Why imprison me?
What's your fear?
Is it that your secret might be revealed
and the cover o'er your sins fall away?

The burden in your hiding
maximizes my transgression.
So, what is your fear:
that I might descend the cross and blabber all?

i've been duped by truth

i trusted her promise of freedom

that an honest mouth and an open heart

had no enemies to fear

so why stand i denied

whipped like a slave of old

branded a jew in yellow

marked with a plague of hearsay

laying in this womb of agony

long thorns pierce my lips

circle my hands and feet

even a scream is invitation

a stamp affirming my inanity

so i swallow a thousand times hard

shutting the throat that bellows innocence

i damn my tears with a smile

cursing the god of the hard-hearts

jesus is cheap anesthesia

a quick-whiff that drugs the pain

before he returns to cook my ass

 a nigger under siege

history repeats with crowds and thorns

a donkey haltered at the base of the cross

will  you call or come

o good and faithful servant

will  you come cursing censures

justice dripping from the corners of your lips

like a magma the side of a belching volcano

*Each one of us, each group, each class, has a special way of acting and living.  For a long time now the people with power wanted us to believe that their moral law was the only true one.  They had a monopoly on morality.  But what interests me is this: what seems immoral to us is actually moral for a particular individual. After all, the gangster has his moral code, and so does the prostitute.  You have to start with that, and to be ready to set out along with them, beginning today, over the long road traveled by history and the Bible.
-Jean Sulivan


*You have to accept living persons on their own terms, with their own reality.  Instead of flinging values at their head, you have to take them where they are, whether on the level of instinct, or law, or freedom.  As for values, I don't  know what they are.  Yes, I do: they're idols.  The moral law doesn't exist in come cut and dried form when you are dealing with human beings.  'Order is already present,' Claudel said.  'Why torment yourself when it's so simple to obey and when order is already present?'  But order is not a simple given. Laws are not the work of some director-general, administered by delegates. Morality comes into being when life calls out to us.  It is created and brought into existence within the agony of history by each individual in turn, not in some arbitrary fashion, but organically.
-Jean Sulivan