Storm Over the Rail Trail

Just finished this painting today. The process was interesting. First, fortified myself with coffee and Bach remedy. Put on a playlist of songs I call "painting." It starts with "Corinna" by Taj Mahal. Then got out the paint, organized the colors I needed, picked a brush, and started with the sky. Did the sky while the tape was breaking into Stevie Wonder's "Blame it on the Sun." Finished the sky on "Sister Morphine" by the Rolling Stones.

Remembered Tsering telling me always to start with the dark colors. Chose a brush for the pathway, and stopped to munch on some unsalted cashews. Then started on all the brown, sketched in around the houses, put in all the grasses with Tom Wait's "Waltzing Mathilda," added the trees and branches to "Flying Red Horse" by John Gorka. Took a break and played a game on my computer. Went back and added the tall tree and the darker colors, more branches, and grasses. A good, athletic song by Eric Bibb - "Don't Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down."

Red flowers. Took another break to ease my back. "Will My Mother Know Me There?" by Ricky Skaggs was playing as I put in the white of the houses and roofs, and finally the snow. Added more tendrils of grass and branches. Added the vermilion part of the flowers. The last song had long since ended - "The Nearness of You" by Nora Jones. Remembered my friend Debbie in Boston, who said, "Music will never let you down."

Songs of St. Louis

I recorded an "open mic" reading of my poem, inspired by the killing of Michael Brown. (If you want to listen, scroll down to the second "play" button, and excuse my poor weblog programming skills.) The slightly re-written poem appears below that.

I was working on Cabanne Street in a Home for Girls
Girls with a Bad Rap or Bad Company or just Bad Luck
One of the girls was White and maybe I was White
Some would consider me so
And some didn’t quite know
But I could always look like a nun
When faced with police
Unlike my swain whose ebony face
Shone with blue lights in the sun

The first time he was stopped
He had a script of a play on his dash
You could read it through the glass
A priest accuses God
And the cop who was White, surely looking for a reason
Said, Lightning should strike you right now
LeRoi answered, Yeah, I guess so
They laughed and the cop let him go

Once, a drunk plowed through a red light
Into LeRoi’s car, skipped over the white line
And he’s still in his seat, dazed and bleeding
As the sirens came near
Cops drag him out
My friend ran over and screamed
Get an ambulance he’s bleeding!
And we end up at the hospital
Everybody was fine

Unlike Leon Spinks who got arrested when cops
Planted coke in his car
I mean, how could a poor Black from the projects
The Projects! No less than Pruitt Igoe
Get an Olympic Medal for boxing
And go so far
I mean, justice no object

And the first month I moved to my place in St. Louis
I heard about a nurse who got shot on the street
No reason, they said – just a random thing
Who did it? They searched but no shooter appeared
So I figured, okay, this is a violent place
I could end up dead any time
No point in wasting myself on fear

A block away, two whores were in their house
Minding their own business
When cops came in looking for drugs
Emptied all the drawers, cut up clothes
Waved their guns
Tossed a fur coat in the bathtub
Soaked it in water through and through
And when one girl objected, shot her too

Okay, I wasn’t there, but we heard stuff like this
Somebody got murdered every week or so
Our murder rate seemed to match the heat
And the welfare rate had only Mississippi beat
Math was never an issue
But the lack of money was

So you make your neighborhood your own
You don’t want some stranger messing it up
You build your bravado, your music, your color
Your walk, your talk, your energy, your fun
And pretty soon, you don’t care so much
For what you don’t own

You cook whatever meat you have on the bone
And burn some incense and have a party
You get in your car
And drive real slow with the music on loud
To cover the sound of the muffler dragging on the ground
You get a coat hanger to tie it up smartly

You go home to Kinloch where sanity reigns
And you can breathe in peace
Until they land the next plane
Like it’s coming to you
So, Ferguson, nothing much is new
Except that now the microscope is focused on true

I dated a St. Louis cop once – he lived in a dungeon
The place was a mess, the plumbing malfunctioned
He was a patch of desert in a delta bayou
With a fatal case of blues
He was proud of his brutality
And polished it like a cue

It’s been years since I went back
I remember the summers that stretched on forever
The patchwork sky, the dripping air, the squirrels, the bugs, the life
The slow moving city, fast-rushing River
You wouldn’t want to swim in it
My girls in the Home were all good girls
Even the Bad ones

Sometimes at night we used to share our thoughts
St. Louis is the training ground of the faithful, she said
Yeah, that’s no joke, we agreed
When you think about it, there’s always a need
And a very good reason
Why dancers, musicians, playwrights and poets
Are born in a place with a troubled season.

Jesus was a Virgo

I need to go to Boston

I feel like I want to crack something open

A whole ice tray of feelings

The love, mostly

Keen and sharp like the winter wind

Whipping across from the Hancock Building

Eyes clenched to the sleet, inscrutable

And on the inside, a vast ocean of space

Driven by single purpose

Nothing I wouldn’t do for the Beloved

When Jesus was two years old

He already knew he belonged to the world

His life would be a gift to humankind

He had an unbroken umbilical

At two, my destiny was only a spark

Beginning its slow spiral

I was sixteen when I chose heart over head

If I had to choose

Not beauty or wit or surely sanity

I wonder if Jesus had a nickname as a child

Before he was called a prophet, a Lord, a Prince,

All those epithets that couldn’t contain him

Jesus must have made friends easily

Gathering his disciples around him like bees to clover

My only nicknames were cruel ones made by boys

Until college where the girls named me Slinky and Cat

But love always got in the way of friends

No bees, only outlaws who would be worshipped

Jesus was an outlaw, too

I probably would have loved him,

Would have pulled him down from the cross and taken his place

Like an idiot, or a saint

And my nickname would have been She Who …

I don’t know exactly, but not Slinky or Cat

Anyway, one thing to say –

Jesus wasn’t a Capricorn

I saw his birthday written in a tome

A book of secrets from an unlocked case 

September 9, was it?  September 6?

Anyway, it’s no surprise.

Jesus was a Virgo.