the red ribbon pact poem 1

i just wrote a whole long entry and my computer timed out
and it ended up erasing. so, in my mild frustruation, i'm just
going to repeat what's probably the most important part
anyway...

so my friend felisha and i made a pact a couple weeks ago.
we were having a conversation about how we regard menstruation
as a powerful moment in a woman's month, how it could really
a source of power for women if only they knew how to harness
it correctly, mostly by changing their attitudes towards it:
by viewing it as a celebration in the body
as opposed to a monthly nuisance.

in the same breath of the coversation, we were talking about
how we haven't been writing because our lives have been so
busy, yes that song. so i proposed the pact, which i now call
the red ribbon pact. i proposed that no matter what, we will
make sure that we write while on our periods. whether we've
been writing like madwomen that month or not writing at all,
we write during that time to see what flows (no pun intended).

she loved the idea and we smoked a blunt together to seal
the pact. can't prick fingers nowdays with that disease
ravaging through our blood.

i'm happy to say that i've had the first opportunity
to uphold my end of the pact since that monumental
conversation. so yes, that means that i am indeed
menstruating. heavily, too, thanks for asking.

so here are the first fruits of the red ribbon pact.


tonight we have flutes for bones; all night our bodies sing


how here have we arrived? yesterday
I was standing at the blunt edge of your machete
mind my body a armoire of borrowed blood

tell me if this will all taste good tomorrow:
the deviled eggs and the devilry in dawn,
your bright body against the summer-cold

mourning of night’s sweet lace tell me
to continue and I will continue to drag my half
clothed kiss all over the pot-holed village

of your face with a smile as wide as a boulevard
I will stay here for a slice of forever pie
and never evict the birds from my hair

so long as you never ask why the moon throbs
for fish like a grandmother’s salt-water
dreams, and this: why only martyrs cry

tears as thick as chutney and sweet just walk
with me down the mellifluous wail of these streets
just few more twirls slow on the backs of abused

ballrooms until the bandit moon says so long
as you never ask why your sleeping mouth
is the furnace I choose to warm my hands at night

Harlem Poems

As far as the young Harlemites are concerned, this week, much better.

I think my ass just had to loosen up.

Monday was a much more positive day, for all of us. The vibe between me and the students was more positive, with a certain familiarity that I didn't expect them to grant me for another week or so. I was also surprised by how quickly I had learned their names. Desperation is a bitch...

In the beginning of class, I took them outside and had them walk around the block, writing down smells, sounds, colors, things they see. It was so cute to see them walking through this forest of concrete, past rancid trash, past 99 cent stores, past elaborate wigs in shop windows, past the ranting homeless, walking past all of this with their notebooks propped up, writing as they walked. A few of them ended up writing "Harlem" poems from the exercise.

I think we really got cool when I did my HIV poem, "Next Door Neighbor" for them. I instantaneously loosened up after I performed. My whole demeanor towards them and the situation changed. I should have done that shit in the beginning. What the hell was I thinking?
They loved the poem. One girl, a really avid writer looked at me like I grew another face and she asked me almost increduously, "you wrote that????"

I also learned the merits of having young people work in groups. I guess the classroom is like everything else: the more pieces you break it into, the easier it is to digest. The intimacy of a group as opposed to the whole class really allows some of the quieter students to open up and be more themselves. Plus, it's just easier to get them to shut the hell up.

It's really hard at first, trying to get some of them to write. While others write with a quiet exuberance, many of them do it so begrudgingly. Why are so many of our young people so anti-writing? A couple of them are even proud that they don't "know how to write." Quite a few of them said, when i was trying to get them to write something (and I'm still trying to decide if this is a cop-out or a really valid concern),

"I'm not a poet. I don't know how to write."

How do we negotiate this? How do we still regard Poet as something respected and esteemed without making the term so alienating and untouchable to younger people? The only answer I have to this overwhelming, overarching concern of theirs is:

"I'm not trying to turn you into poets, I just want you to write the poems that are already inside you."

I"m not sure if this makes sense to them, but i don't know what else to say. Either way, once they started writing, they wrote some really good shit. One of my favorites, the African student, the wonderfully intense and thoughtful one, wrote a short lyric about AIDS being the equivalent of World War III. One of the groups that I worked with decided to write a group poem about a boyfriend and a girlfriend having an argument and it turns out that the boyfriend is the AIDS virus. So it's essentially the woman talking to AIDS and AIDS talking back to her except we don't find out till the end.

Today was just a good old time. I started the session by reading them Patricia Smith's "Skinhead" and they responded really well to it. The shock value of the poem worked wonders. Talked briefly about the wonders of the persona poem. I'm learning that with this age group, the less you explain things and the more you show them, the better.

I find myself really gravitating towards quite a lot of them. I'm really starting to like these kids, more swiftly than I imagined: from the timid and tender ones to a couple of the rambunctious and bawdy ones. On opposite sides of the spectrum, they all remind me of little shards of myself when I was that age...hell, even now.

I did this fun performance excercise that I made up on the fly. I crossed my fingers and hoped it would work. I started performing my abortion poem, Crying over Spilled Milk and had one of the students call out colors while I was doing the peice. Each time she called out a color, I had to invoke the emotion that the color created in me. It was crazy. I've never done that poem like that before and I had no idea how flexible of a performer I could be if challenged. I think many of us get so used to and comfortable with doing poems the same way, once we've found the way that works.

She called out red and I started reciting the poem very angrily, she called yellow and I started skipping and reciting with a haunting, ironic brevity (considering the subject matter), she called out pink and I started reciting as if I were a girl in love, she said black and I hunched over, strengthened yet roughened my voice and made such intense eye contact with some of the students, that it made a couple of them clearly uncomfortable and self-conscious. Gray invoked a monotone that I didn't even know I possessed. The students loved it. After that, I got a few of them to volunteer, which was really fun to watch.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses about my interaction with these students is that I'm not a disciplinarian. I kinda let them do what they want. If they want to throw packs of oatmeal cinnamon cookies across the room, then that's their prerogative. I don't like this about myself, but I think that side of me will come with time. I've never been that way with younger people, I've never been firm, never been able to play the role of the babysiter.

During their break the director came in and patted me on the back. She said that the students came to her and they were very happy. Interestingly enough, the girl who came in last Wednesday and kept her arms crossed the entire time, the one went and told the director that she was disinterested in my unit, is now one of my favorites. After having a conversation about how fine Morris Chestnut is, she asked me:

"So, are you going to be here permanently or are you leaving after next week?"

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't want to tell her the truth, which is:

"It's up to you, darling, up to you."

The Attack of the Sympathy Cists

Felt wonderfully at peace today after a whirlwind of a weekend in Atlanta, where I had two gigs and a pretty amazing weekend. I got to connect with a wonderful woman that I've never met, Blue, who I'm now proud to call friend. She scooped me up from the airport, we shared a meal, had mad laughs and got a chance to enjoy each other's poetry ( we both had features in the same evening) ...all in one night. Our bawdy laughter, i think, still sticks to the walls of that Thai food resteraunt where we ate--a few ears forever assaulted.

I also got to spend time with one of my best friends in this world, Sethe's Man and bond with the family that hosted me, invited me to come down and feature at their wonderful venue.

Tuesday is swiftly becoming my favorite day of the week. These are the days I can work on the newsletter for my freelance gig, plan my cirricula for the rest of the week and maybe even write a poem or a group of words passing for a poem.

While I was in the shower earlier this afternoon, a line popped into my head: "He hates this skin he's been given." Yes, I'm talking about Rene--the acne, the puss-filled cists, the psoriasis that plagues him. I think I'm beginning to sympathize with him to a strange extent, as I watch the cists beginning to bloom on my own body. Acne and cists aren't contagious so I don't know what else it can be. Two weeks ago, I got my first one behind the knee. Last week, two almost simultaneously eruped: one on my inner thigh and a vicious one on my left butt-cheek. It hurts to sit down. It hurts to walk. Are these sympathy cists or are they just coincidental epidermal volcanoes of puss and pain? [did that make any sense just now? or was that just plain gross?] Anyway, I've never experienced these painful anomalies on my skin before, but why now?

Things that make you go hmmm..


You know it's big when I tell my mother that I'm seeing someone. My mom and I just don't have those conversations...well....okay, every five years we may have a little elbow-rub about it. I think that reluctance to speak with her about sex and love started way back in 7th grade when I asked her what an "orgasm" meant and she told me to ask my science teacher. Yep, that'll do it. Imagine my embarassement when I asked Ms. Lewis in homeroom. Imagine hers.

And then, there was that conversation my senior year of high school, when we went out to dinner and were having girl talk. My mother revealed that the only two men she'd had sex with were her two husbands: her first husband and then my dad. By that time, I had already had sex with four guys. I had already doubled my mother's number. I felt deliciously ashamed and kept my own dealings locked in my mouth.

Anyways, during the course of our conversation about my new man, something bothered me a little. Mom asked the question:

What are his interests?

And you know what? I couldn't answer. This bothered me: not because I didn't know what his interests were, but because I wasn't sure if he had any. Is that an awful way for me to think? The other day, I asked him what country he'd like to visit and he said Amsterdam so he could smoke ganga in the streets. I personally found that a bit ridiculous, but I tried not to be a snob about it and kept my thoughts to myself. So, in light of that, when my mother asked me what his interests were, my first thought was "marijuana" but I didn't think it wise to tell her that. I also thought "his 4 kids" but I didn't want to drop that on her yet either. So, I resorted to the poetic response and said that he was interested in the inner workings of things. You know, him being in electrical engineering and all...

As soon as I got back on Sunday, I called him during the cab ride home, across the Queensboro Bridge. I found myself eager to see him. He hopped the train from Bushwick and we all but melted into each other like two hot snowflakes melting into pure unmistakable water. That night, at dinner, he asked me point blank:

Why are you interested in me? What makes me different from all the other men you've been with?

Essentially, it was the tough-to-ask-tougher-to-answer why me question. I found the question, and the way he asked it vulnerable, searching, and breathtakingly sincere--born out of some sort of insecurity. I find that so sexy. In the end, after some mild attempts of bullshitting how different he is from the others--which isn't really all that imporant in the grand scheme of things--I just told him:

I just like you for who you are, and I'm with you for who you are and not what you know.

We were both satisfied with my answer, the way we are satisfied by each other.

NAS is coming

Well, today was my first day at my new teaching gig in Harlem. I wouldn't say that I felt nervous, though I'm just not as at ease in the presence of younger people as I am with college students. I know that this teaching is going to require different things from me and I'm not sure what those things are yet. I had a lot of activities plannned and I had no idea whether or not they were going to work.

We stared around 4:30. I asked how they were doing. They said nothing. I asked again and got inaudible mumbles. Ok, i thought, this is going to be tough.

I can explain everything that seemed to have gone wrong. I can explain how hot the room was and how distracting it was that folk kept walking in and out, opening the door to peep in, and interrupting us for no reason whatsoever. I can talk about the nameless girl in the corner who frowned the whole time and refused to participate from the very beginning. I can talk about this same girl telling the director how disinterested she was and the director pulling me aside during break to tell me that my approach was too intellectual and too much like school. I can also talk about the inappropriate joke that she cracked shortly after that, that wasn't tasteful or funny, but instead, tacky and hurtful.

But I won't.

Instead I will talk about the fact that we were able to talk about mutual masturbation as an alternative to having unprotected sex. I will also talk about my co-workers J___ and P____ who were supportive to me and wonderful through the whole session. I will also talk about the young man from Sierra Leone who talked about how much the AIDS epidemic was affecting Africans and in turn, how much that affects him. I will talk about how cool it was to play Bessie Smith for them, whether they thought it was cool or not. I will talk about the girl who raised her hand exuberantly every time I asked a question and during the free write, asked if she could write more than one poem. I'll talk about the kid who wrote during his free write:

"I feel trapped in this room like a caterpillar in a cocoon.
Should I have stayed in my mother's womb.
I'm lonely, friendless, by myself.
I'm poop, have no wealth."

And the other kid who wrote:

"Black people are as
dark as the night's
sky. Black people are
shadows of their
host. Shadows are
like a friend who
will never leave
your side. Shadows
are people can
go anywhere
they want. Shadows
only enemy is a
bright light, that
takes control during
the day. When night
appears shadow
scares the light
away and vice-versa.
But one day shadows (black people)
and light (white people)
will be in peace together
and working together."


I'm really compelled by some of the things they've written today. So, it wasn't a perfect day. Hell, not everywhere can be like the J-school, where I teach on Thursdays, where the students are so perfect I can't help but wonder if they're fucking with me. I needed a little unspoiling and I needed to finally roll my sleeves up. So, here it is. I've asked for it. I just need to try a different approach and incorporate more profanity and visual stuff and encourage more class participation. And then, there's always music. Thanks Bessie, but next week, NAS will be taking over... NAS is coming...