Tuesday, December 24, 2019
LONNIE JOHNSON ~
Welcome! one and all to two solid days of music.
The only problem is, we are dealing with copyright laws
and copyright laws can be important and should be respected
and with the right player (you & me) played with ~
so some of the links will be there for us
and it turns out for copyright reasons
some links won't be there, but often something is there.
I want you to see what I intended for our holiday fare
even if the tune may be absent ~
be playful and try out another tune
that is offered.
Carry on.
Monday, December 23, 2019
YOKEL ( 11 ) ~
Wreck
One of Native’s boys, the best looking one,
Smacked his car and hiked home with a
Bloody lip to get help from his father as
What to do. Native and I were working
At his farm together but stopped right off
And rode the tractor up the Jelly Mill woods
Road until we came out on the back road
Where the Ford was nose busted into the
Side of a concrete bridge. The boy had lost
Control on the steep hill gravel, spun
Around and was stopped fast by the bridge.
We had to get it out of there before anyone
Reported and the state cops showed —
Besides, Native’s boy didn’t have a license.
So with two log chains Native hitched it
Right and rolled it the two miles home
With all the other kids who showed up
Piling into the front and back seats
Fire
I knew Native for five years before Lily
Had his fire but when the trash pail flames
Let go in the Spring wind and spread in a
Dance over his dry fields it was his only
Neighbors he rushed to first because the
Fire department was ten miles off and Lily
Was a hippie without a phone. We didn’t
Have a phone either but used the one in
The Minister’s place and then called Native
Who brought his young boys and together
With rakes and shovels we slapped the fire
Back and made it perfect for the firemen to
Hose water, use walkie-talkies and take
All the credit. But before the big-shots got
There Native looked up from the smoking
Fields and nodded over to me that he well
Remembered doing this 30 years ago with
His uncle when the hill behind our place
Nearly burned over.
Neighbor
Was quite a guy —
A ladies man with four sons.
A college professor who took one
Of his students for his second wife.
A twinkle to his eyes helped swing things
Since he only had one arm, lost as a boy,
But he insisted on manning a chain saw
Where he could, drive stick-shift like a demon,
Play the piano. Now that he has been dead
Ten years I wonder if he ever told me the truth,
Since he was too good to be true. A man whose
House site I cleared and then there were twenty piles
Of brush he wanted burned. I still have my denim
Winter coat that caught on fire by a hot spark.
The book he wrote on Thoreau.
The books I wrote because of Thoreau.
And somewhere in my hands that last time I was
Called over to help him out of his bed, body
Burned away from cancer, and bracing him up
In the bathroom so he could take a leak
We both got a look at one another in that
Awful private mirror.
for John
______________
Bob Arnold
Yokel
Longhouse
2011
Sunday, December 22, 2019
Saturday, December 21, 2019
DAVID BOWIE'S BOOKSHELF ~
a gem of a little book ~
Bowie's choices but it's
O'Connell's spirited
and well-researched
package
Friday, December 20, 2019
Thursday, December 19, 2019
Wednesday, December 18, 2019
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS ~
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving
in the backseat of my car are my own sons,
still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard
me warn them against playing with toy pistols,
though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t
like, not what I fear, because sometimes
I think of Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping
all another insignificance, all another way to avoid
saying what should be said: the Second Amendment
is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance
that says my arms should be heavy with the weight
of a pistol when forced to confront death like
this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires
before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play
in the backseat while the video of Tamir dying
plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing
I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar
of poetry, the moment when a black father drives
his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death
of a black boy that the father cannot mention,
because to mention the death is to invite discussion
of taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson
that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,
to you, the police officer who justifies the echo
of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice
is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets
because his mind would not accept the narrative
of your child’s dignity, of his right to life, of his humanity,
and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;
the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding
on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,
the black people who march, the white people who cheer,
the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of humanity
that we erase in this American dance around death, as we
are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn
to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear
for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything
about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me
of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off
to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,
and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,
the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right
& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound
to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,
mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything
they see into a grave & make home the series of cells
that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.
______________________
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Felon
Norton, 2019
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