This poetry bag is heavy.

Weighted down by the white man's greed and dishonesty for 10,000 years.

My eyes are blinded by the search for gold

and my ears are pitched to the high voltage industrial scream of a billion fuel burning engines.

Time is hung around the neck of every slave that has ever existed under my rule.

Carried my great hunger with bloody consequence.

My thirst is quenched with the sweat of people who were born into metropolitan lines of starving masses

that gassed 100 civilizations of Romans and English and Colonial stealth jet technology transgressing into the spirit world of 95% of the humans on the planet.

Upon it

women have been foot bound -

drug down -

come on -

swept under -

and walked in the rear of a billion lines

along with the cattle and stratus of water

coming and going

coming and going

in coastal floods of domination and over saturating testosterone nightmares.

And the Indian people

they weren't spared the wrath of my weakness.

They showed us how to grow corn.

How to shorn our crops before the winter frost.

And all it cost them was their families -

their religion -

and their very way of life.

Later even their place among the nations of their mother earth.

These native Americans were beat back -

butchered up -

men turned to the white devils' liquor and greed.

Their seed washed away as whites took their women into the frontiers of the great Pontiac and Geronimo.

Tortured in the Golden Fields of Liberty for conquest from the Atlantic to the Pacific railroads.

And how my brain bleeds as I think of the Africans.

Their bibles hanging around their pain in thorny Christian manipulation.

On the slave ships they cowered in steel cages

felt the rage of their masters and the sucking breath of America pulling them into chains

and whips

and rape

in the cold dark Southern nights.

If I could bear it I would ripe this ugly pale skin from my body.

1 would wring out my soul down by the riverside drunk

and raving up to silent Gods that set me in motion.

I would drown my guilt in a thousand tear-soaked oceans where the hungry and poor fill up the gapping

vaginal canyons of the desert.

I would skin 10 trillion kilt animals across the universe

and milk 10 million ripe mammals into the mouth of babies crying toward the void.

The noise I would make when I died would fill the lonely mountain tops to the far reaches of Tibet and

Bali.

Trees that hold the dead souls of all people would shine with humility

and an all encompassing calming wisdom.

An army of nurturing goddesses

would sweep the techno-terrorism civilizations of the world from the face of the planet and transform us

into something we're not or ever have been.

Then I could finally be proud of my heritage again.

If I could I would change the world for better.

I should fill the valleys with wetter places of growth and peace.

I would drift along in the enlightened purity of my white skin . . and

Ohm-0hmmmm-0hmmmm.

Create a home

for us all

in this poetry bag of mine.

This poetry bag

is soooo...

heavy.

         
Copyright Clebo Rainey 1999