To All The Freedom Poets Shouting In The Dark

“HAMAD DREAM OF 2030 IS NOT APPEARED YET IN BAHRAIN!...HAMAD YOU ARE A DICTATOR”  - from a protest sign at beginning of film

“I feel really alone. Whether it was a democratic country or an authoritarian country. All of them acted the same when it came to us. I discovered that my humanity is a subject of discussion. Should I be killed in the street or not be killed? Based on the interests of the United States or Saudi Arabia or other countries. It’s the killing of a dream.”

“When I’m sleeping, a lot of times I dream we are returning to the roundabout. To this day I dream it is there. I don’t feel it is broken.”

"This [facebook] page was a virtual lynch mob, focused on a 20 year old girl, named Ayat al Qurmezi. She had read a poem criticizing Khalifa and the King at Pearl Roundabout. The page asked thousands to participate in defaming her honor, and demanded her arrest and torture in prison. It wasn't long before they got their wish. Masked commandos broke down the door of her family home and took her to prison...After three months in prison, Ayat surfaced for this apology on state TV, which the family says was obtained by electric shock torture and forcing her to open her mouth while army and police officers spat in it." 

- from "Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark" by May Ying Welsh of Al-Jazeera, the only journalists who stayed

Ayat al Qurmezi (read her BLOG)

"I have not yet finished forcing every candle of dreams (youth) on this motherland..." 

- line from the poem by Ayat al Qurmezi which led to her imprisonment, translated by Mohamed Al-mahroos

_________

I had come out of a bedroom, pajamas and all, to greet a few friends. Sitting patiently and in reserved calm is my wife and a local actor in town, sitting outside in the main room of my abode. I begin talking about recent books I’ve read. I start talking about a book on the subject of black history in the American South pointed at the presence of the actor, who I only recently became acquainted with. I continue to divulge in The Inconvenient History of Brazil, which I learned received the greatest influx of African slaves than anywhere else. She is sweet and doesn’t mind me carrying on. In another room, my brother and a friend are worriedly arguing about how to get to Los Angeles, specifically to have more drinks. Ignoring them, I saunter out of the house and find my way to a nearby bus stop. 

Small trickles of rain bear down on the fogged windows of the bus as we cross through a muddy swamp area. The bus driver is exceptionally personable and a great comfort, in total control. In mid-conversation, I ask to be dropped off at a local convenience store. The cold, wet ground feels like a vent of sticky moisture from the saturated soil. Immediately outside the door, three homeless Aboriginal people kneel prostrating outside the store entrance, while one of them, a middle aged lady takes to a free gift of exceedingly processed fast food. I enter, greeting the store owners. As I look out the window, I see a group of girls in beachwear catapulting themselves off a nearby roof for the humorous purposes of landing on a trampoline. I walk out to get a closer look. The first lands extremely short, the second a bit further and right on her spine. She gets up aching, only to watch a third catapult far beyond the trampoline’s distance. Her impact is felt with crushing intensity as she writhes in a split-second. Witnessing, one can immediately tell her thigh must be broken. I then enter the store again, and with uncontrollable laughter, we are outraged by the stark contrast between the different kinds of help needed around the store. 

_________

History

"To dream that you are reading history, indicates a long and pleasant recreation."  

Rain

"A powerful symbol of renewal and spiritual cleansing...Interpretation is contingent on your current circumstances as well as the kind of rain that is falling...Depending on the dreamer it could suggest a period of renewal and fertility (reproduction or creativity)." 

Help

"If you dream that you help someone, or someone asked you for help, it means that you will succeed without needing help from anyone."

(iDream)

_________

can you tell me why you want to lose your minds?

“is the mind not a functional device?

a stronghold of impurity, though weak as a right?

a vile desire entrenched in the quickening of race and drabness? 

or old as a tire-stretched din?"

shrieking at dawn with favored kids,

roped to the sound in time 

only for a moment

“to flesh out the wicked rot 

a spawn of loss and un-coped wires

fuming ghastly as the corpse 

that smoked wild smoke

and leapt to a magic unseen and disbelieved

except by the weeded out freak-smiling lawmakers at dawn”

the hopeless mold sweetens through an unearthly jail

round toxic commotion encircles in ash and loneliness

wakefulness opens to the sole breath of god

and waiting awhile for the noose tightened,

alas around the saviors brightened tooth shown under a restful laugh...

- excerpt from "Why you want to lose your minds."

Through a Subterranean REM Dreamachine Train

Are the effects of REM similar to that of a film reel, where the mind develops a way to conceive thoughts with equal momentum and speed as one would perceive, in simultaneous function with the the faculties of memory to create images, sound and other sensory phenomena experienced in dream as in memory? 

Is REM the Dreamachine in the flesh?

_____

In this Dream Series, I ask what about the recurring and unusual instances of action in dreams which remind me of the function of metaphors in myth and poetry. For example, the train seems to be a passageway, or link between worlds, memories and times. Next, there is the “emptying of the fridge” in Venezuela when the Christian world is coming down, and the frozen, armless hand of an enamored singer vying for my attention at the final dream cycle.

The dreaming begins with my wife and me traveling to the East Village of Manhattan to see a friend. This friend allowed us a place to stay and offered his peer support as a successful musician to my wife, who is also a successful musician. In the dream, however, instead of a musician peer to my wife, the individual who we are staying with is a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who engages with me in very healthy ways to support our common goals as writers. When we meet this man, we find that he is extremely effeminate. He wakes from his unkempt bedroom and greets us warmly, however bedraggled and immediately throws on a pink, fishnet, sleeveless shirt and walks out the door, we don’t see him again, but he offers us his place.

Later, I find I am late to pick up my parents at the airport, as they are arriving to visit with us during our time in Manhattan. I am very late, and we have missed dinner, as the time reads after 10, however they are relieved to see me.

As I am returning to the East Village, I find myself in what looks like it may be Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I once walked through, with intimidating hooded men standing motionless in small groups on street corners. I feel out of place to say the least. I band of small Latino kids face me and jeer and bat at my clothing as I try to walk away unseen. I offer them money and they simply reject my idea that they are Mexican or somewhere in some poor country in Latin America and need my money. They don’t take beggar’s money, they say. Finally, I meet my wife somewhere in the city and we board a subway train. The train pulls off at what seems like we are now in Venezuela! There is a choral group busking beside the benches in this very outskirts subway stop. I flip them a coin behind my back so as not to let my wife see, as she dismisses them. As we walk from the underground train platform, we walk into a realm of pitch black darkness. There is no way to go, so we head back to the subway. The choral group is gone and the platform is completely empty. I try to find my coin, but find nothing.

______

“The Pride of Bedford-Stuyvesant”

Interview with Randy Weston on Democracy Now!

"I grew up in a very powerful, spiritual, cultural area in Brooklyn, what they call Bedford-Stuyvesant...Everybody had to take art, you had to take piano, or trumpet or violin or dance, that was in the neighborhood, and economically everybody didn't have money, but culturally it was so wonderful.

[Marcus Garvey's] philosophy of Africa, is our ancestral home. We were taken away, those of us who were taken away, we have to give back, we have to rebuild our motherland, which is Africa, and all of humanity comes out of Africa anyhow, so he was way ahead of his time. 

Your history, your ancestry is your foundation."

______

When we exit the train at the next stop, we are still in Venezuela, only there is a field of sparkling light before us. Within the field, my father and step-mother’s house lies empty. In the field, a highly religious ceremony is taking place. They are enacting the end of the Christian world, the last Christian rite it seems! As the high-rising organs sparkle with incandescent crystals as one would believe heaven to appear, everyone present forms a mass around a ceremonial hearth of heavenly glow. My wife and I dive inside the house, wishing to escape such highfalutin religious activity, and begin emptying their fridge, cleaning their expired foods out from their dusty and neglected icebox. All the while, we see on television, the center of the Roman Catholic world crumbling away, as the central image appears, where the great Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil falls down the mountain like Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdhad.

Then, out from the ceremonial mass, as its Christian imagery begins to fade into an archaic celebration in precious stone, naturally encrusted over a celestial mountain of pipe organ, I am somehow called out into the midst of the open field, and led into a palace of sorts. There seems to be royal intrigue about, a changing of the guard causes slight anxiety in those present. One lady, however, turns to me and begins chanting and singing lightly to calm us. She gives me her hand, which freezes in the grasp of my palm with effortless burden. She then turns, leaving her hand in mine while singing to everyone present, calming the vibration of the palace, near-crumbling at the end of days with her strong, human voice. She comes back to me, though leaving her hand in mine, her palm is now mangled, fingerless and bloody, though she is calm and so are we.  

_____

in the livid pull of train wreck desire

the followers’ sneering crimes become awake

to the rush of the wading horror

that thrives innocently on beer and hate

while our nonplussed singing escapes into the cruel, driven spines of the wicked slink of fame

that shines like hosts in a steaming ballroom of creative play

and shaved rasping throats blunder over towers of hypocrisy

engraved mores of hunger and celebration link together within insane, aesthetic duality

to please the entranced few 

in a skinny pathway across ever-shrinking pores of history

wearing narcotic bracelets and shaming our alien tours with priceless need

in the random chores of spurious fornication

on bedside hordes that tame the blue African skies to dried jungles

that feel free with deserted lies 

in the political waves of a corporate, shark-ruled tribe

swearing and leaning into the hounds of biblical law

- excerpt from "When No Stars Appear"

   

Dream Memories Fleeing Religion and Hitler Himself

Over the past days, a series of dreams have not left my memory, and for that I wonder about their place within the whole of my Life.  As I continue to reflect on a dream that stays with brutal clarity within the near-reaches of my waking mind, the dreams I have anew continue to resound with equally inescapable clarity while awake.

Snow at Louveciennes by Alfred Sisley

Dream 1

Inside of a large cathedral, with many rows of seats, I stand from a balcony. I look out, and the audience attending seems to resemble that of a large concert hall, stock full with individuals in highfalutin suits, they mostly represent a rich, upper class of solely European ancestry.

I am told by an individual sharing the balcony beside me that all of the congregation is from Brazil. At first, I wonder, am I in the church of the Santo Daime?

Then, suddenly, out of the back hall, a Torah emerges from the crowd, towering to the height of the near ceiling, whereupon the highest balcony leans down to touch the top of the Torah's immense scroll handle, reaching upwards towards the top of the cathedral wherein the light pours with blinding illumination.

As the crowd exits from the cathedral, one man stares at me, he is much darker in complexion, and appears to resemble an individual I had met near the border of Brazil.

Dream 2

I am in what seems to resemble a mechanical tunnel system, similar to that seen in films set within the body of a spacecraft (2001: A Space Odyssey; Star Wars). I am fleeing through the endless tunnels with my wife. We are fleeing from the wrath of Hitler himself! He follows us with a few of his heavy-handed cronies. One catches up with us and strikes my wife on her shoulder with a deadening blow that sends her wildly stretched out into the vacuous space of the concave tunnel. Hitler himself is fast approaching. I look at her shoulder, it is very bruised, and I fear for her ability to continue to play music! Nonetheless, we continue on, fleeing on into the endless tunnel system.

Next, I find my wife is caught behind, she is executed by the wrath of Hitler before my eyes, and disappears. I exit from the tunnel system out into a nighttime snowy landscape. I find that there are people following who are in much better condition. They have guns. I am in the midst of war time. In the middle of a field, I am stunned by the encroaching enemy. Surrounded, I am snuffed out into the deadening silence of nature's own wintry night.

I find Hitler himself is caught within the tunnel system, I have extended myself beyond death and reach into the tunnel system to finalize my own revenge against Hitler and keep him in my newly found giant's grasp. I reach into the tunnel, and what emerges but a violently green bird with a red tuft around the neck. The bird flies away.

Discolored Urban Landscape Sexualized in Youth

Ciudad by Ulpiano Carrasco

The landscape is a discolored, underdeveloped urban setting rising high up, similar to urban sprawl of Cairo, favelas of Brazil and the outskirts of D.F., Mexico, I can see out from a high rise, immediately outside the underdeveloped core are more riche developments that look more like suburban residences in Boston, upstate NY or Washington DC, then after that ring which has a certain brilliance and illuminates in the harsh sunlight much clearer than my immediate surroundings in a somewhat dim vantage point, the most outlying division is a pentagon-looking, round-shaped government-type building similar to the famous MIT hall in Cambridge, yet the building is surrounded, as are all outlying developments, with dense low-lying jungle similar to southern Mexican traditional Maya lands, I seem to have checked into the dilapidated high-rise I'm in, as it is a hotel. I'm with four others, 2 guys and 2 women my age, one of the ladies looks Provencal French with a Roma nose, the group becomes quite sexually aroused and active, altogether, I'm observing with care how they treat the French-looking lady as her naked body is mounted revealing a pointed mass of moving genitals, the group soon disperses with an air of slight dissatisfaction, I seem extremely anxious and leave the building

Sept. 29 2011