Una Poema

El campo verde toma mis ojos.
Y con su belleza, lo duerme
Jadeantemente
La noche está viva

Un cielo triste de morado
Se dice de nos verano
Y el viento de sada canta
hasta que la belleza
se muera.

Mañana,
vivimos otra vez

Vivimos

Happy, Repressed

Within those embellished walls
They sing of mirth
& having nice lives
Houses on hills, big & nice
Flowers & a lawn,
With a picket fence, white
Seeking out the world’s glitters
Painting pictures of a life

Those lonely souls are anxious
With raging insides, dying
“Good morning dear!”
“I love you,” and the show.
Growing old and cracking,
With their sidewalks
Contempt in quiet desolation.

Untitled Poem

***If you have any suggestions for a title let me know.***

In walks the music,
Upbeat and mellow
Like a sad saxophone with sunlight
On a cool piano’s Midnight Movements,

And out she walks
Swinging hips stride sexily
In her red dress, leaving perfumed intoxicants
She goes to my head, discreetly

Sweet satin skin
Like brown sugar, in black coffee
I’m killin’ her softly, and tenderly
Sex and love are poetic clichés, —I know.

Late night lovin’
Sleepin’ in all day,
99 problems; minus my 100
I should care more. But I won’t.

Untitled 1

“Life is a beautiful struggle,” she says to me.
“I like how you balance your optimism and realism,” I respond.
“But… don’t you think so?” she asks.
“It’s a nice definition, poetic at the least.”
“So what do you say it is then?”
“Life is… I don’t know. Se la vie.”

I roll back over to place my arm around her, enjoying the coolness of her flesh against mine. We had spent another night together after she had sworn that we wouldn’t. Many of our nights were like this, spent in sweltering stints of passionate sex. We would get lost in time, and lost in each other; then cool off with verbal intercourse of casual philosophy, exchanging our thoughts on love and life.

“This is the last time I’m coming over here!” I recall that angry voice of hers in my head. At the time, furious, but I knew not serious.

“We can’t keep doing this,” she had told me.

It was because she said she had someone now, a serious relationship. She told me about a week ago. I tried to act as if I couldn’t really give a damn. It was the way we men try to do, play it off as if we were emotionless; stoics in the stern face of love. But it was a mask, and I knew this, but wouldn’t let her penetrate my blank façade.

My lover and I had a history that went way back, about two years ago I think, long before her and Mr. Nice guy had gotten together.
“Yeah, he treats me good,” she says as her embrace conforms to mine. “He has a great job, a nice place, good conversation. I couldn’t ask for anything else. But I miss you.”

Tonight we saw each other again. A night that began in innocent conversation, and presently resumed in pillow talk; after our fits of lust had been satisfied. I heard her phone vibrate on the floor. She lazily climbs over me to grab it and falls back to my bed.

“Looks like somebody misses you too.” I say.
“Hmm,” she hums with a humorous smirk.

She flips open her phone to respond to him I supposed, with fingers tapping away rapidly to a text message. ‘Wait a minute, what the hell?’ I think to myself. ‘Is this a hint of jealously I feel developing in the pit of my stomach? I don’t get jealous. Why should I? I can have other women. What she and him do is none of my business, it doesn’t affect me.’

Yet, by some involuntary choice of my own romantic sub-conscious, that little touch of jealously was incontestable. I lay there and gaze intently at the perfected light brown visage in my presence. The pale blue tint from her phone made it visible, surrendering to her beautiful air a luminous glow; a radiance that complemented her present prettiness. An enticing creature she is, my Nubian Aphrodite. She is the opiate of my eros; my lustful power, my --?--, and a deadly flaw of mine. I loved having her, and I needed her. But she was not entirely mine at the moment. For she is his too; and my knowing this minor piece of info was enough to devastate some small, repressed part of me. Our attractions were growing fatal, and fated to resolve in a star-crossed heartache.

My stare continues through the duration of her message. She flips her phone shut and tosses it.
“What?” she inquires. “You’re just layin’ there staring a hole in my forehead.”

I laugh, “You know what,” pulling her naked physique back closer to mine. Her brown eyes fall into the darkness of my own and we stare, burying our pupils into each others’, as if we thought we could make the substance of our minds meet; like our souls might experience an ecstasy and conjoin somewhere outside of this physical realm. She kisses me, with soft and moist lips, relaying a tantalizing quiver through my nerves.

Childish Idolatry

Unlike many of my peers at the time, I never had the luxury of believing in a Santa Clause. Nor did I ever truly believe in a Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny or any of those other magical personalities I’d argue about with my fellow 1st grade classmates. I can remember pondering the concept of Jolly ole St. Nick one Christmas Eve. “How can his reindeer fly?” I thought “if they don’t even have any wings.” This was my reasoning as a very young child. I could have been no more than 5 or 6 at the time, while some may say this premature rationality has robbed me of my innocent and what I’d preferably call the ‘gullible’ stage of childhood.

I can remember one night sitting at home on the kitchen floor with a pencil and piece of notebook paper. At this young I age I can remember attempting to express my artistic abilities, usually with crayon sketches of a favorite cartoon character or some fascinating car or truck. Yet tonight my youthful aesthetic had been focusing on a different genre. “What can I draw if I wanted to draw a picture of God?” I pondered. I had often heard people discuss this “Heavenly Father” in church. Therefore I had concluded that he must be a man, a very big man in the sky. But what did he look like? I remember constructing a visualization of some gray toned cloud-colored man flying among the clouds. Is this what I should draw to illustrate an accurate portrait of “God?” A word I had heard so often in church, or spoken of by my family, and I had heard this name mentioned on T.V. So what does he (or she) look like then? I had never seen a picture of him before. And a new thought occurred to me; I had never seen him for myself, nor had I heard his voice. “So, how can I even be sure that there really is a God? Maybe this God is something like Santa Clause, a Santa Clause for grown people? Maybe he doesn’t even really exist at all? What if he’s just another one of those stories they tell, like Santa Clause or the Boogeyman, one of those stories to make people act good.”

This is the philosophical pondering of the young David Russell. I was left perplexed, baffled at a religious reality and its ideals. I wanted to know how I could draw a portrait of God, something I had never ever seen. Then the thought hit me, “I know, I can ask my mother, she knows a lot of stuff, she’s a grown up.” She enters the kitchen not aware of her agnostic 1st grader’s inquisitiveness. “Mama, what does God look like?” an unanswerable question thrown at her out of nowhere? The next few minutes she tries to explain to a six year old child the concept of an omnipotent, benevolent, invisible, and unfathomable higher being; how people believe he is up there beyond the sky, but no way to provide a young inquisitive mind with a simple picture. No way to provide an elementary student with an elementary validation of God. “So, why would anyone think he’s up there with no way to see him, or touch, or hear him?” I ask.

My mother, her following actions, the wisdom presented in this response, is a memory that I can never forget. For, at the time, the picture she’d draw, God’s picture was beyond my understanding. There, at that age, and for years to come I’d try to figure out what she meant with this simple, untalented, but well drawn portrait. “What do I think MY God looks like?” she asks rhetorically. “This is what I think my God looks like.” On this notebook paper, with a black pen she sketches the picture of a woman; a woman who wore glasses and had long curly hair. “A woman” I responded, “but I thought God was a man.” A woman, as a God? And she said “Her God” at that. But I thought there was only one God. I thought he was THE God. I thought he was everybody’s God. How could the portrait of this woman be her God and only her God? I look down at the picture again, not professionally drawn, but the resemblance of this womanly God to my mother is obvious. The hair was the same, and the glasses; and she had even drawn in the details of those three little brown dots my mother has around her nose.

This answer leaves the young David Russell even more confused. How could God be a woman? A woman that looks like my mama, and why does my mama say that the lady in her picture is her God? Now, being as old as I am, I thought I had a better understanding of what she meant by drawing “her God.” Yet, my mother’s drawn riddle is still not completely solved. Was this a hint at some kind of metaphorical agnosticism? Many of her religious associates would call this act blasphemous, an act of idolatry. Yet, my mother is a regular attendee of our Church. I wouldn’t call her anything near blasphemous, and definitely not skeptical, or agnostic (or at least not openly). So what does this portrait mean? A memory that lingers in my head and still leaves me somewhat perplexed. I’ve never asked her what she meant by drawing a God that looked like her, and I doubt I’ll ever ask her. I think this is just one of those mysteries that will go on throughout the course of history as unsolved, and it may be fitting that it does.

Dithyramb

But behind that exterior smile
I say there’s sure to be found,
A masked and disregarded frown
I ask—can it be so easy for all?
To simply smile—just a lift of the cheeks
At all of the world’s menacing wounds

Well.. is it, so easy?
Though, we’ll say no,.. no
It cannot!

For the smile is something different
It tries to cure the unfairness of pain
With its lighthearted teeth…
And thus—its laughter endeavors to….?
Whisk away all of last night’s sorrows?

Or how… How does it do it with such poise?
And precisely
Like an anecdote for impending pessimism

This Charisma must be from Dionysus himself!
So you should extol it more than any
As the most godlike of your sentiments

It’s like demonic Love, who conquered all
But left destruction in its passion…

While your humor leaves no trail
But only a heartfelt amusement…
And some happiness
And smiles comparable to the Absurd
Like it gives a clue to true Meaning

Hinting that it’s only really like a comedy
When asked what it all meant.
So try to laugh yourself to tears
At spectacles of misery and tragedy!

Spend your nights in carefree chaos!
While drinking yourself to an oblivion!
And laughing away all of your sins and pains!
Yes! I prescribe that you do just that!
Let it be your new philosophy!

So when old or new troubles do arise
You will now just… laugh them away!
It is the most amiable—and most admirable of lifestyles,
To simply smile
And laugh
At life.

Hinterland Jazz

Summertime
The heat soothes muh sweat—somehow.
At dusk, our sun makes a hazy sky pink, and gray
as he makes his way to rest fo tha night;
somewhere, back off in a distance from the Delta.

A humid breeze blows lightly,
Like the calmin breath of the South.
And then stops
Leavin a stifflin’, eerie stillness in the air,

Right across from the green fields of cotton
That ole white post fence needs a tackin’, wit more fixin
But it still ran its distance, along that ole dusty road
The one where ole Miss Zora trods along,
like she does about every evening
Hummin’ & singin some ole-timely soundin’ slave spiritual,
Hummin’ and singin’ like she was hurtin something awful.
She sounds like her soul had been hurt, but she could still find joy in it
She made it swell and die sorrowfully in my ears

It sounded so terrible,
Listenin’ to that ancient lady sing about pain.
Terrible but beautiful—revealin' to my soul some of her woeful wisdom
Every note had it’s own peculiar type of grief, too awful for words

Slaves used to gather up cotton in that same field
The same one Miss Zora walks by each day.
& she neva looks ova there, no—neva glances its way!
She just walks along, wit her nose up,
just enough not to make her seem proud, but not haughty.

I thought I saw the blackness of a field hand’s ghost
like it was tremblin’ under the whips of deadly work
and cryin’ fo a spirit at the ropes of Reconstruction’s lynchins’

The wind stirred up again, offerin nothin’ but more mugginess,
While we sat on that rustic front porch
Sippin our booze and reminiscin’ back,
To those good old days, and the bad ones as well.

Sachmo’s sharp trumpet pierced the background
With a little more raspiness in that next “summertime”
We listened to the piano dancing along with his voice

“One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singin!!!
Yes, you’ll spread your wings, and you’ll take to the skies.
But til’ that mornin’, there’s nothin’ that can harm you!”

Miss Ella’s pretty voice came behind his:
“Oh, your daddy’s rich, and your ma is good lookin’!
So hush little baby, and baby don’t you cry!”

The barefoot children ran around the house
Jus’ by their laughin’ you could tell they didn’t have a care in the world.
I lean back a lil’ more, my rockin’ chair squeakin’ and sayin something else.

My ole friend beside me had drifted off to sleep now,
lettin' the winds and times lull him to it.
I thought I should do the same now,
I was growin tired....

African News

For this class I’m taking on Africa, we’re supposed to read news articles about the continent each day before class. I was just on CNN and BCC. & I tell you, how in the hell can I complain? Prior to writing this I was just sitting here thinking,.. contemplating, and reflecting over my laziness. I’m almost disgusted with myself. I used to be discontented with my skinniness. Then I see pictures of these children from the Congo. Their limbs look like the frailties of famishment and represent the consequences of a failed political system’s personified ego.

A mother clutches her child for the sake of an internal instinct. Desperately she is determined to preserve one life. Tears pour down the despairing soul’s cheek, as she laments to the heavens. The look on her face says it all, I didn’t need any caption. There is pain in her face, found most obviously in the cheeks, and made more obvious by the revealed teeth. It looks as if she were crying out to the heavens, like she were reprimanding an unfair God who had left her with this dark brown carcass of a morbid desolation. What anguish! What grief! Oh, the desolation they must feel, like the world has turned against them. How can it feel, for we never know the experience? We auspicious Americans will never know the reality of my motherland’s pangs. For we find ourselves blessed to awake and congregate in the sanctuary of our classrooms every morning! The plights of these peoples are imponderables to us. We can only attempt to empathize and then sympathize with these alien others.

“"We have lost four children in four months to fever," says Therese Tchausi (seated).”

I find my heart stricken with a bleak compassion. Questions swirl around in my moral mentality. Those like: ‘Why is there evil in the world? Or how? Can there really be some God to allow such things to happen? Why would this good God allow it? Why do people do this to each other? Why don’t they help? Why am I not helping?’

Then I compulsively force myself to instill in my conscience a noticeable serving of guilt, along with much more grief, and only a little depression. There world is a cold place, and love seems at times to be only a demonic apparition of a rational animal’s confusion! Why do we allow it? But then again why should I even care?.... No! I reject the nihilism! For I do care, and its more like I can’t help it! My inherent sympathizing just is what it is. I read about black people dying and burying their children. And I understand that the sands of Kenya and Namibia are red because of the blood the lands have absorbed! I perceive an African graveyard that lacerates my spirit. My soul is made sick by its superfluous mortality.

Employment

Now this one here is from way back in the day.

Employment (Blame?)

Where is my hood?
I no longer know…..
The place I was raised
I no longer go
It’s in the same place
But it don’t look the same,
It don’t feel the same,
Cause so much done changed.
What’s wrong with these streets?
The ones we played in.
No kids play in them now,
Just buyers and sellers.
It must be these rocks, or cracks, or pebbles?
Or whatever you call it.
Those small white round stones,
The stones are what did it.
Stones turn them to bones.
Turn streets to bones,
The streets are now dead.
I see remains of the living,
What they call a crack-head…
A fiend in the streets
But its not his fault.
So who do you blame?
Who’s fault is it made?
Well, some blame my nigga,
He wants to get paid. (…employment)
My nigga had a job,
He worked nine to five,
But he was too black,
So his job laid him off.
But he has two mouths,
One young mouth to feed.
The young mouth cries,
The young mouth must eat.
My nigga buys white,
He has baking soda,
With fiends in the street,
The hunger is ova.
Now his profit to double
The American Dream:
To bite the hand that feeds,
When one is fed by a fiend.

That is my nigga
And he made the crack,
Sold crack to his people
And thas “black-on-black”
So you see my hood
Now who do you blame?
You can only blame me,
I’ll show you the game.
Do you blame the man
Caught up in the struggle?
Or will you blame the man
Who eats by his hustle?
Give D-boy the fame
The fiends know his name.
Throw stones at them both,
Give crack-head the shame.
As I have already stated,
I am only to blame.
I showed you my hood,
I showed you the game.

Three Thirty-Three

Three Thirty-Three

This weird and abstract apparatus we call life. It can be the oddest, and the simplest, and the most cherished, loved, adored, and hated thing of all things. & what of it? I mean… we come to ask questions like.. what does it all really mean, I mean? It doesn’t make sense, but it does, at the same time. It is a contradiction I tell you. For one time I thought that I’d found a secret to it. That all life really was is just one massive incongruity of contradictions and denials. I am to be a nihilist’s nonbeing, an aggregate of oblivion.

In my African American Studies class, I’m supposed to write a 5 to 7 page paper on my identity. But what identity does Dr. Lavender speak of? Is it how the other sees me? Am I to write such a statement through his eyes. For how do I describe my eye without the aid of a mirror? Like I am to ponder on the imperfections of a square society’s reflections. As they say to me ‘David, you are a black man! And excessive melanin and lacking of light makes you a lesser being than the rest of us! Your ancestors were inferior to the whole and so are you; but not as much now a days.. since the politicians change the rules for the sake of the many’s opining.”

Why do they call me black, when my skin is of some brownish texture? I call their demeaning deeming a societal black. And this label too is absurd, like all of their other meaningless rabbles of structure.

Civilization is deviance, normality is madness, and to be refined is to be an asshole, in my own opinion!!! These are my thoughts at three thirty-three in the morning, and I’m holding on to them relentlessly.

I know that this next part is random, and so is my usual state of mind; but I do enjoy wearing nice suits and neckties. I also enjoy hot and steamy sex a lot more, especially outside, on some shadowy park bench. Or better yet, I’ll pin her up against a tree, and brace my arms around the sensual nudity of her upper legs. Then I’ll thrust with robust intentions of fulfilling what Mother Nature intended! This is just a quaint theory of mine, but I think sex is the sincerest thing of our humankind. I was trying to do her with a Dionysian madness, as we were both choc full of gin and juice and ganja! After we both climax I decide to relax and just reflect on the happenings of tonight. From that I then begin to drift off while I reminisce on the oblivious recollections of yesteryear.

I fire up my wine flavored black and mild cigar and take a long and easy puff. As the smoke slowly flits from my nostrils I think back on all of the women of my day. Sex is a good thing, and I thank the good Lord for it. I love women too, though I’ll never understand ‘em.

A Dialogue with Much Ado About Nothingness

The wise man began to speak:
“If I could only touch the truth, like it was a tangible thing. And then we incessantly search for it, nonstop, and some of us will search all of our lives. We will ponder, and suppose, and then guess, with innumerable trails and errors. A few of us embark on a futile trek for our untold truths! Ha! And with what luck do we ever find ourselves successful, with an undeniable certainty I mean? If the wisest man told you he knew it all, everything! If he said his brain encompassed the totality of all things that can be known, then… do you believe him? Will you simply dismiss every bit of your cynical skepticism? Can you epoché you epoché? (he laughs to himself!!!) I do doubt it my philosophical friend. It is now too much of a habit of yours—to base inquiry upon inquiry, and place doubt upon doubt. How does one who seeks the truth expect to find it; especially when he follows his questions with more questions, and then more… and more. It’s as if his process infinitely progresses, and then regresses, and…..”

“So what truths are to be found in this world?” I cut him off with this question. “I no longer think there are any at all!” I say. “But the world is to guarantee us nothing but absurdity! Yes my wise friend, for I do think that I have it all figured out! You may think I am kissing the asses of existentialist! But I’ll agree with Kierkegaard, and Sartre, and Nietzsche. I want to comply with Camus as I declare to you with an utmost certainty, that the world is nothing but a cosmic, measureless mass of uncertainties!” I think if even God himself, or herself I guess… but whoever the being would be, if it told me that it were God I’d probably still have my doubts about that avowal. So therefore, I guess my quandary is not one such as how do I believe in God (or to believe the truth we can say) but my difficulties are how can I believe God himself (or herself, like I’ve said)?”

Then the wise man laughs to himself and asks me “Do you not understand it my naïve and young friend? Does the idealism of your youthfulness blind you so badly that you cannot simply see your truth for what it is? Or maybe you search too hard for it. (laughs) Yes, I’m almost certain that this is what you do. You look too hard for what you cannot see, for what is unperceivable by your very own sentience. Your searches will only continue to bring you anguish, and at the end of the day you are left with more despair. You love wisdom you say, well do you?”

“I do lover her” I respond. “And I can’t leaver her alone. I’m like Boethius and this Sophia is like my mistress! A fatal attraction we have for each other. I’m madly in love!

“Well my young romantic” the wise man replies “you do know what it is like to be in love with a woman.” I take it you’ve been in love with a sweet siren of the flesh before, a woman not the same as your Sophia, but similar.

“I think so” I say. “I’m pretty sure I’ve been in love, but just once. She was a sweet girl, and we made love often. But, our consciousnesses could never meet—even though we tried. That’s the tragedy of romance, isn’t it? That we try so hard for our souls to meet, but it can’t happen. When we’re in love we try to learn so much about that person. We spend late nights immersed in conversation until sunrise, as we’ve inquired the deepest and darkest desires of our other. We want to learn everything from her favorite color to her worst fear. We ask each other about petty things, and the most personal things. ‘What is your favorite food, your favorite song, what are your thoughts about a God, and what are your life’s aspirations?’ Yes my wise friend. I know a little something about a living love, and how it goes along with this thing we call life. But what I know best about this love is that it doesn’t let two souls touch! It sends them into an irrational frenzy, and a midnight ecstasy! Only to torture them and allow temporary relief! This is what I know best about love!

“I see you understand then” says the wise man, “for you have experienced the feeling before, in our own earthly forms, of what it is truly like to love. And thus I must commend you, for being wise beyond your years. Although, if you will allow me to do so, I ask that you will heed my advice. If you are to continue to love your women, and your philosophy and your truths, then you must be aware of this one thing. That love is the most dynamic, and the most uncertain of man’s powers. It empowers you with a blind notion of the most blithe bliss, and hence you become susceptible to the most emphatic despair. This love can make your soul feel complete and then tear it asunder! And in any form that it may reveal itself, through its erogenous eros, or philos, or agape; remember that it can and will conquer.

Now think back to what I was saying earlier, when I told you you are searching entirely too hard for what you cannot see. For the truth lies behind your eyes, and cannot be seen as an image. It is between your ears, and will never be heard as sounds and songs!

“What in God’s name do you mean?” I shout. “What truth is there in those places? There’s nothing a small sample of biology and anatomy. I doubt you’ll find any absoluteness where you say!”

“Man is a truth within himself,” says the old wise man. Then he slowly creeps over to his chair, the one between the window and his fireplace. He choreographed his gait gracefully, by the aid of his cane and an inevitable onslaught of old age. He turned and sat down with an uncanny easiness; almost awkward I’d say, but successful.

“Is this man the only truth we’ll find?” I ask him. “Or people I’d better say, for if man is a trueness then woman must also be of it too. However, I’m still curious my ageless friend, how can this man exactly be a truth? For I thought a truth must be everlasting. And man is not, is he? At least, I’m pretty sure he isn’t? ….well, he’s not is he? Then I noticed my old amigo close his eyes. I thought he was about to doze off for a bit. As it is a tendency of the elderly, to drift off in the middle of a mid-day’s conversation. But he was really dying; somewhere in that infinitesimal instance of time it takes for one to die, he did. He would drift into the oblivious ranks of nothingness with the rest of the world’s expired greats. How odd I thought. And I wasn’t sad, since I thought myself the stoic. Death was nothing to me for that moment. But I was still curious.


…plus, I love how you told us Ms. Fason, not to take ourselves too seriously. I love it!

Just a little poetry from back in the day... I though I'd share it. I doubt its that much to look at it. Hell... I don't even really know what it means myself. You should read it.. and tell me what you think it means.. if you think it means anything at all. Or maybe you just think its a bunch of gibberish. Let me know any thoughts you have about the matter. But now I sit here to ponder.. what the hell does meaning really mean any? What does it mean for something to really mean something? *LOL* Another one of those philosophical hang-ups of mine. I usually have about 10 to 15 a day, sometimes all day... That's just that 'philosophy bug' as my professor calls it! I think its bite has proven terminal. But that's a whole nother story. I'll save it for next time.... So for now, you, the reader, can read my poetic nonsense, and let me know what you think about it. Thanks...

I call this one Blue Jazz Rendition

So today I’ll be blue –
Like I can play a guitar,
And sing verses about how my baby left me
Or play that mellow jazz with a sharp trumpet
As the ensemble sets this soft mood.
Maybe I can just leave my soul by the water’s edge
And let it stare at its reflection.
To ponder about that small ripple
That’s gonna grow until it just fades away
When the sun sets behind the rain clouds
I may see a brightly full moon.
So tonight I’ll be blue too –
And sing some more about that color – celebrate it.
Be happy if I’m sad – only content if I’m glad.
The charcoal and ivory keys can sing it better.
Best when they are mixed together and look like gray clouds –
Softly struck by the moonlight that shone blue tonight.


D. Russell
01.27.07

& that's it!

Hello

Hello ladies & gents. And thank you for visiting David's Blog. I'm somewhat of a rookie at this creative writing thing. So I'm thinking it should be quite an experience.