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SUMMER READING CORNER
Freedom of Vision , edited by Stephen B. Gladish and Robert Yehling
Order: www.kobocapublishing.com
www.amazon.com
Excerpts
Focus…Jimmy Santiago Baca
Writing It In Blood…Lollie Butler
My Story: Interview with Francisco Del
Monte…Stephen B. Gladish
The Nature of Things…Gordon R. Grilz
A Poetic Suite…Lisa Shannon
There
is a light in us,
A
spirit that foams forth into the world
With
our most powerful aspects
Like
a swollen ripe apple
Its
tight skin gleaming soft phosphorescence
On
the blue air bulging with light,
The
apple like a medieval friar
Bursting
with energy
To
toll those taste buds
Like
bells in the tower
Groaning
with masculine happiness
The
rough joys of plucking apples from the orchard
And
biting into one
With
the feverish relish of a jaguar
Licking
water from a forest pond
After
a night kill.
The
apple's blood rings my lips
Stains
my fingers—
The
tree
All
alone in the middle of the field
Spreads
its branches of light
Radiant
Without
prayer or forgiveness.
• • •
I've
seen the old men at dances
Grim-lipped
and melancholy
Listening
to a song from the band
Remembering
an old love
They
haven't seen in a long time—
The
light in their faces
Is
the same that spreads over an autumn
Field
at dusk, after it's been harvested.
• • •
I
have the same disease that most men have—
Going
back to the woman I love
Rebuffed
every single time
When
I ask if I can sleep over.
I
blame the light in her
For
my repetitive obsession:
Attracted
by the light cupping her breasts,
By
the whip-crack light that snaps
Around
her waist,
Making
me growl like a lion in a circus ring
Forced
to sit in a chair.
It's
the light that springs from her hands
Like
a delicious plate of Mexican food,
And
not allowed to make love to her
I
live like a prisoner in a cell on bread and water rations.
On
those rare occasions,
When
her tongue curls into my mouth,
I
am the man travelers find in the desert,
A
beautiful woman lays me in her arms,
And
from a leather water pouch,
Drips
cold pure water into my parched mouth.
Even
the light that scorches the desert
Becomes
a mere oasis of light
In
her presence.
A
light in her attracts me, not dissuading me from leaving
And
moving on with my own life,
But
a light that never lets me forget
Her:
I
am a black fly buzzing against the sun-warmed
Windowpane,
The
snake absorbing the waves of emanating rock-warmth
Is
me,
The
lilac bud tightly encased in its green scales
Barely
starts to unfurl in the winter light
When
freezing night cold makes it draw back
Is
me.
• • •
Forgive
yourself
And
honor the spirit within you—
So
the lilac in my garden
Tells
me this morning
With
its tight-whorled barely budding
Tongues.
Writing
It In Blood:
A
Night Of Creative Writing With
Women Inmates
Lollie
Butler
First buzz, then the ironclad slam. It’s Thursday evening and I’m experiencing my usual brand of uneasiness as I look into the prison keeper’s face. He is smiling. Sadistically? Patronizingly? Let’s make the English teacher wait a while then put a little extra book into the gate.
No,
that’s probably not it. However, it’s hard to trust a women’s state
prison guard who’s younger than my son and wears a gun on his
hip to accentuate his authoritarian attitude.
In
two minutes and three more gates – including a scanner that will go
crazy should I leave my car keys in my pocket – I’ll be inside
the prison
yard where six hundred women are put on hold. The state of Arizona
calls this “restitution,” yet makes no claims I’ve ever heard about
rehabilitation, though I know some women attend A.A. and substance
abuse programs regularly.
“You
can’t rehabilitate prisoners who have never been ‘habilitated’ before
they got here,” a Department of Corrections officer informed me during
my first month’s orientation. Guards call teachers and religious personnel
“Do Gooders” or “Jail House Jehovahs.” It’s been four
years since
I started coming here. Maybe I’ll change my mind and become as hardened
as the rest, start referring to these women as numbers, but I don’t
think so.
“You’re a damned bleeding heart!” the prison librarian says, when I tell her most women here seem like types who were never given a chance. A lumpish woman of about fifty, with a smirk for every situation, she shrugs and nods toward a blue-clad group of young women browsing through a section of law books. “You’ll learn the hard way. They steal you blind, then kick you,” she says.
I walk across the yard, through lines of women dressed in blue jeans and sweatshirts tagged with the same numbers as their mug shots. They wait for laundry duty, food or the distribution of other necessities. I enter the library building where fifteen or twenty women who have histories tangled with the most horrible abuses imaginable will sit at long tables, grab pencils and write their stories, some tearfully, some as dispassionately as though they were writing about ghosts. McCarthy is standing in front of the library. He’s cool, the women tell me. It’s the nicest thing inmates say about a guard.
“Good evening, ladies,” he says as we enter. The grey-eyed grandfather type has earned the women’s approval. The phone attached to his belt squawks. Two young women neatly approach him from the back, obviously waiting to ask a question. Their faces are clear of makeup and their clipped hair is pulled back. The women are at ease with the older man, who carries his slouched frame as though burdened with a weight beyond his years. Their relationship is not a bit like those they maintain with most of the “brown shirts.”
“Hey, ’Carth! I’ll need to get my laundry later. You won’t ticket me will you? You know ’Carth, if you treat me OK I’ll write a best- seller and you’ll be in it!”
“Hey yeah, that’s all I need,” he says. He looks over names on a clipboard, lets the door close easily and sways back into the teeming yard. It still seems strange to me to hear of guards giving tickets for inmate infractions. Among other things, inmates are evaluated on the basis of how many tickets they’ve received when it’s time for parole. It’s just part of the system, they say. In this way they’re like parked cars; just don’t park too long in the same place.
Once the plain wooden tables and chairs are arranged to accommodate the number of women gathering, I put my books down and pass the sign-in sheet around. I’ve learned not to ask leading questions that are formalities in other circles. In this situation, “How are you?” or “How was your day?” seem like prying and give the women opportunity to complain about prison life. There’s a lot more information in their faces and postures, more than I want to know some nights. I get the class started. “So who has work to read tonight?”
Stephanie, a young black woman with exceptionally fine features and a broad smile says, “Silvia does! She’s been working on this thing for two weeks.”
Silvia, a Mexican girl whose dark hair is plaited in one long braid, unfolds a piece of paper and stares at it a moment before looking up and smiling proudly. Silvia and Stephanie bunk together in the same pod, in all a cluster of six beds in an open bay. I imagine Silvia writing after lights out and tucking the poem into her bra where it will remain safe until class. I wonder again how these women can create under the all-night lights, singing, sobbing, bed checks and general nocturnal chaos that go with the territory. I’ve wondered about this many times.
Six people read in this session, including Kath, a bright, clever writer. Her merits include poems published in statewide literary magazines. Kath is a mother figure to the younger women and a dependable, “I-tell-it-like-it-is” type. The salt-and-pepper, two-foot length of her hair is neatly clasped in a pink foam curler at the center of her back. Thick glasses speak of nights writing and editing law briefs in direct defiance to outdated correctional department policies. On my second night here, she proudly uncovered a studio portrait of a dimpled, curly-haired youngster and passed it around the table. “Sweet child,” I said.
“How, how could anyone abuse an angel like that?” she asked, looking directly at me. I felt as though I was being subjected to some sort of prison initiation. The others remained silent.
“That your daughter?”
“Hell no, that’s me!” She covered the photo with wrinkled tissue and placed it under the cover of a book.
Kath whittles away her days as a shift boss at the underwear plant, a prison room where boxers, bras and other underwear items are drafted, engineered and sewn for inmates in statewide correctional institutions. She’s a capable woman who can find creative ways to do any job. I can’t help but think what a fine teacher or attorney she would make, except for one obstacle: She is doing hard time and may or may not ever be paroled.
“So Rose finally learned to spin,” Kath says to no one in particular as she pulls out a wooden library chair and sits. “I’ve been teaching her how to turn over boxer shorts until the whole band is sewn—and today she did it!”
A pretty ash blonde in her twenties, Rose grins sheepishly as the others applaud. It’s good to see the women encourage one another. I find myself taking pleasure in their hard-won achievements as though the feats are my own.
“These are my friends Carol and Murph. They’ve been saying they want to come, ’specially since you get free paper here,” Lisa says with an impish grin. She’s talked several of her non-literary friends into showing up, only to have them disappear at break time.
Lisa has a strong, character-lined face filled with enough freckles to defy any label imposed by a prison system. Her grin is as fresh and engaging as a young farm girl’s, although the expression doesn’t reflect in her sherry-brown eyes. I see it more in the taunting turn of her lip. She enjoys talking about her high-flying times on the outside, flaunting 38 tales of her male conquests. A manipulative creature, Lisa is smart and sassy, eager to benefit from classes, but attention driven.
“Who’s this guy you’re writing to?” someone asks.
Lisa rolls her dark-lashed eyes and displays a glossy photo of a muscled young man who might be the model for a True Romance cover. “I met him one night when my husband and I wanted a third. Two a.m. and he was sitting at the bus stop, just sitting there with his long blonde hair and everything. So I picked him up. My husband left but this baby stayed...”
A chorus of oooohs resounds from the women.
I’m sorry I didn’t interrupt this before. “O.K., sign in and let’s get started.” I check my watch. Only ten minutes of small talk...not bad. Marie offers apologies for being late and sits down next to Kath. A statuesque black woman, Marie moves with a dancer’s grace. She is wearing a slight dab of pink lipstick, and her river of heavy hair is braided in slim plaits as though a friend took time and pains to fuss over it. “I have something I need help with.” There is earnestness in her voice. I know she’s been laboring over the exercise, identifying clichés, since I assigned it the previous week. “A lot of not-so-hidden clichés...” She grimaces, and then begins to read in a cream-smooth voice, punctuated by child-like hesitations. After a few lines, she says, “And I’ll always love him...”
Celine clicks her pen, a clear sign of irritation. “How can you say,‘...always love him’ with a straight face? I mean there’s a lot that’s fresh in the first few lines, but that line has warts from old age.” Celine scans the table with intense blue eyes. She’s a passionate woman of ample figure and muscled forearms, the effect of long afternoons working on the shotgun crew (digging fence-post holes on county range land). She clicks her pen twice more and sighs. Kath and Rose nod in agreement. The others squint or look blank-faced. “I think it’s good,” Silvia says, taking the pen from her lip and nearly whispering. “She is describing how it is to feel deserted. That’s hard to do without using one cliché, isn’t it?” Her brow wrinkles and she looks at me.
“Hard but not impossible.” I look back at Marie, who is jotting something in the margin of her paper.
“O.K., how about, I’ll always want him? Is that better?”
“Better but no cigar,” Kath says and looks at the others, encouraging comment. “I’d like to see you write more about this guy, enough so you can toss a lot of it, then see what you have. I think once you get past the therapy of this thing, you can write some gutsy prose and that’s what we’re waiting for. I mean, gal, you have to write it in blood!”
Marie closes her eyes for a moment. I’m afraid once she opens them, there will be tears. I brace myself, hoping the group hasn’t been too critical. We’ve talked about constructive criticism enough that they should have the ways and means of it down by now. Most women, once they begin to crack open enough to tell their own stories, have to struggle through a few layers of hell. They all know it. Those who eventually encounter their internal horrors, and heal from them, credit writing classes or counseling groups that confront domestic violence, substance abuse or some another form of living hell.
Marie knows Kath and Celine well enough to recognize their styles of helpful criticism. A grin breaks slowly over Marie’s dark, polished cheeks. The smile she offers everyone exposes two missing front teeth.
“You’re right. This is shit.” She tosses the paper in the air.
“Not shit!” Kath says. “Save the good stuff and start from there.” Celine nods her head. “Kath’s right. Bring the changes back so we can hear them, OK?”
Silvia volunteers to read some work in progress, a poem about her time in a Mexican prison. The details are heavy with pain and suffering. I wince at the thought of actually criticizing the piece and tell her so. Lisa saves the moment by offering that the poem is beautiful; she especially likes the fresh use of similes, but it makes her sad. Heads shake in agreement and Silvia smiles softly.
We take a break. Several women pull cigarette papers and tobacco from their pockets. They stand just outside the door, rolling cigarettes and issuing smoke trails away from one another. I think of derailed train cars, standing off track, their brakes smoking from a sudden stop. As the sun goes down behind razor wire, I thumb through A Child’s Garden of Verses, one of the many outdated library books the Department of Corrections considers contemporary poetry.
Kath
throws opens the door. “You’ve got to see this one, Lollie!” I stick
my head out the heavy door to witness clusters of blue-clad prisoners,
their hair and shirts saturated with the crimson of a desert sunset.
All along the yard, grey institutional windows have taken on pure
gold streaks as the sun dips behind shadowed hills. “Now
poem me that!” she says defiantly.
A
female guard passes through the library as we reconvene. Her shirt
is creased sharply in three pleats down her back. She eyes the table of
women dispassionately and closes the inner door behind her. No
one speaks until the guard is out of sight, then Marie clears her throat
and begins to read as though she has just now written this on a scrap
of precious paper:
“When
I’m free again, I’ll sip a glass of pink wine, real
slow like my throat just opened for the first time, I’ll
make love to my old man, way back on
the summer couch or under a tree near
old Bulah Creek that lived beside us close
enough you could hear it giggling. And
when my kids put their arms ’round my neck and
say ‘Momma’ like they just woke from a bad dream, I’ll
hug their skinny-bones, hug them and never
let go till I’m more dead than Jesus.”
The
wrinkled paper slides into her lap. She stares at something past
the room, blinks once, blinks again to clear the moment from her
mind. She looks at each of us, one face at a time. “Tell me now, is
zat cliché?”
My
Story: Interview
With Francisco Del Monte
Stephen
B. Gladish
It
was time to find out how Francisco’s story began and what happened
in between. At
Bisonwiches in Tucson, Arizona, Francisco, Leah, and I got lunch
and the interview began
Gladish: Tell me about your family and where your story began.
Francisco
Del Monte: My father was
Cuban, my mother African- American.
We grew up in Sacramento, CA. My dad worked for the city. There
were six boys and a girl in my family; four were older, three brothers
and a sister, and one younger brother. When I was born, my dad,
who was Spanish speaking, wanted to name me Jose Luis Gonzalez.
Two days of heavy resistance from my mother convinced him
to go along with her name for me: Francisco Del Monte. Her maiden
name was Del Monte. When I was ten, my dad, who was an alcoholic,
lost his job and wanted a divorce, because he couldn’t financially
support the family. Mom went along with it. While there was no
physical abuse involved, there was plenty of emotional and verbal abuse.
Gladish: When did your life change from being an inside-the-law boy to an
outlaw?
Francisco: The first time I broke the law, I was seven. I remember this boy
about my age kept riding his bike up and down the street in front of me,
back and forth, as if to say he had the bike and I had nothing. One day
I went out and swung a broom or a pole at him as he rode by, and knocked
him off clean off the bike. I don’t really know why I did that. Shook
him up a bit, might have knocked him out. My mom scolded me, grounded
me.
The
thing is, my three older brothers were into gangbanging, and everybody
I knew was into gangbanging. If I didn’t join a gang, I didn’t have
to go into any dark alley to get beaten up. I got beaten up right at home.
For example, once when I was twelve, Pooh, my older brother, began
by trying to provoke me and then with no warning whatsoever, he swung
at me and smashed me full in the face, breaking my jaw. I remember
it because I was all dressed in blue, and then I was drenched in
blood.
It
wasn’t until I was ten that I made my mark as a Crip. I saw these kids
with cars, jewelry, big wads of cash, and lots of power. So I wanted some.
It wasn’t until I was eleven that a guy gave me five crack cocaine rocks.
I sold them for twenty bucks each, total of one hundred dollars, and
gave him the hundred dollars. He gave me ten rocks; I sold them for two
hundred dollars and gave it to him. He gave me fifteen rocks and I sold
them for three hundred dollars and gave it to him. We went up to four
hundred dollars. I sold all that. We went up to six hundred dollars.
I sold
that. So he gave me an ounce of cocaine, and said when I sold that I could
keep the money.
Two
days later, I had thirteen hundred dollars and bought my own cocaine.
People began coming in to see me from all over Sacramento, especially
from the rich neighborhoods. Here’s just one example: One guy
named Mike gave me five hundred dollars three times a day for cocaine.
He did this for three or four years. You know my markup was at
least one hundred percent, usually one hundred fifty percent. By
the time I was 14, my mentor, Big Boy, who was 21 years old, six-foot-three,
and weighed about 500 pounds, took me aside and said. “You’ve
got to get a good lawyer on your side. Pay him $5,000 a month as
a retainer. You’ll be glad you did.” He took me to my first
lawyer, who
had friends in the right places. So at age 14 I had a lawyer and I paid
him sixty thousand a year. I lived in the ’hood on the West Side;
by then
they told me, “You’re a legend on the other side, the East Side.”
Gladish: By the time you were 14, what else had you done to become a legend,
what kind of money did you have, and what did you do with it all?
Francisco: I had a 1994 Monte Carlo; I carried $22,000 around in my backpack.
We did armed robbery and home invasion: that’s burglary when
the people are in the house. We traveled to see the Statue of Liberty in
New York City; we went to Six Flags in Texas, Disneyland, and the Black
Hills of South Dakota. We saw the four Presidents carved in stone. Without
that lawyer, Robert Turasso, before I was 16, I would have been
jailed for aggravated assault and attempted murder at least three times.
Most of my family were Bloods; they wore red. I was the only Crip;
I wore blue. My brother and family and friends of the family— Leon,
Mervyn, Archie, were all gangbangers. My mom never knew who did
it, but from age 12 to age 16, I’d put six hundred or seven hundred dollars
into her mailbox three or four days every week, in a big envelope with
her name on it. She could never tell the handwriting. She had kids and
not much of a job. My dad had caused enough verbal and emotional abuse
and trouble. He was no help. So somebody had to help out. She and I
fought a lot. I didn’t go to school, but I was very smart, so
people told me.
I did wrong, and liked the excitement. She put up with me until this one
thing happened.
One
time after we left my uncle’s house, my mom threw me out of my
house for shooting my uncle. She didn’t care that he was a Blood, and
he shot first. He didn’t die or anything. Later, when I was 16, I
was indicted
for three murders; they were dropped to negligent homicide, and
I served three years in the California Youth Authority.
Gladish: What kind of piece were you carrying and what was the most vivid
image from the incident that provoked those charges?
Francisco: I had an eight-shot Desert Eagle .44. We were at a mall in Sacramento.
There were Bloods and Crips in two groups, and the Bloods
started the shooting. We all went outside the mall into the parking
lot. I shot the guy who had started the whole thing, Ross, and the
bullet hit him in the butt. He went back inside the mall and fell down.
There was a crowd. I walked through the crowd. They
said, “Call an ambulance.” I
said, “No, call a morgue.” I shot him six times, to put fear into those
Bloods. There were five to six hundred Bloods, and about seven hundred
Crips in Sacramento.
Gladish:
What caused those actions? What happened to you before that big
gun battle?
Francisco:
I was 15. I was driving my car in Richmond, CA. A Blood ran
up to me and shot me six times: Poom! A bullet in the head. Poom! A
second bullet in the head. Poom! Shot in the stomach. Poom! Shot in the
leg. Poom! Shot in the stomach. Poom! Shot in the back.
I
was on PCP so I didn’t feel any of it. He had a long-barrel .22- caliber
pistol, using long rifle cartridges. That’s what the doctors told
me when
they dug most of them out. I still carry around a couple of them. Anyway,
I just rolled out of the car and began shooting back. I hit plenty of
other shooters. I never went back to see how they were or whether I killed
them. You just didn’t do that. I became a renegade. Trekell Park was
my neighborhood. Guys went there every night, shot dice, smoked dope,
and sold weed. There was no other life style.
Gladish: What kind of armament did you have?
Francisco: I had to stow them away for three years while I was in prison in
California. I had a Mossberg 12-gauge Street Sweeper, with 50 rounds
in one drum. I had a 9mm Berretta. I had an M-16. I had an AK- 47.
Gladish: Where did you go after you got out of prison at age 19?
Francisco: Mom wanted a new beginning. We moved to Eloy, Arizona. I
was there for about three years. There were big race wars—Blacks against
the Mexicans. We took bets all the time: “Who can knock out a person
with just one hit?” meaning one bullet. Knock out meant just what
it said: Knock them unconscious. That was part of the gang procedure.
Anybody could knock a target out with fifteen bullets. That’s why
my favorite firearm was the Desert Eagle.
Gladish: How did you manage to avoid more prison time?
Francisco: The cops didn’t care if black gang members or Mexican gang
members killed each other off. That just made the cops’ jobs easier.
Besides, once we knocked a rival gang member out, and he was alone—maybe
everybody else had driven off or gotten away—either we or
the rival gang would lay him out on the railroad tracks. Nobody could
trace the cause of death. People figured it was just another hobo drinking
too much wine.
Gladish: So how many gang members of both sides may have gotten the
railroad blues?
Francisco: Ten or fifteen. Again, for our part, we never went back to see
if they regained consciousness and moved out of the way. For all we know,
they might have all survived.
Gladish: Were you living on your own?
Francisco: Oh yeah. Remember, I was financially independent. When I was
10, I had $600 a month coming in. Age 11: $2,500 to $3,000 a month.
Age 12: $7,000 to $8,000 a month. That went on through age 13. By
age 14, I had $10,000 a month to live on. That’s when I put the lawyer
on retainer.
Gladish: How did you store all the loot, all this income?
Francisco: I had a safe under the floor in my closet. I always had two hundred
fifty thousand dollars on hand. When I had one hundred twenty thousand
dollars coming in every year, I blew half of it, just for the love of
money. We learned to do home invasions of the drug dealers. That’s where
the big stashes were. I learned not to trust anybody. If I left my house,
my girlfriend left the house too. She had to. But
we had fun as well. Thirteen of us went to Hawaii. I could rent an
entire floor of a hotel when I wanted to. I had a fifteen-thousand- dollar
diamond necklace for six months, then just gave it to a girl I liked.
Gladish: I remember having Six-Gun in my class at Rincon, before I met
you. He wanted help writing a book. He didn’t know any composition
rules whatsoever. But according to his daily journal accounts,
every day was an adventure in mystery and suspense. He never
knew what gunslinger or chasing cop lurked around the corner. I don’t
know how he got through it.
Francisco: I knew Half-Dead when he was at Rincon also. He had sixteen
victims; he was a real killer, a serial killer, on his way to death row
at San Quentin.
Gladish: In looking back at your life, how many people shot and hit?
Francisco
(after a minute of thought): I should have been on death row. I
may have avoided ten major prison sentences before the age of 18. After
age 19, I’d rather not say. I shot and hit 15 or 20 gangbangers. Maybe
five or more died from lead poisoning. No drive-bys. I did what I
did and kept moving. I didn’t care much; they were shooting at me.
If they
died, it was their time to go, not mine. From age 22 to age 28, I served
time in the Arizona State Prison system.
Gladish: What changed you? You’ve been out for some time now.
Francisco: I found a positive role model in prison. I watched this teacher
and said to myself, “This is how I want to be at age 40.” Everyday
the teacher wrote out an inspirational spiritual message on the blackboard.
I had a whole notebook full of them, along with just about everybody
else in the class. Tolstoy said the most important book he ever
wrote was The
Calendar of Wisdom.
The teacher said Tolstoy collected
quotations from two hundred spiritual masters and leaders. Each
day he had five quotes for inspiration, with his favorite quote written
in italics. So I buckled down and got my education. Somehow I mediated
between the blacks and the Mexicans on the yard. I was half black
and half Mexican, so I could solve problems quickly. I
had a reputation that surprised me. My nickname was Dibo, for the mean
guy in the movie, Friday, so nobody messed with me. I’d tell the students
in class, “Hey, if I can do it, you can do it.” I always had a smile.
I thought about making it outside. I’d say, “Think what I have in front
of me. Think what you have in front of you. Everything will come to
you.”
The
Nature Of Things
Gordon
R. Grilz
The
green iguana on my wall
Has
closed his eyes as if asleep
Watching
the Sonoran sunset
My
eyes follow a white-winged dove
To
its nest in a palo verde
During
the night
Monsoon
rains move in from Mexico
In
my dreams you are always alive
You
call to me across the arroyo
But
the wind steals your words
A
man in shackles measures his step
Against
the chains that hold him
And
learns to move within his limitations
We
are pilgrims finding our way
Learning
the lesson the turtle teaches
To
the fish
Sadness
borrows my soul
I
lost myself before I lost you
A
Poetic Suite
Lisa
Shannon
I. Song of Silence
Whispering
through the desert
Gathering
dust and lifting it to flight,
Singing
over the pines
So
hollow and eerie after midnight.
Even
the subtle sound of semis
On
the freeway through the motel window
Are
barely audible over the air conditioner
That
boasts its frigidity.
That
song of silence—
I
miss the harmony of birds and trees
Traffic
and artificial wind In
this space where peace and quiet
Is
the JVC set on 10?
II. Pretty Business
No
way I'll miss today
Shadows
rise and fall
By
the door slightly ajar.
It's
a Saturday (maybe Sunday)
Early,
earlier than usual—
I
trip myself awake
With
deep chocolate coffee
And
sing along with an Alicia
Keys song
Butterflyz
That's
what I've got.
I
hope you can't see my sadness
Through
my best face.
I
try so hard to smile,
I
try to be happy most of the time.
My
best face...
Carefully
plodded with dew
And
powder
Shimmering
eye lace,
Composed
lip lines and
Frosty
gloss.
A
voice from the sky says
It's
time to see you.
I
close the door as
I leave the
Pretty
business
Behind.
III. The Shadow
Buried
No
light in my corner
As
I hide in the dark.
Darkness
I'm
in a foul mood
My
mind aches
My
body quivers I
hate mornings.
Emptiness
My
shadow self lies to me
Lies
to you
Lies Lies Lies
in the mirror
And
laughs at me
For
you and your instruction
For
me and my bullshit.
Dying
Laughing
Crying
Shattering
truths
Your
lies.
IV.
Mary
To
flight gently she takes
With
grace her beauty shines the truth
Before
I turn to notice her,
She
vanishes like the wind,
I
feel her kiss on my cheek
Her
butterfly wings pattering the breeze
Between
us.
She
speaks
Music
to my ears
I
call her
Mother
V. Waking from the
Dream
Longing
in absolute obscurity
Closing
my eyes to
Shakespeare
lies
Talbot
truths
My
soul shivers at the reality
Surrounding
me.
The
faraway scent of your skin
The
sweetness of your smile
Your
hand in mine
I
feel myself waking from the dream.
Cold,
steel whispers
Another
angry day
Satin
words fall from mannequin mouths
Dawn
piercing through my window
I
jounce from slumber
Shakespeare,
our host
It's
all in the masquerade
Pitted
in your renaissance story-telling
My
dreams
Night-terrors
The
alarm rails
Adding
din to fin
V. Spoons and Sirens
Dedicated
to a friend who OD'ed on heroin two
days after I wrote this.
It's
10AM the floods are on
They
say she ran away
But
she's sitting right next to me
She
hasn't gone anywhere
Except
maybe in her mind
Dropped
the spoon on the floor
Off
to another-land
I'll
never go there.
Alarms,
sirens, bright lights
Over
the grass they linger
Like
fleas, gnats,
Irritating
insects
With
bug masks and pesticide
To
kill the masses.
(dead
air)
Slow
motion
Every
silence deafens me
They
knew
The
dog ate her spoon
I
grope for my blinder
(darkness)
She's
coming back
I
can feel her breathing
They
say she ran away
But
she's sitting right next to me.
• Freedom of Vision Lead
• Freedom of Vision Introduction
• Contents and Contributors
