that girl's lost her sway
saturday, september 22, 2001
oh, i don't know. i'm not very excited about things, these days. i mean, there are little patches of energy splurts, absolutely, but not very often. it's like --- bleh bleh bleh bleh, wee!, bleh bleh bleh bleh, wee!, bleh bleh bleh... and i have a distinct sense that it used to be bleh, wee!, bleh, wee! bleh ... get it? ha ha ha. i'm so good with words. i know.
gene sent me a bright red MAC lip lacquer so i can be hedwig for halloween.. that was definitely wee!.. (and a really nasty picture of courtney love.. and we all know, when you use the words nasty and courtney love, it means really, really bad.. ) .. hanging out with angela is also very wee! ... but most days.. just a lot of bleh.
the internet sucks. or i suck for not finding it fun anymore. journals don't interest me like they used to, the web forums i visit are suddenly intensely lame and unsatisfying, reading magazines online just isn't that much.. fun anymore. i tried web chatting some week ago. it was horrendous. the whole process of finding some stranger to talk to that might be interesting in a sea of horny lame cyber sex people and racist trolls... utterly pathetic. i quickly logged off.
hey, we just interpreted this poem in my african-american literature class.. for some reason the phrase 'violent dreamers' is just so.. pretty. here we go:
For Malcolm X
All you violated ones with gentle hearts;
You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;
Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,
And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.
All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums
Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,
Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,
Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.
Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!
Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!
Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.
You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.
When and Where will another come to take your holy place?
Old man mumbling in his dotage, or crying child, unborn?
-- margaret walker, 1970
hey, and margaret walker wrote another really good poem. i have no idea if it's "allowed" to post them like this but i will. this next poem is one of those that should be read out loud. it's written so rhythmically. my favourite is in the fourth stanza with the clever play on words.. "we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when".. anyways. i'm not having a good semester, so it feels nice that i'm enjoying what we're reading in one class at least:
For My People
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sweing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and firls who grew in spite of these things to be Man and Woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something -- something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take controll.
-- Margaret Walker, 1937
i spent yesterdays at angela's and we saw scully giving birth on the x-files. thank you, tivo! aww. we both got mushy. heh. well, not at the birth so much as the image of scully, baby and mulder in a huddle. heh. anyhoo. cin cin.
�� 9:15 p.m.
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