Work -The four-letter word tied to our fate
Enslaves the spirit during out pubescent state
It’s an entrapment we think fills all our needs
But its only really benefits the masters of greed.
Work - A story of lies will always get you the pay
I’ve done it more times than I care to say
Though, once I fell off my ladder of lies
But landed in a garden of lucky surprise.
It began, as always, with an innocent tale
A story of employment in the sign-posting world
I bragged that I’d worked in the U S of A
Climbing the scaffold for aerial displays
My master said son, “If that is the case,
Then climb up this ladder and show me your pace.”
He left me alone while I stumbled up high
But I soon lost my head in a vertigo cry.
As I wobbled on stilts, applying paper to paste
The wind whipped around me and splattered my face
The paper slipped down, nearly taking me too
After five minutes of frustration I didn’t know what to do.
My master returned in the nick of time
Smiling broadly at this battle of mine
“Well, I guess this ain’t for you he said with a grin
So come on down before you cause a great sin.”
As I sat in the office feeling humilities hell
The Gods smiled too, at my inept portrayal
Of a worker who climbs to the stars just to smell
The odor of money at the bottom of a pail.
So when my master emerged from the cavern of fate
He applauded my brass balls and the smarts that it takes
To lie and face up to the realities of truth
Because what else can you do when your lie comes unloose!
So seeing I wasn’t a fool, just a liar
He gave me a job in the office as his squire
A position that suited me just to a tee
Because as an Englishman I loved morning tea.
I worked there three months massaging my career
Til my American wife dragged me over here.
Now I’m not sorry to say I preferred to make the move
But my master was heartbroken when he heard the news.
So the moral of this story, if you really need one
Is work is for horses and fools - so just have some fun!
Monday, August 13, 2007
Thursday, August 2, 2007
TO SEE LONDON AND DIE
To see London and die', is etched on the skulls of all who have been touched by this fabled city. In the scattered colonial hamlets around the world the streets of London are said to be paved with gold. But in the Britain of the 1990's the great motherland of suffrage tolerates Black people only if they have money, know their place, and stay in it!
Returning to London after ten years living in California, the reality of this peculiar British tradition of ‘knowing one's place’ struck me anew as I pushed through the crowds at Gatwick Airport. The customs officers looked suspiciously at the visas in my passport, from the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, and asked me just exactly how long I intended to stay. When I informed them I had the right of abode in the country, their conspiratorial eyes followed me until I was out of the terminal.
As I stepped out into the oozing, stifling drizzle, which is called a climate on these wind-swept shores, everything looked so small and miserly. The dank rows of brick tenement buildings that curled around car lined stuffed roadways, were much too small for single lined traffic let alone the monstrous trucks with European plates. The skies constantly overcast seemed to agree with the disparaging looks on the faces of my black brothers, colorless and gray. To be Black in Britain is to be cast adrift in a sea of dullness, ostracized from the gaiety of a motherland's warmth, a beggar at the gates of a bleached kinship. But what is most painful about being Black in Britain is the systematic leaching of aspirations and hope.
As I moved on into the maelstrom of Maggie Thatcher's new vision, past the begging punk rockers and the hordes of soccer hooligans armed with the ignorance of race hate, I longed for a pint of best ale. Fortunately, the pubs still remain a sanctuary from the gathering greed that has infected this land since Maggie and Ronnie's political intercourse. Of course the fact still remains, that the further north you go in England the better the beer is. Here in London I made do with best bitter, hybrid dark ale on tap. After years of suppin' the insipid Budwieser and its various 'lite' cousins in America, I was happy to wash my parched throat with a true brew with a healthy head.
The pubs I found were still the bastions of free speech in a nation that loves to philosophize. And unlike America, political and cultural debate is rampant in Britain! But it is said that an Englishman may respect your opinions, but will deny you your feelings. Thus these philosophical posturing are often a mask behind which hides many aching souls.
In America generally and California in particular, people delight in expressing their personal feelings, a little too much at times, perhaps. Yet there can be seen a sincere desire to get out of themselves, to share their feelings with others in order to better understand themselves. The British conversely pride themselves on holding back their feelings, superior in their faith of not being too emotional. Consequently they live lives of quiet desperation, shut up in themselves, afraid to feel, made all the more stifling because it's self inflicted. This adherence to proper form and its denial of individual initiative is the biggest battle that the exile fights to overcome when he leaves Britain. Some never make the break, while all are scarred by its destabilizing influence.
This peculiar feature of self-effacement and emotional self-doubt in the British character is, to my mind, the cornerstone to the governing classes ability to manipulate its people and limit their potential, because if people are put on the defensive when questioned about their feelings, they will become immediately intimidated by the logic of the question rather than grasping the motivations of the questioner. And if you doubt your own feelings, or can give them only limited credibility, then a large element of faith in yourself has been removed from your control.
And control is the name of the game. For if an individual doesn't control his or her destiny in life, then there are many people waiting in line to control that individual. Slavery, after all is simply the giving up of an individual's ability to control his or her destiny.
The destiny of Black people like all others can only be found in our own hands. Black people must throw off the culturally incarcerating stigma of the Anglo-Saxon's in- ability to feel. We must trace our roots through our feelings taking control of our lives in the process. Because there are only two indisputable facts in this life: one; we all will die, and two; if we don't control our destiny others will!
In America this concept of control is understood, and as such it has given way to the cult of the individual. Three thousand miles away, on the wind-swept shores of Britain, a nation who has put its thumb print on much of the world, the cult of the individual appears excessive, corrupting and uncivilized. Yet this concept, although it has its shortcomings, instills the belief that if you want something you must go after it yourself. You must want it like a passion bordering on obsession. And to hold it, you must control and focus your attention on your success to have any hope of it working for you! This is not to say that just by asking you will receive; but rather by believing in oneself, focusing your control over your skills and abilities, that effort will create the conditions for your own good fortune.
As an individual who was raised in the Brixton of the sixties, I could see very little had changed on my return in the nineties. Brixton's battered lanes and scars of bubbling dreams still collided in a twilight firmament exposing a sorely unequal country. The tenements had become 'gentrified' but the consolidation of sorrows can not be so easily patch over.
The prospects for Blacks in Britain seems no brighter now than when I lived there. But the will for change cannot come from the favors portioned out by the powers-that-be. They must come from Black people rediscovering their emotions and feelings, monitoring them with their knowledge of the world, and taking positive steps daily to take control of their own lives.
Returning to London after ten years living in California, the reality of this peculiar British tradition of ‘knowing one's place’ struck me anew as I pushed through the crowds at Gatwick Airport. The customs officers looked suspiciously at the visas in my passport, from the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, and asked me just exactly how long I intended to stay. When I informed them I had the right of abode in the country, their conspiratorial eyes followed me until I was out of the terminal.
As I stepped out into the oozing, stifling drizzle, which is called a climate on these wind-swept shores, everything looked so small and miserly. The dank rows of brick tenement buildings that curled around car lined stuffed roadways, were much too small for single lined traffic let alone the monstrous trucks with European plates. The skies constantly overcast seemed to agree with the disparaging looks on the faces of my black brothers, colorless and gray. To be Black in Britain is to be cast adrift in a sea of dullness, ostracized from the gaiety of a motherland's warmth, a beggar at the gates of a bleached kinship. But what is most painful about being Black in Britain is the systematic leaching of aspirations and hope.
As I moved on into the maelstrom of Maggie Thatcher's new vision, past the begging punk rockers and the hordes of soccer hooligans armed with the ignorance of race hate, I longed for a pint of best ale. Fortunately, the pubs still remain a sanctuary from the gathering greed that has infected this land since Maggie and Ronnie's political intercourse. Of course the fact still remains, that the further north you go in England the better the beer is. Here in London I made do with best bitter, hybrid dark ale on tap. After years of suppin' the insipid Budwieser and its various 'lite' cousins in America, I was happy to wash my parched throat with a true brew with a healthy head.
The pubs I found were still the bastions of free speech in a nation that loves to philosophize. And unlike America, political and cultural debate is rampant in Britain! But it is said that an Englishman may respect your opinions, but will deny you your feelings. Thus these philosophical posturing are often a mask behind which hides many aching souls.
In America generally and California in particular, people delight in expressing their personal feelings, a little too much at times, perhaps. Yet there can be seen a sincere desire to get out of themselves, to share their feelings with others in order to better understand themselves. The British conversely pride themselves on holding back their feelings, superior in their faith of not being too emotional. Consequently they live lives of quiet desperation, shut up in themselves, afraid to feel, made all the more stifling because it's self inflicted. This adherence to proper form and its denial of individual initiative is the biggest battle that the exile fights to overcome when he leaves Britain. Some never make the break, while all are scarred by its destabilizing influence.
This peculiar feature of self-effacement and emotional self-doubt in the British character is, to my mind, the cornerstone to the governing classes ability to manipulate its people and limit their potential, because if people are put on the defensive when questioned about their feelings, they will become immediately intimidated by the logic of the question rather than grasping the motivations of the questioner. And if you doubt your own feelings, or can give them only limited credibility, then a large element of faith in yourself has been removed from your control.
And control is the name of the game. For if an individual doesn't control his or her destiny in life, then there are many people waiting in line to control that individual. Slavery, after all is simply the giving up of an individual's ability to control his or her destiny.
The destiny of Black people like all others can only be found in our own hands. Black people must throw off the culturally incarcerating stigma of the Anglo-Saxon's in- ability to feel. We must trace our roots through our feelings taking control of our lives in the process. Because there are only two indisputable facts in this life: one; we all will die, and two; if we don't control our destiny others will!
In America this concept of control is understood, and as such it has given way to the cult of the individual. Three thousand miles away, on the wind-swept shores of Britain, a nation who has put its thumb print on much of the world, the cult of the individual appears excessive, corrupting and uncivilized. Yet this concept, although it has its shortcomings, instills the belief that if you want something you must go after it yourself. You must want it like a passion bordering on obsession. And to hold it, you must control and focus your attention on your success to have any hope of it working for you! This is not to say that just by asking you will receive; but rather by believing in oneself, focusing your control over your skills and abilities, that effort will create the conditions for your own good fortune.
As an individual who was raised in the Brixton of the sixties, I could see very little had changed on my return in the nineties. Brixton's battered lanes and scars of bubbling dreams still collided in a twilight firmament exposing a sorely unequal country. The tenements had become 'gentrified' but the consolidation of sorrows can not be so easily patch over.
The prospects for Blacks in Britain seems no brighter now than when I lived there. But the will for change cannot come from the favors portioned out by the powers-that-be. They must come from Black people rediscovering their emotions and feelings, monitoring them with their knowledge of the world, and taking positive steps daily to take control of their own lives.
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