Dead Of Night

The church was deserted.
We were married in the dead of night.
No one around to see our glorious unity.
when we walk into those fields
We reap the harvest the others have sown.
With time on our sides
all I have to do is sit back and write,
wait for you to self-destruct
and take me out
in your beautiful flamewreck.

A Day In The Park

Frogs are dancing in the park
dogs are chewing on some bark.
Ducks swim by, nibble on some bread
and amorous couple give each other head.

There's a big black man in a small pink suit
trying to talk to a naked old coot.
They both want some sunshine
but they've both run out of time

Now Playing: System Of A Down - Mesmerize

Broken People

We've been trying to tell this story for years
but they only ever belive me after too many beers.
Sit upon taht stool and complian about their lot
they commit lots of crimes, pray they never get caught.
Pull a big job every year or two
that's the way to keep away the blues.
Some say they try too hard
but you haveto, if you want another drink at the bar.

No matter what you say
no matter what you do
they'll always dig a hole
just big enough for you.
They'll throw you into a little box
hold you until you decide to talk.

Currently Playing: Vietnam - Vietnam

The Chamber

People are here to watch.
How can they believe
In a system that kills
without discrimination?
Don't they know I'm human too?
I too have a soul!
I too feel pain!
Simply because I have renounced
the light. Does not mean
I'm a bag of meat
that can be destroyed on a whim.
What happened to my rights?
I've paid your price
my penance in blood!
I'm not scared to die
I'm scared to die alone.
They strap me in,
they think I'll struggle.
They can not know,
I've already given up hope.
There's no life left for me
hasn't been for fifteen long years.
There's nothing left to do.
Except pray.
Pray that God will accept my broken soul.
I once knew the light
but now only Darkness touches my soul.
The gas enters my body.
The pain is like nothing
I've felt before.
Every nerve ending is on fire.
So this is how....

The Blackened Room

He paces the Blackened Room.
The one he knows so well.
Ten paces right, ten paces left is all.
Nothing except for a cot and a candle.
No window, no lights, just darkness.
This cell has been His home,
for the past fifteen years.
For fifteen years no natural light,
no companionship except the rats.
So He waits.
He waits for the day when they will come
and take Him to the Chamber.
"It's been too long" they cry
"we need his blood!" they moan.
But this man has none to give
for he was drained long ago
locked in the Darkened Room.
He has paid His penance.
Every day is like a year
when the mind is solitary.
No one to talk to
no one to see.
The mind turns in on itself
snacks on itself in glee.
Slowly, slowly insanity comes
unnoticed at first then roaring through the cage.
He hears the footsteps outside his door
never sure if they're real or not.
The key turns in the lock
but the door won't open.
The Blackened Room won't give up its prey.
The Blackened Room is God.
The door creaks open
the light pierces his eyes, He turns away.
Darkness again,
Darkness forever.
The hall seems to stretch out before him.
Everyone avoids my glance
acts as if they don't know me,
as if we haven't already
spent a lifetime together.

Sharing Books

A few months back I was flying down to mexico for spring break. I finished all my books on the first flight to Austin and was talking to the flight attendant about having nothing to read. He reached into a locker and handed me Robert B. Parker`s Stranger In Paradise. Not really my type of book but I started to read it. Now I`m at home and I know a few people who do like this type of book.

So I thought I would give it away and track where it goes. Could be interesting. I also have a couple of other books if anyone is interested.

Ralph Ellison - Going To The Territory

`Geography as a symbol of the unknown unluded not only places, but conditions relating to their racially defined status and the complex mystery of a society from which they'd been excluded`

Here I think Ellison is talking about how the history and possibly the future of the race is built into the geography of where they were born and lived out their lives.

`we were...introduced to one of the most precious of American freedoms, which is the freedom to broaden our personal culture by absorbing the cultures of others.`

vernacular as a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves

I think Ellison is saying here that language must be a continuously evolving thing, one that we use to control our world but also to move it forward and combine it with new ideas generated by minority cultures.

`In this country it is in the nature of cultural styles to become detached from their places of origin, so it is possible that in their frenzy the kids don't even realise they are sounding like black Baptists. Being Americans who are influenced by the vernacular, it is natural for them to seek out those styles which provide them with a feeling of being most in harmony with the undefined aspects of American experience. In other words, they're seeking the homeness of home.`

`It was as though I had come to the Eden of American culture and found myself indecisive as to which of it's fruits were free for my picking. Thus. for all my bright expectations, my explorations had taken on a certain aspects of an unanticipated and amorphous rite of initiation in which the celebrant - if indeed one existed - remained mute and beyond my range of ear and vision.` p 148

This is a fairly common theme with Ellisons writing , I think it shows up in the Invisible Man. The man is searching for some sort of initiation rite that will bring him into the world in it`s fullest capacity. Something that will make him tangibly feel different. In Richard Wright`s autobiography Black Boy the fight near the end takes on that meaning, of an iniation or rite of passage. But no matter how well you accomplish your task you never achieve those new feelings. It doesn`t feel any different than any other accomplishment. So you become stagnant and go back to doing smaller things.

`...it should be remembered that worms teach small earthly truths even as serpents teach theology.` p 149

`A Southern bus was a contraption contrived by laying the South's social pyramid on its side, knocking out a few strategic holes and rendering it vehicular through the addition of engine, windows and wheels. Thus converted, with the sharp apex of the pyramid blunted and equipped with fare box and steering gear, and it's sprawling base curtailed severely and narrowly aligned...a ride in such a vehicle became, at least for Negro, as unpredictable as a trip in a spaceship doomed to be caught in the time warp of history - that man made "fourth dimension" which ever confounds our American grasp of "real"or actual tie or duration.` p 155

`For since it was an undisputed fact that whites and blacks were of different species, it followed that they could by no means be expected to laugh at the same things. Therefore, when whites found themselves joining in with the coarse
merriment issuing from the laughing-barrels. they suffered the double embarrassment of laughing against their God-given nature while being unsure of exactly why. or at what, specifically, they were laughing. Which mean that somehow the Negro in the barrel had them over a barrel.` p 192

Here Ellison is making reference to laughing barrels. In slavery time white people apparently didn`t like watching black people laugh so they made them laugh into barrels.

"...a gift of freedom arrived wrapped in the guise of disaster. It is ironic, but no less true, that the most tragic incident of our history, the Civil War was a disaster which ended American slavery." p 204

"...dancing of those slaves who...imitated the steps so gravely performed by their masters within and then added to them their own special flair...The whites, looking out at the activity in the yard, thought that they were being flattered by imitation and were amused by the incongruity of tattered blacks dancing courtly steps, while missing completely the fact that before their eyes a European cultural form was becoming Americanized, undergoing a metamorphosis through the mocking activity of a people partially sprung from Africa." 223/224

`Each must live within the isolation of his own senses, dreams, and memories; each must die his own death.` P 275

`With few exceptions our energies as writers have too often focused upon outside definitions of reality, and we've used literature for racial polemics rather than as an agency have seen and felt it.` p 282

I feel that he is slighting some of the black power movements that have tried to focus on the pain and suffering of the people perhaps the expense of the narrative. But then again, he also says the novel is the most important written art form. Which is so completely wrong it`s almost funny.

`We back away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humour as well as the horror of our living. We project Negro life in a metaphysical perspective and we have seen it with a complexity of vision that seldom gets into our writing.` p 283

`...the writing of novels is the damnedest thing that I ever go into, and I've been into some damnable things.` p 208