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Christina Davis
- Female
- Stockton, CA
- United States
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- Interests:
- Poetry, Fine Arts, Visual Art, Writing
- About Me:
- I love to read and write poetry. I guess you could say I was a bit obsessed. I love anything that comes from the gut.
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- Donald Anderson
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THE STREETS OF EMPIRE
Folk singing,
mind bending,
day dreaming,
hitch-hiking, turned on,
tuned in gypsies
of the howling sixties—
we stumbled through
the siren stoned streets of empire,
chasing gossamer ghosts
of our apostate souls—busted angels
slipping through cracks
in black robed judges’ mandarin tongues.
Warm, wet bottles of misty grape
slipping from lip-to-lip and ‘round,
pungent puffs of sacred smoke
circling mouth-to-mouth
and down to the foggy meadows
of our misty minds—circling, dancing,
reeling, and chanting ‘till gravity vanished,
and we saw Jesus bleeding
and dying again
each night in the midnight flash
of the headlights; heard the starving souls
of Wounded Knee
cracking like snail shells
under the cast iron wheels
of history... rolling cross their lives
the way thunder rolls
across the sky.
An’ days when the blood-black belly of the
Great Central valley
lay in a shroud of tule fog,
we tattooed the hunger
in our mothers’ eyes
on young willowy school girls’ thighs
and rediscovered our mothers’ hungry eyes,
while our bare-footed lovers
watched carpet bombings
drowning out screams—way over
wherever in hell those muddy fields
happened to be—saw water-buffalo
cremated between young school girls’
bleeding thighs…for tin, rubber, oil,
and rice—while we made love
to the face paint
of our youthful appetites,
and the fall out of our mothers’ hungry eyes—
for the lives they’d forsaken
for a haven out of the storm—
there to slave for the men
to whom their love
had been sworn.
Then, the empire—
both its eyes
now badly blackened
by the bare knuckled fists
of a foe
it could never see—
embarked for home
to salve its wounds
and tally up history’s score
on the old oak tree.
And to erect a wall
upon whose facade
of polished stone
names of those who’d
died for the empire—
for reasons never fully known—
were shown, while crickets chirped
and pastors prayed
over freshly dug soldiers graves,
and bugles sounded taps
to finalize the grief
of those whom death had
so capriciously left behind
and, half way 'round the world,
cold gray ashes
of priestly immolations
drifted at random
in the winds of earthly amnesia,
and the blood of My Lai
grew rice again.
And we—Humpty Dumpties
setting out from the foot
of the empire’s wall
to search for the earth with our
tattered maps of broken sky—
now fell from sight
in phases like the moon—
eclipsed and subsumed
by the runes of a global system’s
single mind—as prisons,
hospitals, and in house drugs
each took sizable bites from our lives
if we hadn’t already died—until
we who still remained
sought for means
in the runaway mirrors
of decency’s common wine
for something we might do—
not just for food,
but also for truth—
something the empire
might also value,
but finding little on the table
of tangible dreams
over which the empire and we
could both agree,
we ultimately learned
to spit from mouths
that had by now
become dry as the dust
being stirred about the streets
and shopping malls
of a bizarre fantasy—the
war of all-against-all—
weekly bankrolled
with cash advances
for the mere signing away
of next week’s wages—the well
oiled plunder
in the wake
of the rolling thunder. . .
And so we just kept stepping,
and longing
for that deep sense of knowing
and belonging so firmly possessed
by those who’d died still holding fast
to the last of the decency
on the prairies—even after the rats
that gnawed their children’s bones
had built their nests in the
until they finally knew
as only they could know—
that indeed the rolling thunder
would coldly trample under
a sworn to treaty,
binding all signers
for as long as the rivers flowed,
and the grass should grow,
and though the rivers and the grass
fulfilled their roles…yet
the rolling thunder
plowed up the green grass,
cursed the sworn to commitments,
and those whom they'd swindled,
leaving behind
only the extruding, black, swollen tongues
of genocide....And
those wheels of empire
just keep on rolling, and singing
“Freedom! Freedom!”
as they roll, loving the
word more then any other,
so reassuring to the wheels
as they parade past
the media managed multitudes…
singing “Freedom! Freedom!”—
as they flatten freedom
the way blacksmiths
flatten out red hot irons.
THE END.
You gotta howl or weep, on or the other!
Joe :)
From the gut is where I generally come from ... think! When I start a poem I don't know where it's going. When I feel it ending, I sometimes revert to something at the start, which seems to round out the direction I was taking at the start without knowing what that was. Of course that's just one way I work. I've written over 600 poems, but for the last two years I've been writing, editing and proofreading my memoir, "Lost in America: Memoirs of a Maverick" My childhood friend who was a Basketball coach at Bakersfield Junior college just read it in five days (no mean task, as the blow by blow acount of 47 years of my life takes up 688 pages) and thought it was well written and never lagged for lack for adventure, wit, uniqueness and originality ... well, he didn't say that exactly, but you know, the man in the streets commenatery on something tends to be pretty cliche with all the meaning coveyed by the tone of voice and enthusiasm the say it in. Like as in "It was really interesting!"
Okay, I'll send you three poems and see if you think they come from the gut:
STORM MOTHER
On fugitive wings
of legends
and other merciful
fictions, I fly
out through the back door
of childhood—down
into the silence
where hoot owls weep
in opium dreams
of darkness and refuge—
past all memories
of the sun or the moon,
and there I wait for her
who gave me suck
to reinvent herself
out of the dust—to
come back to the
center of our lives ... back
from the winds
that steal her away, back
from the delusions
and incurable pain
of a childhood she
seems helpless to
ever grow out of.
A small boy
in the wake of his
storm-mother's
path of destruction,
steps out over fragments
of shattered dishes
into the dusty yard where
the toys she's cursed
lie like broken pieces
of her own childhood—
helplessly alone.
The small boy
gazes down the road
after the howling yellow-gray
clouds of dust
rising behind the engines
of the madness
tearing her away
from him.
He kneels
on the battle field
of bleeding toys,
and feels the dog's
tongue-wet breath
warm against his
dusty cheek.
They wait
there together
as they always have—
until the storm
blows itself out,
and she comes
back to them.
The following I feel is more of a succinct treatise on mortality than from the gut. What do you think.
WILD FLOWERS
Spill across the
soft smoky hills like
rolling carpets of
light.
Their wildness touches us,
and we are silenced,
for we—like they—
scattered and feverish
in the sun,
will soon be gone.
The following poem has been call my sister poem to Ginsberg's "Howl"
That's all Folk! Hope you enjoyed these and have a better idea of who I am.
Care to share something you've written? I always manage to come up with some little critique or another.
Joe :)
Her email is kathykieth@hotmail.com