I don’t know who you think I am but let me tell you just in case you missed it. I’m a short white irish italian I smoke I drink I think therefore I write my heart out on these pages
I bleed for the world everytime I take stages and make them conversations
when the homeless sage asks for a dollar I find the need for love to be contagious
I read newspapers filled with marketing target bullshit phrases
selling faces in pain to shaky nicotein stained hands and it burns
hotter in me than a pile of streetwise garbage can blazes
I can’t erase this compassion or this need to take action over social states of stasis
our oasis isn’t nameless it’s the fraction of empathic love
we feel when we share our world with faceless strangers
the greatest danger we confront is our utter lack of bluntness
when talking about the history of american cages
my social studies days were lost in the lies of eighth grade textbook mazes
comprised labryinths of white supremacist justifications
I don’t blame the teachers they aren’t paid enough to know the difference
between slave wages and railroad migrant asians
when they take the train they don’t remember the chain gangs that laid the track or
how broken backs gave way to gospel the hot spell of crime in these absent minded times might simply the rind of a watermelon left to rot for ages
and I’m afraid the hype about my generation will be lost to our doped up hazes or
that we’ll choke when it’s time to stand and be counted amongst those minds
that still might save us
all the time blinded by the prospect of fame our artists tame their rages
miss the point and wind up famous
forgetting that their passion used to be to pave the path for changes
and the aftermath of greedy art is the start of something dangerous
while collard greens boil on ghetto ranges link card exchanges WIC for NAACP starbucks coffee grazers raising doubt about the validity of
Jessie Jackson’s armored chevy blazers rainbows push the poor into
shallow graves of poverty and the money from the lottery
funds the schools with wooden nickles
and infants from the thighs of teen age babies rain like skittles
it’s a whistle stopping traffic in my mind when it’s more important to find
invisible missiles in Iraq than to counteract the terrorism of assault rifles attacking
our south side neighborhoods where crack is sold like chiclets to children
dodging bullets between mid terms and prison
hung up on american cages
it’s just the way it is some things will never change
it’s just the way it is some things will never change
like I’ll never grow taller and I’ll always love pasta with maranara
the way my nonni used to make before she lost her mind
and while
north side waiters powder noses between shifts and kids
overdosing in the desert raves of california
while sex slaves are being trafficked from czechoslavakia to the united states and
russian women sold as wives to lonely americans on web pages and while
supreme courts consider telling us what marriage is while
considering death sentences for 17 year old gang bangers while
sudanese blood flows out from continents we choose to forget about and
the maoris in New Zealand sing the songs of their slain ancestors while
my grandmother forgets who she is in an alzheimers clinic
thinks I’m her husband one minute, a stranger the next while
a college degree gets people lower paying wages and machines replace millions
who used to bag groceries while
families are starving and mommas can’t get daddies to help pay for their babies and the village it once took to raise a child has been replaced by a welfare check
that doesn’t even cover the cost of a decent calculator, while
governors increase tolls for roads that are already paid for but doesn’t bother
with the pot holes crippling cars south of the south loop, while
we fight wars we weren’t asked to and build walls between our friends with
callous words and cowboy slang while
artists on the radio make it fashionable to kill people and
priests make confessing a matter of sexual deviance, while
our grievances go unanswered and we look out for ourselves
I see only people holding mirrors up so that they feel less alone
you may not know me but I tell you again in case you missed it
my namesake is irish but my earthquake is human
my soul is your shoe and my poems are true cause my lies are too boring
I don’t have the solutions to every problem I listed
I just wish our poets would try not to be so Def so that they could become better listeners I wish they would worry more about honesty and less about celebrity
that’s too much to ask from a poverty consciousness but when an artist feels so poor so unheard
that they take the spoken word and turn it into a commercial and
rehearsal after rehearsal for that one big slam that will put them on t.v. and
make them the fantasy they never felt they achieved that is when art bleeds integrity and the sharks of contradiction swallow the whole fuckin scene
when the only thing that matters is not how far you’ve come or
how much green you’ve amassed but
how many people are bettered for you having
passed from your mother’s tit to an earthen pit.
