Talking

I just wanted you to know
That if ever you want to talk to me about your problems,
I'm here in whatever capacity you'd like

See my ma told me that the issue with men,
Is that we always want to fix things,
So I try not to focus on that,
Unless that's what you're looking for,
In which case I will be a rusted tool box,
And a a handful of hammered thumbs.
I will be blue prints and best laid plans,
I will be all the ambition of black coffee and early mornings,
I will be well worn work gloves, and muddy boots
I will be winters on the roof and summers in the yard
damnit I will show you that I can work hard,
As we work on repairing something.

But on the days where solutions aren't the goal,
When feelings simply need to be given a voice
Well I'm good there too.
I will be a night sky to yell into,
I will be trees waving in the wind of your voice
I will be cave where dark things that need no names can be left
I will be a well without bottom for secrets to be dropped into
I will be a back pocket that holds stuff,
Just so that your hands can clench into fists
And then open like flowers
I will be all ears and closed lips,
because you're feelings matter,
and I want to hear about them


And in those moments when you breathe hot anger
In those moments, with all of your words smoking,
When you have a mouthful of matchstick madness,
I will not be water.
I am a piss poor fire extinguisher,
When you spit sparks,
I will be gasoline and dynamite
I will be tinder and kindling
I will be a wind that whips up flames
In the face of our anger,
Problems will paint themselves in ashes
and call themselves solved.
ain't nobody trying to be in the way,
when our tempers get to flaring
when our eyes get to glaring
when our hands get to tearing
when our souls get to baring
because nobody wants to be burnt by that heat.


And on rare occasion,
When I think you're in the wrong,
I will call you on it.
I will go to the mat on behalf
of every idealistic bone in your body,
because sometimes people like us,
let our mouths run,
and sometimes passion
is just a little bit faster than compassion,
but you're usually good at that
So on the even more rare occasion,
When I am wrong,
I know you will show me how
And why
And maybe bring it up all the time
And that's fine
Because as long as we are talking,
I know that we are building something better,
as long as we are talking,
we can wear our hearts on our sleeves
we can whisper like the rustle of orange leaves
we can laugh like the kid who believes
in all the good things the world hasnt taken away yet.

To all the people I tried to love before learning to love myself.

 First of all, sorry, I'm clumsy at the best of times

and unbalanceed, more often than not

I may have fallen for you, fallen towards you

fallen on you, or even fallen in front of you

I fall down often, and land hard. 

Eventually, I stopped getting back up.

I was content to sit and lean against the legs of my betters,

for who could fall for that which has already stumbled tumbled and become broken?

Certainly not me. 

But there are places on the ground here,

 as soft as chamomile and warm with the light of an absent sun

I yearn for the early days of love, where I felt more loved than hurt

I yearn for a time when I was ready to swim with strangers and come up

gasping for air and finding none amidst my own laughter.

GOD

 Throw snowballs at the mf some times

youll never hit him

but 

you might wake him up

Jesus is at the door again.

Jesus is at the door again,

And he’s ringing on the phone.

He’s pulling on my heart strings,

Like an old dog with a bone. 

Today he says he’s hungry,

Hasn’t eaten in a week.

But there’s henny on his breath 

And his knees are looking weak. 

I don't know what I’ve got,

But I know it’s not enough,

Hope and peanut butter,

Tuna cans and other stuff.

Jesus is at the door again,

And he’s ringing on the phone.

He’s pulling on my heart strings,

And I do not like his tone

He’s indignant. 

He says I oughtta know 

How much I owe 

to the blood he spilled,

and bodies he buried, 

And resurrected 

Before he goes, he lays me low,

“Ain't you never had a debt befo’?”

Jesus is at the door again,

And he’s ringing on the phone.

She’s pulling on my heart strings,

Demanding I atone.

Today blood drips from her hands.

She’s got toilet paper bandages,

Held with rubber bands.

I didn’t see and let her wait at first,

I hope she understands.

What I could do was not enough,

But that is often how it stands.

Jesus is at the door again,

And he’s ringing on the phone.

He says “Just hang in there,

I swear you’re not alone”

Always

Always, I will love you.
In fact I will always love you more
But not just more,
I will love you more than most,
I will love you the most often,
And more often than not,
You will love me back,
Except when you hate me,
In those cases I will love you even more
than I loved you the day before,
I will love you like the moon loves the sun,
and I will love you when you run,
but I should probably walk,
and you should probably talk,
But all this is just to say,
I will never love you anything less,
than every day.

Kaepernick Wont Stand for the National Anthem, and Neither Will I

For as long as I have remembered the most difficult thing about going to sporting events, participating about sports in high school and even just listening to the Red Sox on the radio has been the Star Spangled Banner. In fact, I would say my relationship to that little piece of civil religion has followed me my whole life. When I was a very young child, I was getting ready for nap time when an announcement came over the intercom at our school saying that we should all stand for the national anthem, and I did. Then when the song ended, we were told to put our hands over our heart as the whole school did the pledge of allegiance, which I did not know, my parents had never taught me. After telling my father about this he sat me down and talked to me about what those things meant. He told me in no uncertain terms that I should not stand, nor put my hand on my heart and that I most certainly should not pledge my allegiance to a flag. He told me that he and my mother wanted our family’s allegiance to be to God, to our fellow humans and not to a force which actively warred against both. I asked him what allegiance was, and he told me that in essence my allegiance was my soul, to pledge my allegiance was to pledge how would I would spend my life, what I would support and what I would allow to give me direction. God seemed like a decent thing to give my allegiance to if for no other reason that God had never to that point told me to do anything and I am awful at following directions. So I carried on as my father had told me, not standing when we went to Wolfpack hockey games, nor at Rock Cat games, not when I was yelled at by my fourth grade teacher and physically dragged out of the classroom, not when I was sent to the principal’s office by my eighth grade social studies teacher and spent the remainder of the year sitting outside the classroom during the announcements, not when I got into an argument with my sophomore year history teacher over 1st amendment rights and was sent from the classroom yet again, not when my wrestling coach gave me extra laps and push ups for making the team look bad, not even when my baseball coach told me that if I wanted to play America’s pastime I better love America. I have been called everything from traitor to terrorist by my peers, my friends, my fellow church members, my coaches, my teachers and even my relatives. These experiences made choosing my college very easy, the college I ended up attending had sparked national controversy the year before by declaring it would no longer play the national anthem before sporting events, and for the first time I could attend soccer games without getting awkward stares and angry glares for being the only one seated while the star spangled banner was sung.


It was while studying religion at this college that i began to research civil religion and the more I learned, the more I came to understand not only my position but the position of those who had hated me, argued with me and been hurt by me for my non-compliance. In America (and in many countries) we worship our country. We lay down our lives for this country, we take lives for this country, we see our country as a light in the dark world, we believe our country is beyond reproach, everywhere around us is the message of how important our country is, how it represents freedom and justice and equality, and in that light of course I seem like a malcontent for not pledging myself to that. However the more I learned about civil religion the more I became scared of it. The yawning void between what America is, and what we are told it is, is where I have grown up, and is all I have known. I grew up in the North End of Hartford, experiencing the segregation that while not enforced by laws is none the less present. Hartford is so segregated that even though I was “as Irish as Paddy's pig” as my dad liked to say, and had the skin and complexion to match, I was frequently asked by folks in the neighborhood who didn’t know me if I was Puerto Rican. This is because a Puerto Rican person looking like me, made more sense than a white kid growing up in the North End. Everytime I hear the words “Oh, say does that star spangled banner yet wave,O'er the land of the free, And the home of the brave?” I cannot help but scoff because in my experience the American flag does not wave over a land that fits that description. Is this really the land of the free when we have more incarcerated citizens than China, than anyone? Are we the home of the brave when we have been cowering before narratives of hatred and racism so deep that on any given weekday around 5 PM you can watch as hundreds if not thousands of white workers flee from Hartford to return home to gated communities and suburbs? That my best friend will have people cross the street when they see him, follow him around in stores and generally fear him with no knowledge about him based on the color of his skin? That we callously accept that any male over the age of 18 in the Middle East can and will be categorized as an enemy combatant to be killed by drone attacks. We live very far from such a land.


The national anthem we know is part of our civil religion it is the hymn with which we worship the idea of our country, and the values it extols are indeed noble, however they paint an incomplete picture. The country being sung about when this song was written, did not include black and brown people amongst those who could call the nation home. In fact the only time that the song does refer to black/brown people is in the often unheard third verse: “And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a Country should leave us no more?Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” According to Jason Johnson a writer for The Root who wrote on the racism of our national anthem this past summer, the verse is about the attacking the slaves who fought on the side of the British. A couple centuries ago when this song was written, racism was being built up as a cornerstone of American culture, and the evidence is here in the lyrics, these men would not free, not in the land that is being described here.


All of this brings me to this morning, when I picked up the Hartford Courant hoping to read about the Red Sox and instead found an article by Jeff Jacobs called “Kaepernick's Act Heartfelt, But Divisive.” Kaepernick’s decision to not stand for the anthem during NFL games has created a lot of op ed sports pieces about the role of nationalism in sports and vice versa, and Jacobs claims that Kaepernick is essentially, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, that what the song symbolizes is more powerful as a unifying force, and that Kaepernick’s decision is selfish and wrong footed. Luckily, Jacobs doesn’t assume he is the be all end all of the discussion and says “Maybe I'm missing something here, but Kaepernick missed that point. He went after the American symbol. He had to know he would alienate a huge segment of our society and create an instant backlash. In my mind, he went selfish, not selfless. Hey, look, at me! I'm not standing for "The Star-Spangled Banner." Right off the bat, that will inflame millions of Americans.” You’re right Jeff, you missed something. You missed the fact that this song was written at the same time that racist systems were being created that would destroy black and brown bodies and souls for centuries to come. Far from missing the point, Kaepernick is acknowledging that the anthem describes an America that is largely unavailable to black and brown Americans. The systems that enslaved Africans hundreds of years ago are not somehow separated from the systems that are allowing police to murder and assault black and brown Americans today. The narratives that white people created and recreated to perpetuate the destruction and enslavement black people are the same ones that white people are using to fight back a movement whose only point is to simply convince the country that the lives of innocent people should matter regardless of skin color. What Kaepernick is doing is simply saying that he can no longer worship at the altar of America, not while it soaked in the blood of black and brown bodies. I understand how awful this piece will sound to folks who are patriotic, folks who have put their lives on the line for the ideals of this country, who have made it part of their identity. Folks who have incorporated patriotism into their soul, as I have with my religion. My religion is also corrupted by power and wealth, my religion also has a long and terrible legacy of violence and destruction, and yet I live and pray by the ideals of my religion, and I know people who live and pray by the ideals of America. Those ideals however, should not and cannot prevent us from criticizing the legacies of our institutions, the violence of our institutions and work at repairing them.If we cannot examine them critically how will they ever live up to our ideals? Or maybe a better question: if we cannot examine ourselves critically, examine how our own biases and prejudices have helped perpetuate the violence in our institutions, how will we ever live up to our ideals?





Jason Johnson: "Star-Spangled Bigotry: The Hidden Racist History of the National Anthem"
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2016/07/star-spangled-bigotry-the-hidden-racist-history-of-the-national-anthem/





Jeff Jacobs: “Kaepernick's Act Heartfelt, But Divisive.”
http://www.courant.com/sports/hc-jacobs-column-0828-20160827-story.html

Icarus

Today, I heard the story of Icarus in a whole new way,

Today, his wings didn't break beneath the sun,

There was no heat melting wax, no feathers gently falling away,

There was nothing slow about the abrupt end of ascension.

This Icarus crashed against the barbed wire ceiling that hangs over this city,

his wings were torn to shreds, his fall reached a terminal velocity.

We are taught to blame Icarus,

We are taught to see Icarus as filled with braggadocio and  lacking in self control,

we refuse to see that he was only born with a buoyant soul,

Souls such as these long to scratch the sky,

To look down on the world with God at their shoulder, clouds at their toes

and heaven laid out before them.

And of course we fail them.

Barbwire ceilings do not occur naturally,

Our cities aren't meant to be inescapable, inhospitable 

they arent meant to put so many in the hospital,

in the ground,

and if you hear the faint sound,

sneakers scraping against celestial chain link,

stop for a moment and just think,

did you see him today?

did he just start to sink?

did he do a loop the loop,

start from his front stoop,

touch the sky with Kanye,

then hit the green house to hoop?

He wont get a filibuster, he's a forgone conclusion, 

and we pretend not to see his wounds and contusions,

Black's dont crack, dont bleed, dont feel pain,

will always be blamed, always be shamed 

and excuse me if this sounds like a refrain,

but if all lives matter,

why wont we talk about him?

Is it cause when Icarus has ebony wings,

that don't melt in the sun, but shine beneath the moon,

it's that much easier to close your eyes?

fall asleep as we whisper gentle lies,

it'd be harder if you could hear is brother cry,

his mother cry, my mother cried,\

I pray to God that an angels wings are made from more than wax,

That they can transcend barbed wire,

that they might carry Icarus higher,

than our world was ever going to let him fly.