J. Otis Powell!
Twin Cities Writer/Performer:
J. Otis Powell!

Guest Book
E-mail: opwll@aol.com



J. Otis Powell! Selections
Unsentimental Biographical Note Can We Make A Fire
Ghost Paper The Way The Ground Opens Until It Comes...
Alarm! Phloem Waiting For A Spaceship
Sentient Force Slow Dancing In Blue Lights The New Normal
J. Otis Powell!
Biographical Note Poet - Philosopher - Educator - Consultant
Curator - Activist - Arts Administrator
Performance Artist
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UPTOWN Research Department
J. Otis Powell!
OPWLL@AOL.COM 612.821.9123


J. Otis Powell! works as a poet (writer), media producer, performance artist, producer and curator of performance events, arts administrator, an educator & a consultant. His poetry has been published in two books of his own work: THEOLOGY (Traffic Street Press) & My Tongue Has No Bone (Porter Publishing), and numerous anthologies and magazines including: ache Magazine, RUMINATOR Review, DrumVoices, Siren, Futures Magazine, The Drumming Between Us, Collage, Hungry Mind Review, A Definitive Guild To the Twin Cities, A View from the Loft, Colors Magazine, The Artist's Voice, the Star Tribune, Insight News, Air Check, Public Art Review, Art Paper, The North Coast Review, Performance Twin Cities, the Arts Midwest Jazzletter, Twin Cities Jazznotes, Powderhorn Writer’s Festival Broadside Project, The Critical Stage and Critical Conditions.

A new collection of poems entitled: EMANCIPATION STORIES: POEMS WRITTEN IN THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM is currently seeking a publisher. His current work includes an autobiographical prose book of creative nonfiction with a working title of INTERSECTIONS: CONFLUENCE IN A POETIC LIFE, and a collaboration with photographer Bill Cottman titled FOUR WOMEN.

Awards & Accomplishments

J. Otis has been the recipient a Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, two Jerome Mid Career Artists Grants 1996 & 1999 and a year 2000-2001 Intermedia Arts Interdisciplinary McKnight Fellowship. He was a founding producer on the award winning Write On Radio!, the Twin Cities literary connection, at KFAI-FM in Minneapolis, he also worked as Communities’ Liaison & Program Director for Interdisciplinary Collaborations at The Loft Literary Center, the nation's most comprehensive independent literary organization.

Also among the awards and honors that Powell! has received for his work are: Silver Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You 1985 from the Pensacola Press Club, Gold Award of Excellence in Television Production for Sketches Of You 1986 Pensacola Press Club, listed in Who’s Who in Black America 1987, A Juneteenth Poetry Award in 1995, selected as a presenter in the Good Thunder Series at Mankato State 1995, selected as a Visiting Scholar for University Center Rochester 1998 & A Special Merit Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters as a producer of Write On Radio! 1998.

His words have also been recorded, to date, on three CDs: THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution , Words Will Heal The Wound , an anthologies produced for National Poetry Month and THIS CAT IS OUT, in association with The New Day Blues Band. J. Otis publishes in mid air as well through performances with ensembles such as STIGMATISM World Ensemble, Afrika’s Ensemble, Revolutionary Hearts, SIRIUS B, OGU, NOW!, tHE eDGE eNSEMBLE, The New Day Blues Band, IMP ORK, Tribo, and DRUMMING WORDS/SPOKEN HEARTS.

As a producer: Creator, writer and producer of Sketches of You, a weekly arts television magazine and writer, narrator and associate producer of MAKING A STEP, an on the road documentary of the Mighty Clouds of Joy, both for WSRE-TV in Pensacola FL. J. Otis worked as researcher and segment producer for RESEARCH JOURNAL, a T.V. series, at Rarig Center for the University of Minnesota. He conceived, wrote and produced a performance arts show titled THE GODS MUST BE PIMPS, in a series for Intermedia Arts. Other stage productions include Holy Ghosts Dance, at Red Eye, SEAMLESS, at the Southern Theater,THEOLOGY: Love & Revolution, a CD recording and a performance arts event at Studio 6A in Hennepin Center for the Arts & at the Knitting Factory in New York City and STIGMATISM at Intermedia Arts. He was also founding producer and writer of the award winning Write On Radio! at KFAI-FM.

EMANCIPATION STORIES: Poetry, Music & Images of Precise Resistance was curated and produced by J. Otis Powell! for the stage of the Historic Paramount Theatre in St. Cloud Minnesota. For the centennial celebration of the birth of Langston Hughes, J. Otis was instrumental is staging two events, SIMPLY LANGSTON at the University of Minnesota and LOTTA LANGSTON at the Babylon International Gallery. In recognition of KFAI’s 25th anniversary he chaired a committee that produced PEOPLE POWERED RADIO: Twenty-five Years Of Fresh Air.

Education

J. Otis Powell! is a poet & philosopher working in an aesthetic rooted in Afrocentric lore and culture. His work has been greatly informed by an oral tradition in literature, music and the Black Arts Movement. He was trained from early childhood as an actor and worked for two decades in black and conventional theater, film and television. J. Otis received his undergraduate degree in television production from Alabama A&M University, a historic black college, where he minored in philosophy. His theater skills have been translated into performance art and his talent with philosophy influences whatever art he creates. Powell! later studied creative writing with Gloria Anzudua and performance poetry with Quincy Troupe. Trained in Open Space Technology (OST) by Harrison Owen at a conference conducted at the University of St. Catherine. J. Otis is an alumni of The Institute for the Renewal of Community Leadership, a program of St. Thomas University.

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Unsentimental
A Poem for Rene Ford
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You talked to me about your irreverence
for the Ellington standard
In A Sentimental Mood.
You said, “There are definitive ways
to play it & I refuse to play it like that.”
Before, when it was convenient to disown
time, & blame others for our misfortune
you made it our responsibility.
Time & life are relentless & the one
hundred & forty & four thousand
sealed souls continue to multiply.
You continue to dance love through danger
& it still takes a long time to get home
& it's always different when you get there.
You are still our guru; teaching us to embrace
new possibilities & to turn & face the sun.
Our time & our song are our responsibility
& we should remember to forget,
we must learn to divide & multiply.
You continue to teach us that memory is friend & foe,
that we are amoebic souls search for home.
Now that we are preoccupied with & distracted by
yet another body count, your council remains relevant;
we change moments by acting in them.
You remind us that we are not responsible
for returning every time, on the one,
because we are, in fact, ourselves, the one.
It we don't hit it, it hits us, because it is us.
The melody, though hidden, or forgotten is still in there.
The mood, is expanding & contracting
& we are stuck in how we liked it once,
instead of responding to it as a living organism.
In the pulse of a new day our aesthetic values
cut through the fog of familiarity, searching for
hope, letting go of emotional attachment,
growing flailing tentacles form the base
of our unsentimental souls.


© J. Otis Powell!

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Can We Make A Fire?
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A circle of rocks awaited us
on the shores of a lake that met a river
in a city of forgotten ancestors.
We made a fire & raised heaven from its sparks;
we the gurus/we the creators/we the originators
are vessels for desire/port holes for passion
& builders of new worlds.
We made a fire & raised a shrine to HEMAPHORMER
of Crying Wolf.
We made a fire that employed denial as kindling
& memory of aggression for slow burning logs.
We looked into flames & saw centuries
of the people's history/herstory & oral traditions
dancing in orange & yellows & blues.
As we inhaled smoke we allowed ghosts
to haunt our circle of chairs
which surrounded our circle of rocks,
while we worshiped a full moon slicing across
a lake of our unrealized dream.
We dream a world with more space
in it for us and art.
We dream a world where people
know what love is & what it is not.
Everyone longs to be loved
though we can hardly bear it
when it comes.
We all desires love but love itself
is mysteriously impossible to reign in,
it is resistant to our prerogatives.
All we can do, in the throws of compassion
is hold on to shifting breezes &
allow heat from the circle to warm us.
Together FREEDOM is possible.
Within this circle of fire we have made
is another planet we wish to inhabit.
This circle of fire is not merely light
& ambiance but a powerful incinerator
that burns away fears & consumes
our cumbersome debris.

© J. Otis Powell! and Eva Ellen

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Ghost Paper
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"My feets achin so's I cn hardly stan, My feets achin, yeah, so's I cn hardly stan, But ah ain't gonna trade em Cause they done saved me from the man." Langston Hughes from Jess B. Semple

Sometimes I think, I’ll spell
my name backwards
& disappear to Jamaica.
Then I think, I’ve invested
too much in this name
to give up on it.
In fact I think I’ll keep
my name & change
my priorities.
I think I’ll keep my heroes too.
In 2002 we recognize 100 years
since the birth of Langston Hughes.
A century of hand-to-mouth
mouth-to-page, page-to-stage-to-streets
to-hearts-to-minds-to-tell the truth
about what it means to be Negro in America.
Langston was born a pauper
& he lived among peoples
struggling for what they needed
surviving with what they found
owning only what they carried
in a world built from their labor,
painted with the hues
of their complexion
& made more human
by the songs of their suffering.

Taking talk to tell it like Madam, Semple,
Ozie Powell, Black Gal, Mother to Son,
like Black Workers, like a slow horn
playing Chicago Blues & dreaming
like there was always a tomorrow
to look forward to, to be human in.
Looks like what drives me crazy is EVIL.
Looks like what keeps me crazy
is Jim Crow & capitalism & my inability
to be me, see me, without the prism of
what is not me taking up too much space.
Separate but lethal continues
to govern world affairs.
& the voices of the peoples
continues muted
under domination
& superimposed supremacy.
Throw the money into the fire
make it useless as smoke.
New currency for a new normal.
"I reckon it'll be
me myself!
Yes, it'll be me."
To reclaim fragments
lost in sounds of drums
& tongues I once knew
by heart, by river’s invitation.
Or does it explode,
this ghost money
overlaid with gold,
soaked in blood
& tossed into the flame?
"We know we are beautiful.
And ugly too.
We build our temples
for tomorrow, strong
as we know how, and
we stand on top
of the mountain,
free within ourselves."
Within ourselves, our own selves.
& we hold these selves
to be self evident that men
& women & children
are not commodities
of the market place,
not somebody’s demographic piece
of the market share
but different personality traits
of the divine source of creation.
Langston taught us
that we have wealth
that can’t be calculated,
we can sweat when
in below zero coldness,
breathing under water
& walking on clouds
without falling through
laughin’, lovin’ & livin’
cause we’re Still Here.
Metu Neter & the smell of
vanilla on a chocolate man
in the middle of Harlam
in the 20th Century
way in the middle of the air.
No use puffin’ up over
his oppression, he’s free
as he wanna be.
Showin’ up for dinner being beautiful
& tellin um ‘right at Christmas"
that it wouldn’t rub off.

© J. Otis Powell!

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Until It Comes...
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A few of us, when given the chance, will flee, chameleon-like, unconditionally into the pale arms of the pain bringers. Most will figuratively remain forever behind the race wall, proud, girding, fighting, always fighting, ever and relentlessly defending all that is really worth defending-the fountainhead, the dark hearth, the drawn bow string, the beleaguered last tenderness-defining the spirit.
from DEFENDING THE SPIRIT A Black Life in America by RANDALL ROBINSON 1998

Until It Comes...
Until It goes...             Until It’s True...             Until it Rubs...


Songs of the spirit harness an energy
from light shed on the struggles of the peoples
& reinforces a photosynthetic process
that leads to impossible contradictions.
Oxidation is a slow but sure transformation
that outlives impatience & lifts
the song to the inevitable confluence of power.
So many times, in the throws of resistance,
on the edge of urgency, I’ve heard my heart
beating in the drums of my ears.
For to long my dreams have been
locked away in a cedar chifforobe
waiting for democracy to come true.
The way to freedom is through improvisation,
because liberty is not yet a reality.
We don’t know how to be free.
The world we want awaits confluence,
a braiding together of values & resources.
We are a nation addicted to privileges.
An experiment still, rats racing up
ladders & down winding corridors.
First escape, then find
ways to hide in the open.
Patterns of stars are not calculated,
the course of change is not sure.
But resistance is precise.
Freedom does not come & go like summer.
Nor does it ring true like colloquialisms.
It is more of a perpetual process
of respiration like breathing.

1

Beyond ideology, it is evolutionary osmosis,
Kujichagulia for the human spirit.
Defending the spirit, until it comes.
Like solo singing soul rises to aCapella purity.
& then it comes...
We who believe in spirits believe it comes.
What is it, this allusive uncommon muse?
This continuum of self-determination?
What is it?
& with the question, it goes.
With insecurity & remorse it goes...
An interrogation of bounty,
of safety, of paradise puts utopia at risk
but we cannot rest benign, we cannot
leave well enough alone.
Swollen vanity is misplaced
as long as oppression persist.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest.
Our hymns are hollow, our prayers are corrupt
& we are a fraud, when we celebrate
the hypocrisy & the heartless legacy
of American conquest.
The biggest illusion is control.
The greatest danger is hopelessness.
We cannot rest so we believe until it comes
until it comes...
We who believe in justice cannot assimilate
until it goes...
We who believe in democracy cannot surrender
until it’s true...
We who believe in music cannot fail
until it rubs...

© J. Otis Powell!

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Alarm!
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WAKE UP!
                  JUMP UP!
                                    GIT GIT GIT UP!

AND LIVE!

The Grim Reaper is smiling
cause so many of us are already dead and afraid.
We've given up the ghost, long before the body falls cold
and the sinister wisdom of the ethos surrounds us like a coffin.
The living dead always have a place to lay their head
and velvet softness is wasted on a bag of bones.
So WAKE UP! and live like it was your calling.
Wonder wildly, feel free , and wax philosophically.
Singin’ out loud keeps the soul satisfied
& dance to music of rhythm and blues.
WAKE UP! JUMP UP! AND GIVE.
Time is temptation, give in,
until you have no more left to give.
Give out, until you find yourself eye-to-I with eye.
Because the Grim Reaper is grinning like a Cheshire cat
and the darkness rolls our days into marijuana cigarettes.


© J. Otis Powell!

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The Way The Ground Opens
(For Kellie Jones, Born May 16th 1959)
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Stars improvised us all
from different points of departure.
We are new solos blown
from the cosmos.
Now that our smile no longer lies
the world will need to be otherwise
Medicine is in our music & it's healing
if we learn to surrender as we fall.
Now that we have conjured
new directions in our hearts
our minds will need to get in line
will need to play a new world anthem;
played in process, in progress -- incomplete.
Still searching for what ground water
already knows, for what memory hides
& self discovery unveils about origins
-- about lost languages
& songs buried deeper than our reach.
We take what we find & transform it.
We interpret it as we reconstruct it.
We will not melt into the homogenized center,
we will not assimilate into the invisible mass.
As we were swallowed by the earth
we gave the soil nutrition.
Our flowers bloom in the spring of time
from seeds deposited long ago.
It’s about improvisation in life
as in art
In love as in the sway of strong trees
in gale force winds
dancing to thunder storms.

© J. Otis Powell!

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Phloem
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The oldest tree alive is called Methuselah.
One might think that living long
is the result of optimal conditions,
but the tree lives at an elevation
of 10,000 feet on a mountain side.
The soil it clings to is not dirt
but dolomite, a limestone substrate,
rock like, with few nutrients.
The ancient tree gets moisture
not from rain                                    but from snow fall
& enjoys a short six weeks of summer sunshine.
It was said of this bristlecone pine
that its secret of longevity
is not so much found in skills
for living long as in the art of dying slowly.
Most of the pine’s wood is dead
life is sustained through a ribbon of bark.
After life ceases, snags stand like ghosts
chiseled by wind blown ice blades & sand,
polished by the harshness of unforgiving weather.
The dense wood slowly erodes away
rather than decomposing or decaying.
As my lights dim & the moon, it seems,
is always blue, I find comfort
in cultivating the art of dying slowly.
Though a bone-numbing wind
tears right through me, as I grow
along side mountains of Isms,
in the limestone of American hardness,
I am dying slowly, pushing what life I have
inch-by-inch through a ribbon of bark,
smiling into the indigo moon
as if gazing into my bathroom mirror.
The moon is older than I & bluer,
but age is such an illusion
& time makes fools of poets
& philosophers & lovers
needing optimal conditions
& more nutrients
than the enviornment affords.
END

© J. Otis Powell!

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Waiting For A Spaceship
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I'm playing dark history. It's beyond black. I'm dealing with the dark things of the cosmos. The dark things are the unknown things. I'm dealing with the dark spirit of all nations, the part of them they know nothing about. What I'm dealing with is so vast and great that it can't be called the truth. It's above the truth. I'm dealing with the potential of people. I'm dealing with what they should be and what I see in them that isn't there but should be there. SUN RA

...In a time prior to star shine,
before cosmic dark ages;
in an epoch more than twelve
billion years ago, a thick haze
of hydrogen gas rose above
inertia & became the blues.
The blues in the universe
is still expanding & is accelerating
faster than the speed of light.
The blues of aquatic space
& outer space have wrapped us
in legends of celestial beings
& shape-shifting amphibious deities.
It was the Gulf that gave us the original
Nommo; amphibious beings sent to Earth
from Sirius for the benefit of humankind.
Oracles renowned for their knowledge
of the heavens, arriving in vessels
along with fire & thunder from Po Tolo
with wisdom of the Dog Star.
The most critical obstacle to space
travel & Aquaboogie is gravity.
Gravity, an inertial force keeps us
from rising above or diving below
our limitations. We might be living
in knots or curves in space swirling
around the opening to a black hole
& whistling music while warped
& dragged along by the edges of a
spinning cosmic worm hole.
Weight & function holds us earth bound.
The blues is our infinity of
shades, hues & dimensions.
Space is the blues, the blacks,
the purples, the yellows, the whites,
the bright lights, the black holes,
the starry sky & the bottomless pit.
Eternity simply goes on...
& we go on within it as if
we have no choice, as if falling
toward the top was ascension.
We have the option to stop
making sense & cents & dollars
& other peoples realities.
What if a mathematical blunder
by Einstein turns out
to be correct after all?
We can make a new world
on the other side of the cosmos
with no flags or nationalities
& live in it like pioneers.
Space is the case, the race,
the face of existence.
Calculating the distance between
here and everywhere
is an endless occupation
with no retirement plan.
Immortality is a cosmic journey
to & from ourselves,
becoming other dimensions
of our universal perpetuity.
We are forever waiting for transportation
to another realm, waiting to integrate
into vast unknown regions
of the colors of our desires.
Every set of lights in the distance
is a mirage, when in May
it’s twenty degrees at midnight
& we’re standing on a platform
waiting for a spaceship.
We’re standing on an edge of
another foggy dawn eons from rebirth
at the Ankh of a cosmic overflow.
On this corner there is no fear of death
only knowledge that we all become again
what we are again & move on.
If at midnight the ship has not docked
we will be lost in an obsidian hole
in time waiting for the next one.
Tonight is this morning
& yesterday afternoon.
Glimpses into tomorrow
look like the beginning
of time, because there is
no distance between them.
There is no separation in the universe.
Amalgamation is a solar system
& divine Influence is merely
a conduit for self knowledge.
Freedom fighters ultimately become
expatriates by working their way out
of gravity & constrictions.
Space travel is simply moving against
gravity to get to where we’ve already
been, so we can orbit through the cosmos
to where we need to go.
Back to Apsu on our way to Sirius B...

END

© J. Otis Powell!

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Sentient Force
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"We are responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, if only because we are the only sentient force which can change it."
from James Baldwin's 1972 essay No Name in the Street

As I turn another corner eye remember
walking away slowly from prisons of ideas
& opportunities that lead into a maze of futility,
marble stairways that ascend
to dead end at a glass ceiling.
Here, in a parody of a place, corridors
wind endlessly together towards infinity
while returning always to a cold & finite world.
A monochrome prison with ghostly stark walls
& an insidious absence of color.
No red passion to guide my soul to freedom.
No black memories of early civilizations.
No greens of collards or turnips or mustard.
Stark white walls, so bland they are at once
ghostly & sterile. There is no light here
but the walls are so white they glow.
Unsure whether this is actual
or a fiendish imitation of life, I wander
from room to room haunted by vapors.
Memories blur between moments
of waking & random day mares.
Reality, in this nowhereness, is intangible
& elusive, filled with a terrible sense of nothingness.
In this monotonous, sterile environment
I learn to cultivate grief,
I learn to bury my dreams.
I catch only twisted glimpses of myself
in mirrors that only reflect white bouncing
off glass & teetering on the brink of remembrance.
So I place one foot in front of the other
& let my feet guide me where they will.
I improvise my way forward until I feel something,
until something or somebody feels me.

1


There is always another turn, so I proceed.
I have hope, even in blinding whiteness.
I have courage even as eye face despair.
An abstract perch above the thresh hole
of pain, medicated to a point of numbness
is always an option in this culture of escapism.
Ivory towers & suburban quarters of denial
& class action backlash affords no safe haven
from the stigmatism we employ to avoid seeing
what we would rather not know.
Dreams are planted in composted sand
waiting for the desert to smell like rain.
Eye & I anticipate this sand wash
becoming a river again
& raising unconsciousness
to the surface where it can absorb
light from sunshine.
Mother earth is an ovum holding seeds
waiting for penetrating rain to flow
through labyrinths & networks
of fertilized duff to achieve reincarnation
& facilitate eternal life.
This white washed prison of unreality
will awaken brilliant with colors someday.
Eye am jazz!

END

© J. Otis Powell!

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Slow Dancing In Blue Lights
for George Coleman
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Just the other day
an old man named change limped
awkwardly, clumsily up the avenue
downtown.
In his hand was a large unwieldy
envelope labeled REVOLUTION.
On his body hung a worn and frayed
blused uniform embossed in
stitches with the words SPEEDY DELIVERY.
I’m expecting revolution
but change comes slowly,
awkwardly.
We can’t get change all at once
so we document the inch by inch
path it takes.
Had I known you were leaving
I might have said something else.
Something about how living
in a maze has some advantages
& showing some love is what
we do as best we can.
I might have said George, write it down.
I might have said, let me help you.
In the colors of our liberation
we walked among them proudly
& we asked the right questions,
at the right time.
How many times do we have to escape?
How many trips up a Sisyphus climb?
We spend too much time in control
& not enough time in love.
We filled freezer bags with words
& thawed them to feed the hungry.
We are medicated with lies
our bodies believed would cure us.
We are blessed with visions
our minds believe will fail.
Our sorted history, practical, while dysfunctional
& absurd, is to be found in grooves.
Our lives groove inside trembling soil,
so we sing songs, full of movement
with voices reaching through peoples to Gods.
We sing, because sound recreates
vibrations that resemble home and struggle.
We sing, because rhythm won’t leave us alone.
We exist in a percussive vibration
reverberating from voices of ancestors,
words of saged & seasoned warriors &
slain freedom fighters like: Martin,
Malcolm, Medger Evers, & a host of
anonymous fallen heroines & heroes who,
as Fannie Lou Hammer articulated,
fell forward for freedom.
Dawn Renee Jones says,
we be living on a vibe.
A vibration on a fault line between self love
& a lie flowing through the veins of America.
There is a sound in our heads that
won’t stop singing, there is a beat in our hearts
that won’t stop, even for the grim reaper.
It’s a matter of limitations being temporary
& erroneous beliefs; innate as failures in life,
failures to understand equilibrium
& principles of rattle snakes
& spirits accepting limitations.
Had I known you were leaving
I might have said, life, like guacamole, taste
like whatever you put in it.
Or told you that the voice of nature
whispered to Umar Bin Hassan
that victory was his, if he wanted it.
If it is his, then it’s also ours,
because we want it too.
Word by word the saga unfolds
like a John Coltrane composition.
The solo is the song & the singer
evolves in every rendition, each variation.
Stories unravel as sentient forces
changing spaces by occupying time,
telling truth by ear.
Remedies prescribed & administered by poets
places philosophy at INTERSECTIONS
where rubber meets road,
ivory meets tower & music meets babble.
We be living on a vibe
& slow dancing to it, like it’s all we know to do.

We dance belly to belly with MEDUSA
in blue lights
sweating our fears as we wet
our dreams with desires,
& her ear with our words.
These words improvise themselves
out of our mouth & promise trouble
& risk, & adventure.

END

© J. Otis Powell!

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The New Normal
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Ground Zero is not neutral ground.
The most convenient oxymoron
in post 9/11 America may be moral ambiguity.
The onion of our nation is unraveling
& many of us continue to hold false hope
& optimism that the gestalt of American
aggression can save us.
Beneath the onion’s skin of commercialism
& global corporate domination is a sadness
fueled by centuries of invasions, colonization,
broken treaties, enslavment, internment,
conspiracies, compromises, profiling,
bombings & embargoes.
Each layer of the peeling onion exposes
muted voices of aliens stranded in whiteness
recovering from illness, deception & exploitation.
Marginalized voices always singing
for scraps from somebody else's supper.
Sometimes the songs are true
but they don’t make sense,
other times they make sense
& we know they’re not true.
Patriotism is faded as stone washed pride.
Either I’ve always known
my place or I never will.
There was a time when only naive idealists
or radicals believed in love, social justice
universal humanity & global education.
Today in an eclipse of the onion
what was abstract dreaming of utopia
is now improvisational adjustments to
normal cries of terror worldwide.
END


© J. Otis Powell!

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