THE POVERTY OF PLENTY

Hip hop slang
Rubs dud-dud sounds.
The music for whites
Who cannot dance and
Blacks who cannot sing.
Them loaded down
In oversized threads
Ignorant of history and
Their place in the scheme.
Them giant clothes hide
Them midget spirits
Desperate for sight
A light in the world.

It’s the poverty of plenty
In the land of the brave
Too fixed on the money
When there’s souls to be saved.
It’s the poverty of plenty
Fooling all who seek truth
‘cause the thieves of the past
Have just donned new boots.


Oh the Hip Hop slangers
What a joke to the real
All remembering a past
They've never fulfilled.
They cry over scares that
They've never shed, while
They climb over backs
Of their brothers who bled
For freedom and justice and
Respect for a truth, now.
Lost in the smocks of
A glided punk's tooth.

It’s the poverty of plenty
In the land of the brave
Too fixed on the money
When there’s souls to be saved.
It’s the poverty of plenty
Fooling all who seek truth
‘cause the thieves of the past
Have just donned new boots.

So let them hip hop
Til the cows come home
It can’t feed their kids
And it can’t feed their souls
And one day they’ll wake
From a shattering dream
To realize they
Can’t even HEAR
Let alone
Understand
The word
PEACE!

ANOTHER COUNTRY

The aspects that most intrigues me about living in another country other than England, are the little details. The habits by which we tie our lives together or tie them up - we rise at six, breakfast at seven and start work at eight. Those many familiar unconscious expressions by which we mark out our space in the world. We are all aware of the different names of countries, the fact that they have different languages, currencies, customs and climates. And in pursuit of adventure we devour travel books and histories and inundate our minds with the silver-screen images of new lands with fresh, crisp, green grass.
Our first steps on that new soil, however, are invariably met with profound irritation over the petty disparities of very ordinary things. As we are disgorged into the curious mass of humanity leering on airport rails, we are struck immediately by the different scent and movement in the air. Our defenses are alerted as we look to smoke out the assailant. However, as our stay becomes more permanent these disparities become exasperating to the point of obsessive national snobbery. In the course of my own travels, which have included most of Europe, the Middle East, North and West Africa, Canada and North America. I have been constantly dumbfounded, bemused and frustrated by what appears to me to be a conspiracy to be different just for the sake of it.
Why, I ask myself, would anyone go through the trouble of designing and marketing a thousand-and-one different types of toilet paper, when one size fits all? Here in America one has a multiple choice of soft, super-soft, super-super-soft, and new improved extra-soft, ad infinitum! To what purpose, I ask? In England the range is truly staggering, from the down-right coarse to the silky velvet(possibly commissioned by Royal charter), toilet paper refining has become ‘class conscious’. I met an American woman, in London, who was making a collection of these choice articles. Her fascination was incredulous; she believed the folks-back-home would just love these cultural curiosities.
In Arab countries toilet paper is sometimes not used at all. Man’s left hand is responsible for this function. This can come as a most disconcerting shock to the newcomer, especially after he is mid-way through his performance, thinking of everything but the inconvenience of being paper-less! What replaces the familiar roll is a cup or bucket of water to wash your hand with. After the initial horror of such fecal indulgence a certain logic explains the situation. Firstly, no child or adult, for that matter, can escape the ‘throne-room’ without washing their hands. Unless, of course, they like the pungent odor of waste-matter about their person. Secondly, toilet paper cannot then add to the pollution and blockage of the commode environs, creating that all too disagreeable nausea which reminds us of our entrails workings. Thirdly, with no consumer demand, many more trees are saved the ignominy of having their lives cut short, turned into pulp and then paper to grace our posteriors. One word of warning should therefore be given to the would-be travelers to these lands of the crescent star: never shake the left hand of an Arab.

Travelers, in Arab countries or elsewhere, always have a new thirst for communications. What are these new sounds? Why the different hum? Where does one pay to hear? The telephone has become our ear to the world. Its universal conformity would thus be a definite advantage. However, the trifling distinctions of the dial tones have always perplexed me. In Britain the dial tone is pitched in a staccato E and comes charging out at you, seeming to demand why you have disturbed the systems inner slumbers. One inserts the coins after dialing and making the connection, by which time the system has relapsed into comatose. The dialing tone returns reminding us of the nerve-shattering key of E and we realize where the Sex Pistols got their musical training! In America the dialing tone purrs at the you in middle C, Cherishing your patronage and ringing gently, as of a Crystal Cathedral, bestowing wisdom and comfort. The workings of foreign telephone systems exasperate Americans the most. Coming from a land where a telephone is practically a birthright, a preferred substitute to a pacifier, Americans battle abroad with coin openings which are jammed, the feistiness of operators, and the excessive cost and inefficiency of a common place utility.
Having been conditioned by a country’s medium of communication, the next great obstacle is to straddle the banal discrepancies between the uses of words. The differences between American and British words belies their common use of the English language. Not so much because they are so far apart but because of their trivial distinctions, for example; the American downtown is the city center in British English; subways are tubes; piers are quays; a duplex is a semi-detached; an apartment is a flat; elevators are lifts; the first floor is the ground floor. The particular literal definitions make one question, what is common about sense? Wouldn’t you agree that the sound of the word autumn is preferable to fall; wallet to billfold; cotton to thread; drawing pin to thumb tack; queue to line? one defines an item or situation, while the other defines its function.
There is a serious side to this dilemma which is more acute than the difference between TO-MATE-TOES and TO-MAR-TOES. One is constantly thrown off guard by the use of terms like cabinet for cupboard; truck for lorry; faucet for tap; muffler for silencer; and vest for waistcoat; we won’t go into cul-de-sacs being called dead-ends or that a fortnight is two weeks. The trivia mounts. But more succinctly the crisis can be summed-up in feet and inches. The metric inch of America is at serious odds with the centimeters of Continental Europe and the twelve inch foot of Britain. Therefor an American/British phrase-book would be a very useful addition for travelers to the United Kingdom.
Travel they say broadens the mind. However, the emotions take a battering in the process. On short stays in foreign lands everyone is granted the license of self-righteousness and cultural arrogance, but as your stay becomes extended on a foreign soil, that nation’s idiosyncrasies begin to seep into the newcomer’s sub-conscious, colonizing the instincts. Before long you catch yourself saying, restroom instead of public convenience, and asking the operator for a collect call person-to-person. Old habits die hard however, and occasionally you lapse back into the euphonic sounding words like biscuit instead of the jocular cookie, or chemist instead of the blatant druggist. But by then it’s too late because you’ve become a foreigner!

To Suffer or Not to Suffer...?

I had the choice: spend two hours on the phone deciphering Internet-ology with a nerd from India, who was obviously far more intelligent than me - her
English surpassed my Hindi - or look at the dissolving iMac loading disk spinning it's rainbow colors into oblivion.
I chose suffering!

On the freeway into work I had the choice: stop off at an art gallery. Take in one magical image which would stay with me throughout the day, and lift me up and away from the grim and dementia of my corporate culture. Or stay in the health- depleting, soul-destroying, cancer-inducing-smog of the shunting convey-a-belt traffic, and still arrive late for work!
I chose suffering!

I had the choice: take responsibility for my life in the NOW. Or believe in the Judea-Christian-Moslem fairies at the bottom of the garden, who I can't see, but who leave me notes every time I visit them asking for money.
I chose suffering!

Suffering -
They say is God given for punishment and edification!
But the leting go of suffering offers the reward of the self floating in a heaven of its own understanding.
Pain -
Is the measurement of our trial through this life;
The litmus test of our machine existence!
Mankind-
Will give up anything…But its Suffering?

THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE

To call a Californian a flake is redundant; in fact, I heard a story recently that you can lose a percentage point off your I.Q. for every year you live in La-La Land!
This phenomenon, of absent-mindedness, however, is now affecting the whole nation. Our President commutes the sentence of a man working on his behalf to subvert the course of history and justice, because Mr. Libby, “can’t remember if he perjured himself with all the important information he was instructed to lie about by his boss”! The President himself forgets his lie about W.M.D’s , the shifting goal posts of the war in Iraq, funding AIDS in Africa, and the cronies he put in charge of Katrina.
But is this a top down phenomenon or a bottom up disease? After all, the President is credited with being the dumbest leader of the ‘free world’ in the past two centuries – we can’t have it both ways!
Check out the following poem and see if you recognize someone you know?

He sat down excited over her latest adventure.
Checking his watch looking interested as I spoke mine.
Distracted by the seconds counting off her watch-ing Me.
Listening and watch-ing him looking through me to her next
appointment-Luncheon–Meeting- Tete-a-tete.

There will be times indeed when talk is right for family and friends.
Time indeed; but not now! Not any NOW’s! For he’s gone,
Dissolved, Melted back into the ether from where she came.

Smoldering
I sat feeling the air of his presence lift off of me.
She wasn’t there!
The human being just wasn’t Here!
Talking, feeling, imbibing our connection, friendship, future, present!
He never really arrived.
Hovering into my life like a paper trail of memories she’s
Chasing to find him-self-but-won’t-slow-down-to-hear-her-self-think,
Or others talk and wail and pour forth their joys and sorrows.

No!
He never was here. Never really here at all!
With you and me capturing the scent of life’s majesty passing between us.

We who care to be present when the beloved is in the air.

The Artist/Entrepreneur

You plan out your week into perfect hour segments. You start with daily exercises, followed by breakfast. Next, plan the day. You think through, and incorporate, the little adjustments that always come up every time you put your plan onto paper. You plunge into answering your emails, trashing the spam, and fighting off the temptation to click on enticing pop-ups – that will be for later, after THE WORK! You bookmark them and struggle through the horror-news-of-the-world-stories wondering what diseased brain has to compile this junk every hour on the hour.
THE WORK, has its own jealous requirements and you unscramble your mind, unlatch the doorway to your soul, and penetrate the spirit that first confirmed your affinity to the creative buzz. Time stands still. Your inspiration ignites synapses of personal places, pleasures and pain. The minutes turn to hours. You are lost in the passion of your life.
It’s time for marketing. Your accountant has told you to spend at least 40% of your business life in the ‘selling of your tail’! It’s boring. It’s so…so…so… uncreative! But it is the business of business. Nobody in America ever says, ‘he was a marketing fool, but an artistic genius ’! It’s usually the other way around. The title genius is never connected with the creative act anymore.
You rush to pick up your child from school, while decomposing the sordid thoughts that marketing has inflicted on your creative moment. You’re late. She grumbles and you use the excuse of how you were distractions by the Palestinian conflict.
A week goes by. You’ve sent out your emails and cards religiously. You forced yourself to wrestle with the marketing Neanderthal. You wait by the phone. You double clutch your mail. You even befriend the mail person as you dawdle patiently for the elixir of checks to come sluicing through your mail box shutter.
You’re working for yourself. You have more time to yourself than the President of the United States. You’re passionate about your art/creation. Your business is unique. Your neighbors envy you. Your friends avoid you. Every home-based online telemarketer has your number in their Rolodex. You are hit with a million opportunities everyday, real and imaginary.
'You are a juggler. A tight-rope-walker in midair suspended across the canyons of hope and faith'.

UNDER THE COTTON TREE

In the center of Freetown, at the junction of Westmorland Street and Pademba Road, stands a colossal cotton tree, nearly a hundred feet high. It has seen the city grow from rows of wattle houses plastered with clay to steelwork concrete Law Courts and brick structures of Government. It was here on the May 14, 1787 that the first settlers, including 300 freed black men, gathered to celebrate their freedom. The cotton tree symbolizes the fight for and establishment of a society of freed men and women.
One hundred and eighty seven years and two days later I arrived in Freetown searching for my freedom, after a journey of twenty-four years and six thousand miles. Standing under the cotton tree, I considered the plight of all those who had come before me, and prayed that my days of struggle would now be over.
Freetown, like Monrovia, was founded by the philanthropic and abolitionist movements in Britain and America respectively, which wanted to end slavery of Africans, in the Americas and England, and find them a home in Africa. Granville Sharp, a British parliamentarian, invested in and helped establish the Sierra Leone Company in London. It later obtained backing from the British government and settled freed blacks from Nova Scotia who had helped the British during the American War of Independence. Jamaican Maroons, given the choice of prison or repatriation to Africa, preferred Sierra Leone, and in 1800, 1500 arrived establishing the original Creole population which was to become a special feature of the new colony.
The name of Sierra Leone comes from Portuguese for 'mountain lion'. The roar of the tropical storms from the high mountains, which rise out of the peninsula, reminded the 15th Century Portuguese sailors of a lion. It was in this area that the first settlers obtained land from the local Temme leaders, and although many settlers were to die through disease, and wars with the indigenous peoples, it was here that the Creoles, the black representatives of British society, were to establish themselves.
On arriving in Freetown my first visit was with a Creole woman, the wife of my London friend’s brother, and the curator in the museum which was next to the cotton tree. When I presented myself to her the look of horror on her face couldn't be disguised. Still dressed in my Tuareg gown from the desert, my hair wild and long, a ring in my ear and amber stones around my neck, I must have confused her with my London accent! She kindly read my letter from her brother-in-law and said in a most dismissive tone,
"Did Ivor give you any other contacts?"
When I answered in the affirmative she suggested that I check them out first.
"My husband is at work just now, please come back later this afternoon, if you must. Good day.”
Rich relations may give crust of bread and such
You can help yourself but don't take too much…
Billie Hoilday

Dreaming Forward - Looking backwards

“To predict is difficult, particularly about the future”. So the poets tell us. But our dilemma today is more poignant in these days of shallow faith. As the future spreads before us its exponential opportunities and promise; we humans, who are victims of our heart’s desires, find ourselves trapped in the pains of our past.

9 people out of 10 that I meet today bear, in the words of William Blake, the ‘…marks of weakness, marks of woe’. We live in a nation where the majority of people are traumatized by the abuse of their childhood. The statistics in America bear this out with 1-3 individuals nationwide, acknowledging some form of parental or societal dysfunction in their youth. More to the point the real or imagined abuse and neurotic behavior of people has become such a part of social intercourse that TV executives have found it a limitless supply of ‘entertainment’ that perpetuates the neurosis and rewards the media industry with billions of dollars.

In the natural course of capitalism’s supply and demand needs, indeed, the natural selection process of the selfish gene highlighting the golden rule of envy and malice, the social engineers of our world would acknowledge this behavior as a good thing. Particularly as ‘the people’ are content to be cannon fodder for consumer wars and fight each other over the crumbs of corporate neglect. Who but a ‘creative designer’ could have come up with such a plan?

But this is all predicated on obsessing over our lives that have past us by. Quite literally we are looking through our rear view windows while moving backwards into the future. Yet, we all crave the moments of transformation which only the present can bring. We understand that our present dictates the future, and we know from our history that our actions or lack of actions have resulted in our present dilemmas. Why then don’t we just forget the past, enjoy the present and welcome the future?