standing in the way of the light: June 2020

I want to write out loud about salt water. think, in the tapping of keys--without thinking--seeing--from the utterances on the silent page, what wills itself out of my body, down my synapses to the fingertips that move the symbols of language into words and sentences and forms of drops in the ocean or oceans made of drops...which is it?

I consider that I have not gone to the water's edge yet--but have fashioned the homemade salt water through the tears that roll down my anguished cheeks with the headlines and the Lynch ropes hidden in the lake Merritt trees--teardrop shape where the head goes for the inevitable breaking of the neck from the noose that tightens--like knees--against the neck of the dead man in the streets that finally, finally, can it be finally now? brings white people to their whiteness...

I am looking at mine. working with mine. thinking and looking and traveling and considering and wanting to wash my ancestry clean in the salt water of the Atlantic where that trade came to port in that same island where my Swedish grandfather came--1900 is when he ran away from having to be the oldest--having to drop out of school to be the farmhand--the one who worked to put the others through school--he would flee--never look back the lore goes--but of course, he is the only one that really knows.

I have tap water in clear bottles--wine bottles--I have drunk the contents and now consider drying out--and I put fresh water from the tap in the clear glass bottles and keep them on the ancestor altar with the images of my dead people. I water the plants now--the cleansing water offered at my door--nine bottles surrounding the phrenology head of my grandmother's father--not his actual head--but the phrenology head I found at...ross? pier one? that stands in for the phrenology head that was at the corner of his desk.

white man's brains mapping white man's brains putting racism right there in the science.... so strange to come from this to the here and now of this hour, stolen from work, so that I might record the salt water thoughts in proximity to the epsom salt bag waiting to dumped into the tub tonight--when I will sit in the salt water I make--to cry the salt water tears from my bluest eyes, while I turn the last pages of Morrison's first The Bluest Eye.

it is a strange moment in this hour of now--confronting so much that travels across and through the waters of the past. wish the past was in the past now--and I guess that's what the marching is about--getting the whiteness gone, once and for all, mixing all the races in the race of human to form a peace--a lasting peace that calms the soul and dries the tears and gets to the work of being human in this humanity of the here and precious now.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. such a symbolic process to begin--getting current with the wind and the waves of sea change in America.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

time and tide...once again, the tides they are a changin'...

again