpetrator's side, the victim's side. Vivid to me is leaving Angola after the first visit and Debbie asking what I thought, and I said (too fast) I thought those were the nicest people I had ever met, and the ironic laughter it provoked in us both, the car yawing. The obvious truth, people are people. Equally, the damage is never limited to perpetrator and victim. Also, that the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts. I remember an afternoon at the iron pile at Transylvania watching the men quietly plait each other's hair between sets at the weight bench. When I asked about a man whose face was severely scarred, a very specific face, with large, direct aquamarine eyes, a guard told me that the man's brother had thrown a tire over his head and set it on fire. This I did not know how to absorb. It was a steaming day; the men were lifting weights and plaiting their hair. I remember Easter weekend at the women's prison. The day before, a long line formed outside the prison-run beauty shop. Inside, the women having their hair fixed were talking back to a soap opera on the small snowy screen. By visiting day the inner courtyard had been transformed into a theme park for the children. A trampoline had been rented, a cotton-candy machine; someone dressed in a bunny suit was organizing an egg hunt. The girls wore starched, flouncy dresses, and the boys white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties. The women were dressed up, too, even the ones shackled at ankle and waist. Deborah photographed all day, nonstop. Identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication, but people wanted a keepsake. We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn't our place to be there. It wasn't really in us to be there. Remember sitting in the frigid Holiday Inn bar near St. Gabriel, at the end of one visit to the women's prison, staring at the aquarium, not talking. Talking to a man who says he has done a lot of time. Lot of time. He should write a book, he says. He wants to be a success. "Hollywood, huh, here I come." Talking to a woman who says the one time her dad visited her from the Midwest, she asked him to look at her eyes. There was a look she didn't want to get, a faraway look. Her father pretended to examine her eyes, then told her they looked like the same old peepers to him. She passed her time reading. Same way she passed her childhood. She thought she was going to be an astronomer when she grew up. Not a felon. Both parents are dead now. Of her three sons, one disappeared, one died of suicide, and the third severed contact. One of the inmates at St. Gabriel informed me she wouldn't be around for visiting hours tomorrow because she was on the drill team. Also, her ex-husband would not be bringing her baby boy to see her. Not tomorrow, not ever. The grease burns, I am told by another inmate, are courtesy of her sister. Don't Walk On The Grass, says the sign posted in the inner yard. Then there's the bus that leaves from Monroe taking visitors to one of four neighboring pens, Al Derry's Prison Transport and Popcorn Balls. Evidently, the popcorn balls make it the competitive ride. Only in Louisiana. After a time. A lot of time. They stop coming. The free-worlders. They are too poor or too busy working or are already looking after others on the outside or their car is broken or they are too worn down or they move too far off or they get old, sick, and die. So the inmates wait for their turn. They aren't going anywhere. They have all the time there is. "The only continuity of our lives," wrote Malcolm Braly, American writer, American lifer, "was that we had none." "Waiting," goes the motto at St. Gabriel, "it's the LCIW way." I wrote a woman and asked whether she ever had any pets. She wrote back: Bandit, Baby, Snobby, Elsie, Bear (those were the dogs). Tiger and Fuzzball (the cats), Jill, Ben, and Junior (the coons). And a lot of unnamed fish, hamsters, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, guinea pigs, "and a deer, not really a pet but I finally coaxed to the point she would eat out of my hand." Not to idealize, not to judge, not to exonerate, not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain. Not to demonize, not anathematize. What I wanted was to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time. I wanted it given to understand that when you pass four prisons in less than an hour, the countryside's apparent emptiness is more legible. It is an open, running comment when the only spike in employment statistics is being created by the supply of people crossing the line. I wanted the banter, the idiom, the soft-spoken cadence of Louisiana speech to cut through the mass-media myopia. I wanted the heat, the humidity, the fecundity of Louisiana to travel right up the body. What I wanted was to convey the sense of normalcy for which humans strive under conditions that are anything but what we in the free world call normal, no matter what we may have done for which we were never charged. The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. As industries disappear, prisons proliferate, state-funded prison-building surges are complemented by private-investment promising "to be an integral component of your corrections strategy," according to an industry founder. The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and borne out by the statistics. Of the developed nations, only Russia aspires to our rate of incarceration. And the Big Bear is a distant second. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, the warp in the mirror is of our making. The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. If you can accept—whatever level of discipline and punishment you adhere to momentarily set aside—that the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise, it might behoove us to see prisoners, among others, as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves. If we go there, if not with our bodies then at least our minds, we are more likely to register the implications. + + + I am going to prison. I am going to visit three prisons in Louisiana. I am going on the heels of my longtime friend Deborah Luster, a photographer. It is a summons. All roads are turning into prison roads. I already feel guilty. I haven't done anything. But I allow the mental pull in both directions. I am going to prison in order to write about it. Like a nineteenth-century traveler. Kafka put it this way, "Guilt is never to be doubted." Also: behind every anonymous number, a very specific face. Also: there are more than two million individuals, in this country, whose sentences have rendered them more or less invisible. Many of them permanently. First to Transylvania. Then Angola. Then St. Gabriel. These are their place-names Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates. I will make three trips. It is an almost imperceptible gesture, a flick of the conscience, to go, to see, but I will be wakeful. It is a summons.

Ultimately improved by it: slant light hitting his prison obliquely near the state bird’s pointed head accentuated crest, the black-ringed bill from which wheat-wheat-wheat-wheat from which whoit cheer , whoit cheer ; cheer - cheer-cheer inspired Ronald Cotton to listen as in his head, the solitary cardinal indulged in snails which seemed like polished fossils of trophy hog tails (after prize butchery) that Ronald was able to recall, his hair a mess of replicas of them as industrious as the state whose success was poultry & eggs tobacco & soybeans as well as convictions: None as tightly knit as Jennifer’s (not even the state flag) that she could identify Cotton that cotton’s taking on appearances other than burst white of a dense localized haze from which to weave memory, following pink-petaled start, rather a satellite dish of a flower, pollen/sensor- studded antenna protruding from the center undeniably; the jury couldn’t acquit Cotton of its role in documenting and altering Jennifer’s history, many lives changed as result of consequences, sensors that boast duality of receptor and transmitter: witness: insects give and take, taint what is put out, taken in; mix it up so that interrelatedness spreads and the understandable error of metaphor becomes less erroneous over time: eleven years in prison, innocence locked up, protected although in prison, it resembled something else. If Cotton strained, he could see the top of a Ferris wheel on the horizon just a possible segment of a rainbow the length of a chain of cardinal feathers even though it wasn’t that at all. The eye witnesses all the time, even the unseeing eye is turned toward a focus on black, saturation dense as conviction; the eye processes, pulls in whole vista to a retinal speck of convergence which is to say there is some Cotton in Poole, some connection, independent shared participation in cold beer, occasional cards turkey-spread in the right hand without knowing the other sank into the seat at the cinema the same way and sampled Funnel cake at the state fair within a week of each other and more than that in common: both being men and convicted for what men really can and really do, do. Including sometimes confessions and apologies; cash reparations after the innocence is free to extend its parameters to unlocked doors, be an oversized over-zealous white bird floating down the aisle, its cottony haze lifted in order to kiss and marry Ronald’s calm delight in being able to take his time leave his longshoreman’s mark on ships that take some of him to any port in the world: durable goods such as the DNA whose precision detects human exactitude, and could build as many Ronalds as time would permit something Jennifer now desperately wants to do, restoring what was lost because it was like something else, because the fact of similarity is compelling, convincing; if connections could not be made, there’d be no havens, no fugitive status lost to fusion, no links to God, no human murmurings whose constant echoes are also the gentle silvery hum of fans praying over computer motors to cool them and also mimic motion of small wings amplified to make sound in the distance much like the electric razor preparing a head on death row clean as a light bulb. Ronald was prepared to be believed; he saw the quiet manner of his long days in court as evidence of his rationality and contemplativeness such as befits clergy; a potential propensity for order, mercy, the steadiness required to dispense blessings mostly on the undeserving without emotion or judgment selfishness or preference while he was being judged guilty for lack of emotion, for Jennifer’s incontrovertible emotional insistence on Cotton’s being the one—she had to finger him to be comfortable within her survival. No way to mistake to ever forget details documented in memory, the event relived to the point that it resculpted her brain into a Cottony bust (he was there to be the perfect model) whose reality floated away in a Poole, as only the reflection of Cotton identified as source. A situation also called (must-have) moonlight. Here’s the new & improved Cotton: eleven years in the making; enough time served to anger to ruin it; at that same room’s temperature it became doubt of clemency, pardon: peculiar butter that erupted as gratefulness for the miracle of absolute exoneration when his impossibility as rapist was proven. Even Cotton conceded that the composite sketch bore a just resemblance to Cotton, displayed a metaphor for men like Cotton, the seeds of capability in the structure of the face, the human repertoire that includes Cotton who softly consents to meet Jennifer when she asks him to funnel her regret and apologies deep into himself, accepting that she meant no malice toward him but toward the perpetrator whom many men resemble, all brothers, family of man resemblance; Cotton’s own daughter, Cotton’s own wife could be in a similar position; no offense taken, captivated by the beauty of Jennifer; her superior logic refusing to let the crime against her silence her; as sure, as certain, as dazzling about speaking up about mistaking Cotton for Poole as she was in identifying in the lineup the closest thing there to Poole the best available, the incredible likeness that memory seized, filling gaps in the recollected Poole with Cotton’s particulars. She felt better in her cotton- touched skin. Metaphor is a form of forgiveness; a short rope of it knots-up those that can’t come together any other way into being defined by the other. Strange and estranged pairings give rise to mutable truth that can yield to both dawn and twilight demands that things be seen differently. Jennifer in moonlight instead of being illuminated moon whose face was also in Emmett Till’s way, but this generation of Jennifer has another side home late after a day of good faith in which she and Cotton team up at a church to speak up about doubt as less a shadow than certainty. Memory is as accurate as metaphor, an overlay that always fits something, that like the purest most sparkling water is too naïve not to submit to any vessel into which it’s poured. Just to be guzzled. Perhaps the vessel in which cotton becomes a pool in which North Carolina is shaped like an embryo: Humanity still on the brink of infancy.

Make your mind what you want it to be. —Curtis Mayfield Tired of waiting for him, I think of a plan to stick it to the Man—he waylaid me with promises: protection, his valuable keys. Nights of seduction, I would glide to the curb in my customized Eldorado, black finish and cool bubble top and turn it over to a superyoung girl with rags and a bucket of soapy water, with a smile and a dead president,make it shine my sister. He is inside listening to Curtis, his sapphire ring he brings the moon with him, this cat, and his eyes glow like mellow stones at my superfly threads. The cashmere white stitched suit, the maxi coat trimmed in fox fur:vixen, my pretty little hat with three blue feather plumes. I let him dig me for a while, and lay a kiss, a spoon of cocaine on him, our secret meetings a potent rush and I am hip to the hit to his fly hand on my thigh, my ladies scatter in a cloud of Opium and he tells me, you know me, I’m your friend. I thought he was my man—I flash on him in the bathtub, its ledge of oils in flasks, pulling a loofah sponge over my tired shoulders, passing a reefer in lemon paper, on all the tired bitches working his keys, hustling his diamond rocks— two sets of false eyelashes, micro minis, freezing their asses off. My .25 Beretta can’t stop him, it’s not real, I’m not real to him. He’ll use me up and kill me; I need brains guts and cool; I put fur on your back, my baby, he says. I am between him and death,the greatest high of all, and I ask him to step outside. The pink flakes blow my mind and I turn to him with a flurry of karate kicks, kicking out my left leg I bring him to the ground and with my foot on the collar of his mohair suit I tell him, I took your money and signed a contract on you:I hired the best killers there are— men like you—yeah, if one hair on my gorgeous head is harmed, it’s all over for you. It’s all over for you, I think, as I imagine I am Superfly; my mind is what I want it to be, the Man is tired and suddenly he looks old, very, very old as he turns away from me, the things he cannot dream— my brazen plans, my body full of love.

No but come closer. Come a little Closer. Let the wall-eyed hornyhanded Panhandler hit you for a dime Sir and shiver. Snow like this Drives its pelting shadows over Bremen, Over sad Louvain and the eastern Marshes, the black wold. It sighs Into the cold sea of the north, That vast contemptuous revery between Antiquity and you. Turn up your collar, Pull your hatbrim down. Commune Briefly with your ignorant heart For those bewildered raging children Europe surrenders her old gentry to. All their eyes turn in the night from Your fretfulness and forgetfulness, Your talk; they turn away, friend. Their eyes dilated with dreams of power Fix on the image of the mob wet With blood scaling the gates of order. Anarchist and incendiary Caesar bind that brotherhood To use and crush the civil guard, Debauch the debauché, level Tenement and court with soaring Sideslipping squadrons and hard regiments, Stripped for the smoking levée of the Howitzer, thunderstruck under the net. The great mouth of hunger closes On swineherd and princess, on the air Of jongleur and forest bell; Grendel Swims from the foul deep again. Deputy, cartelist, academician Question in haste any plumeless captain Before the peremptory descent Of mankind, flattered and proud. With whitening morning on the waste You may discern through binoculars A long line of the shawled and frozen, Moving yet motionless, as if those Were populations whom the sun failed And the malicious moon enchanted To wander and be still forever The prey of wolves and bestial mazes.

They pluck my sleeve, tug my hand, pull my hair. They do not kneel to kiss my hem. No, it’s not like that but they want tokens. Again, not souvenirs but something small and useful, something that will help them out after life, maybe in an underworld. They need a sighted guide to lead them to the river, and they need a remnant of the old world as they embark for the older world, the one that has existed since the first grievous death. They need to feel they still can touch and still be touched, as once they did and were, and one would have to be a cold, uncaring woman to deny their pleas: a woman with a bulletproof  heart, without a memory of life on earth.

The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true.

My friend they don't care if you're an individualist a leftist  a rightist a shithead or a snake They will try to exploit you absorb you  confine you disconnect you  isolate you or kill you And you will disappear into your own rage into your own insanity into your own poverty into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon and then ashes The ruling class will tell you that there is no ruling class as they organize their liberal supporters into white supremacist lynch mobs organize their children into ku klux klan gangs organize their police into killer cops organize their propaganda into a device to ossify us with angel dust preoccupy us with western symbols in african hair styles inoculate us with hate institutionalize us with ignorance hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away And we are programmed to self-destruct to fragment to get buried under covert intelligence operations of unintelligent committees impulsed toward death And there it is The enemies polishing their penises between oil wells at the pentagon the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances the old folks dying of starvation the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs the life blood of the earth almost dead in the greedy mouth of imperialism And my friend they don't care if you're an individualist a leftist  a rightist a shithead or a snake They will spray you with a virus of legionnaire's disease fill your nostrils with the swine flu of their arrogance stuff your body into a tampon of toxic shock syndrome try to pump all the resources of the world into their own veins and fly off into the wild blue yonder to pollute another planet And if we don't fight if we don't resist if we don't organize and unify and get the power to control our own lives Then we will wear the exaggerated look of captivity the stylized look of submission the bizarre look of suicide the dehumanized look of fear and the decomposed look of repression forever and ever and ever And there it is