culture fix

when i'm two years old, my father leaves us.

i have a hard time sleeping at night, and i crawl up next to my mama in her bed.
she kicks me out.
she puts me back in my bed.
or she leaves her bed and sleeps in mine, hoping i don't notice that i've been abandoned.
when i really can't sleep well, i cry and beg my mama for love.
she spanks my ass.
she doesn't know it's wrong to spank a child that wants sleep, love.
at three i call from my bedroom, crying, “mom! I can't sleep... come and spank me...”
then she knows.

if i feel bad, i can fall asleep.
self-hatred is a resting place.

a Colombian woman is hired to do the cleaning at our house.
she talks to me, teaches me how to play soccer in the driveway,
even takes me for a ride once in her not-so-perfect car.
then, one day, she’s fired.
she did something very bad, we’re told.
nothing more is said of it.
another woman who speaks Spanish does the cleaning for us.
my little brother asks to help her do something and she agrees.
in the middle of working together, my step-father comes in and
she is fired immediately.
not understanding, she will not leave.
the police are called.
she is hit.
drunk-n-violent, my step-father is arrested.
but the woman is still fired.
nothing further is said of it.

night comes and i am lonely.
desperate lonely, begging for affection lonely, irreparable lonely...
connection...
how am i connected to other people?

boatloads of africans taken off the coast of hispanola, and sunk.
freedmen convicted for wandering around, for visiting family.
the sentence?
slavery.
children stoned, their parents surrounded and beaten with fists, bottles, bats, chains, night-sticks.
they-won't-try'n-go-ta-school-with-us-no-more.
my father says, "you don't even know cuz we were on the porches with shotguns"
after they shot MLK, after city after city shot back...
and in '68 an old man in chicago schooled my uncle
- who thought white people could fight alongside blacks -
"you won't get anything done in this neighborhood unless you hate niggers."

on cherokee st. my friends are getting mugged at gunpoint -
anonymous black faces attack anonymous white faces.
in paris the fires burn hotter and more frequently, deeper and deeper
towards city center towards wealth towards whiteness...
and we have integrated our hated class now.
we set-them-free and now they are just-like-us.
except they still live 'over there'
and they still might...
come-and-get-us.

tear apart my insides looking for the places that i am complicit in this.
i've got it in me, don't i?
this taint, this nastiness, this hatred, this distance, this...
whiteness.
it's in there somewhere and i claw away at myself trying to slip out from underneath.
i try and claw my way down, down, down...
down to some-kinda-humanity, some-kinda-equality
some-kinda-escape from the constancy of racialism.
some-kinda-somewhere...
else.

in the long night of america,
millions of us pass endless nights restlessly.
keeping guard at the door in case the klan passes...
wandering balmy, haunted streets hoping nothing jumps out of the alley...
fading into drink after drink till the armchair catches your drunk-n-tired head...
the long arguments, negotiations and regretted acts of a sexually repressed/violent culture...

hate is our fuel
and we burn.