eat me you ancient lust-for-life

and i'll drive you to death with the renegades of jealousy

i've decided not to die unhappy

with envy or greed or copy-catting the hood

no 'fronting no lusting no strivin' to be lord

it's a screaming race to in-sanity

remaining sane in this malarial plot

of destruction and doubt

of lost footings while trudging toward renewal

standing beside the disinherited
the long-forgot and the written-off

to be there with them

with ones self joyful beyond the promised flout

ready to walk straight-backed on the plain with the mighty

the weak-minded and the scurrilous

those angry at death when all turns to dust

to be there ready and already rejoicing

when the parousia springs brightly

and the Lord will be Host

*...the deliberations within our soul to intercourse with the world must be the first and primary border crossing.  You simply cannot get anywhere  without passing through that terrain.  That movement is inevitable for life to proceed, and is often spiritual.  When God speaks to us, he moves us. But I suspect that you also may have experienced the terror of being stuck, and of not being able to move, even when you deeply desire to press on.  So this movement is neither automatic nor certain.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*So even when we have the ability to move from interior perception to artistic form, what we make bears only a  passing resemblance to what we perceived within.  Disappointment has been the downfall of many young artists, and some older ones too.

-Theodore L. Prescott

When Ure Hero Falls

                                                                4 My Hero (My Mother)

when your hero falls from grace

all fairy tales R uncovered

myths exposed and pain magnified

the greatest pain discovered

u taught me 2 be strong

but I'm confused 2 c u so weak

u said never 2 give up

and it hurts 2 c u welcome defeat

when ure Hero falls so do the stars

and so does the perception of tomorrow

without my Hero there is only

me alone 2 deal with my sorrow.

your Heart ceases 2 work

and your soul is not happy at all

what R u expected 2 do

when ure only Hero falls

-Tupak Shakur

ouch!

spoken

speaking nothin'

no movement

no nothin'

no howlin'

no cryin' 

just waitin' 

and starin'

looking toward the night

awaitin'

awaitin'

awaitin'

the approachin' Light

what strangeness

what myst'ry

what awesome 

acclamation

*Crossing the border means that you are opening yourself to change - a risk that many people try to minimize by using some sort of guide.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*...who you are to yourself privately is not the same as who your are in the company of others, just as you are different at rest than you are in action.  Others may assess and respond to your actions, but they can only make calculated judgments about what is in the inner recesses of your heart.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*Or My Soul

                                                            Dedicated 2 Moms

                                                                                Dedicated 2 the Powers That B

The choice is no stranger 2 poverty

your soul or Government Assistance

I'm 18 in a country with no path

4 a young unaddicted Black youth with a Dream

Instead I am giving the Ultimatum

-Tupac Shakur

out there

somewhere

where where

but who knows

where

where

shall we turn

a question's being asked

nimrods with answers

as if they always have correct knowledge

their sure escape from the many's problems

they offer their reasoned conclusions

re: the aberrations of life

because 

because

because

to whom else shall we turn

except toward ourselves

when we offer up our ignorance

as the unlikely of truths

that govern the world

a mess life can be

when we shift our reasoned illness

to the strangers of paradise

while sitting on their stoops

pretending to know the truths 

that'll calm all with scoops

with themselves primarily in mind

so

return home

grab a jug of wine

weep a while and swoon

deciding what you'll do 

*So many of the Muslims I know are displaced Muslims, and I want to become that kind of Christian.  I want to see myself in that migratory path, moving from north to south, no longer bounded by water but bounded by hot and cold.  Those ideas interest me bacause ultimately I belong to the desert. That is where my soul was born, and finally where I expect to live - but in Phoenix, Arizona, in Las Vegas, Nevada, not in the pretty desert, but the ugly, the desert of suburban houses and garish hotels.  That is where I find Christ.

-Richard Rodriguez

*Family Tree

                                                      4 Mother

Because we all spring

from different trees

does not mean

we are not created equally

Is the true beauty in the tree

or in the vast forest in which it breathes

the tree must fight 2 breed

among the evils of the weeds

I find greatness in the tree

that grows against all odds

it blossoms in darkness

and gives birth 2 promising pods.

I was the tree who grew from weeds

and wasn't meant 2 be

ashamed I'm not in fact I am proud

of my thriving family tree

-Tupac Shakur

i.

it is...

be!

...and off we go on the false trip

to another space

a place

where the long forgotten had been buried

after their divine, scientific murder

and their forced terrestrial transference

imposed by might

by white

in spite

in the name of christ

granted and leased

in the name of

...of

...now since forgotten

ii.

adherence to possession

and historical procession

snatched from the long selections

of abrogated reflections

and mismanaged devastations

of a people now considered

ones own

o the unjust accumulations

and our steroid intercessions

that destroyed the distributions

of our poisoned replications

it is...

will it be?

*I am puzzled by the hunger for purity among people.  The people who walk down the street with bottles of water, for example.  They have a drive to cleanse their bodies of all that is impure, a dream of escape from the impure.  I am very impatient with that.  We have to reconcile young people to the idea of the unsettled, the indeterminate, the compromised life.  That is my moralism, a brown moralism.  I'm not urging people to any accommodation of truth or light or a path.  I like the idea that my impure lover would be the one giving communion at Mass as a eucharistic minister. That's what the church should be about, it seems to me.  We should always hand the Eucharist over to a sinner

-Richard Rodriguez

*We are now entering a time when we can no longer control history.  Not only can we not control history by putting fences around things and saying, "This is clean and that is impure," but we are now participating in a time that we no longer know exactly how to imagine.  The old journey that defined America, the movement from east to west, from ocean to ocean, the journey of the sun over a day from sunrise to sunset, is now replaced by the journey of the seasons, the north-south journey, the journey of monarch butterflies - and of increasing numbers of Americans who move from hot to cold as the seasons change.  Our understanding of nature is changing, and rather than controlling it, we now have a sense - or at least I have a sense - that it controls us.

-Richard Rodriguez

i listen for a  moment

to the voice of the poets' urge

and hear the sounds of another

eking from the sea

an i wonder if it's mine

or some other hermit clown

if it's the voice from some stranger

human skin than mine

i don't know

but urge myself onward

on toward the edge of the morn

onward to the evening sky

onward toward the bath 

that will scour us with a scourge

of want or of hatred 

hatred for the approaching crowd

oh yes this is the next gathering

of people like ourselves

searching about for meaning

while breathing in the dusk

as we stand beside the crowns

and plagues of ancient crimes

those that are definitely ours 

yet those of humankind

*More tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones.

-Truman Capote

*When state institutions have lost their legitimacy and violence has become the means favored by all sides, the sacred values of justice, morals and religion are bathed in blood and reduced to nothing.

-Marshall Sahlins

Fallen Star

                                                                   4 Huey P. Newton

They could never understand

what u set out 2 do

instead they chose 2

ridicule  u

when u got weak

They loved the sight

of your dimming

and flickering starlight

How could they understand what was so intricate

2 be loved by so many, so intimate

they wanted 2 c your lifeless corpse

This way u could not alter the course

of ignorance that they have set

2 make my people forget

what they have done for much 2 long

2 just forget and carry on

I had loved u forever because of who u R

And now I mourn our fallen star

place letters  on paper

...for   a-while

'til they gather together

'round a circle of clouds

 to speak

then

let them be

allow them to wander as they choose 

while you wander as you choose

wondering-where the scribblings lay

or where they rest

where would they settle into a pattern of meaning

to be lifted off a palate

to be et and eaten 

as if gourmet

like a violated ice cream cake

does any one wonder about these mysteries

as they amber about the room

crawl into the bed

tickle their nose

un-fasten their shoe

i wonder

i wonder

*...what 9/11 should teach us is that religion is a human motive as strong as sex or eating or sleep, and the secular  world that has pretended we can simply ignore it is foolish.

-Richard Rodriguez

*The notion of a dark God is one that we have to take seriously as the fierceness and hostility of religion become obvious.  It seems to me that this is an exciting time to be religiously inclined and also a time when one should be very embarrassed by one's religious faith.

-Richard Rodriguez

*The Sun and the Moon

Your ways R similar 2 the rays of the sun

Warm 2 many but 2 strong 4 some

The more u R needed the brighter u shine

Watched 4 2 long and your brilliance will blind

The eyes of mortal men who threaten u with doom

They regret 2 c u set but it is time 4 the moon

-Tupac Shakur

oh how the movies roll looking at you

at you rolling through the night-darks' early morning mist

through the easy-flow of stillness searching for yourself

your self

edging toward the earth-march of many men walking

staring at "nothing" that sits in their hearts

on the crest of a wing of dreams searching

searching for some one who'll ease the dis-ease of feeling alone

alone

searching and walking

alone

 alone 

wanting beyond Alone

where some peace might settle in and sit down

sit down for a chit or chat or both as a snack

while the madness of life walks past smiling

and you smile for a moment in a roar of joy

wandering about your heart

*...none of us is in control of our destiny.  We can only choose how to play the role we are given.

-Roberto Saviano

*I want people to be confused.  I remember as a young reader I was always patient with books in a way that I don't think our readers are any more.  I am looking for the reader who is patient with books, who is willing to find insight through puzzlement.  I don't want to save the reader from that extraordinary freedom to be puzzled.

-Richard Rodriguez

*We re moving far away from our Puritan ancestors in some way in our spirit of play, and yet in our determination for the individual to become what she will, we are very Puritan.  It seems to me that that freedom to be ourselves is very Puritan indeed.

-Richard Rodriguez

go with me

some where

where

we can simply talk

a moment short

un... the pressure of

being long-winded

wounded

or 

wound about

as sea gulls dip

into the neighboring sea

searching about

for some morsel of flesh

or fish

or muscled mussels

akin to the taste of fire-flies

that nibble on the trash

where will we crash?

who knows?

not even sea gulls know

where the fire-flies roam

until the scents of garbage rise

to tickle them on their nose

 and then 

and then we'll know

we'll go

we'll find a plot to roam

Our personalities, our individualities with our dysfunctions, make life interesting, frightening and humorous.  No wonder God loves us.

When Sister Death arrives, we'll be ready.  She's the only way to go.

All of our heroes have mud on their feet.

                        

*I see...that my own individualistic generation is beginning to think about growing old.  Already there are suggestions that a lot of single people may be brought together in their old age.  I certainly

saw community develop in the Castro district of San Francisco.  Here you had a highly individualistic gay culture facing the inevitability of AIDS, and from that suffering came a community quite unlike anything I had ever seen before.  It was not a familiar type of community - because in many cases families wouldn't want anything to do with it - but it was the woman next door, it was the man across the street, it was the whole community of strangers coming together to form a new city. 

-Richard Rodriguez

*When I lecture to young people, I try to teach them this paradox: American young people need to realize that their I, which each generation necessarily believes it has invented - that each person in that generation has singularly invented - is itself a communal value.  That it comes to them from their grandfathers and from their great-grandfathers.  That their individualism is what ties them to America, to the tradition of the community.

-Richard Rodriguez 

there are times i want to cry

to weep an ocean of grainy sobs

full of grounded and grinding pain

pouring from the innards of my over-wroughted heart

i am full of agony of our abused and haggard poor

of our over-laden and burdened masses of the plain

knowing not where or how to move about the overload of wants and whims

but aching for the simple and the constant urge to live

oh i want to weep for myself and the others standing about

waiting for Some One to show again, to relieve us from the bout

of the common 'gainst the common, against the rich, against the poor

to know that one day, some day we'll stand as a common lot and hail

we'll stand together shouting for the Hallelujah-One

stand high with louder urges for a promised land to come

while we weep as forlorn brother-sister on the shores of the waiting land

for the parousia to unearth and lift us to HU-MAN

*...when I hear Americans talking about their need for emotional closure, I realize just how awful our fear of the past is. This country has been written in tragedy, and we have been willing to forget it.  It doesn't seem too far fetched to me that in another generation this might be forgotten, too.  Americans are brilliant at that.  We have given ourselves to amnesia.  That's why the world wants to come here.  We could call the land virgin, we imagine it as a place where nothing had ever happened here before and where every tragedy is the loss of our innocence.  Even your question proposes that now we will have to face this thing, but we have never done so before.   The Civil War was not the loss of our innocence after all.  World War II was not the loss of our innocence.  We keep getting past it.  We are puzzled by Bosnia.  We are puzzled by Northern Ireland.  We are puzzled by wars that persist.  We are now puzzled by the Middle East.  We are puzzled by Israel and the Palestinians.  We don't know why they can't solve it, and that's our best American impulse, I think - just to put an end to it. We say, you can't go on fighting forever like the Hatfields and McCoys.  Move to California. Move to Georgia.  Leave your in-laws behind.  Do something, but don't get mired in the past.  It's brilliant.

The tragedy and irony is, many of us belong to memory religions, and this is the great, continual contradiction in our lives.   We come out of a culture that is so individualistic, so Hellenistic, so centered on the individual's possibilities of moving beyond the group, beyond family, beyond community, reestablishing, redefining, re-imaging himself as herself, whatever - and we are also people who call ourselves Christians and Jews and Muslims, and therefore belong to tribal religions, religions of memory which by their nature imply that we belong to an entire tradition.  We have never been able to resolve the two impulses, and we are constantly at war.  We want to pray before the football game in East Texas, and then some individual takes the case to the Supreme Court, and the Greeks in their temple decide in favor of the I.  We struggle constantly with how much to remember and how much to choose to forget, or pretend to forget.

-Richard Rodriguez

panties and bra

i toast you

for the way you wear yourself

honestly

the way you stand

the flirt you be

you

like the way people hold you

allow you to be

all you may ever be

ever wear

what ever in public space

to be seen

touched

lusted if they must

without crush

or lock up

or fuck up

or stupid stuff

there you are 

beaming

cute and sexy

mute yet not cold

you without end

moving through life

being what you do not know

becoming what e'er you'll be

safe without case

or chaste abandonment

but there in your glory

with a meaning without end

gives me the sense of sin without end

and grace beyond disgrace

with love beyond rape 

and forgiveness with space

*Christianity and the desert religions generally, and Islam certainly, have a great deal to learn from the Asian tradition of contemplative life as a moderating force to the activistic traditions within the West.  Someone once said that not until Christianity arrives in Asia do we really know its full history, and I think there's some truth to that.  India and China could shape the quality of activism in Christianity and give it a much more paradoxical quality.  This would make it much more difficult for us to say with certainty, "That is Christianity," because the moment we say that, Christianity will always surprise us.  I don't want to be careless about it, but I do find an element of playfulness in Christianity that's present from the very beginning, from the stable.

-Richard Rodriguez

The Sun and the Moon

Your ways R similar 2 the rays of the sun

Warm 2 many but 2 strong 4 some

The more u R  needed the brighter u shine

Watched 4 2 long and your brilliance will blind

The eyes of mortal men who threaten u with doom

They regret 2 c u set but it is time 4 the moon

-Tupac Shakur

the bazaar-nest of our...silence

i don't know what stirs within me

when i see the thrust

of dead words without thought

when letters of many           jump at my throat

as an echo from garbled junk

i don't know what

                     but my stomach churns

and

my nerves feel jangled

as i race toward some escape

an escape

to a sensible Word

to a sound of sensibility

that attempts to ease the pain

the strain of ignorant sanibility

in this internationally insane world

very few own ignorance

or

acknowledge our ravaging past 

or

stare into the sup-pressed chambers

of our mass conflictive ass

where feces-manicured faces

lay hidden

sassing our flowered past

i don't know

just don't know

but feel our anguished secrets

our pretense of  god-like-nests

have poisoned our human nature

and the craziness we breed

The search for something more

The search for something more

in senses not sensing

only teased toward sensation

the cover for The More

the spiritual divine

clawing for an opening

from inside (soul)

out of the heart

through what matters

of body parts and being

for exposing God

to a world unsure

in denial, in denial

that the more is at home

one's home gnawing

to break through the cage

where The More is engaged

*The achievement of the Judaic tradition is that it identified God's presence as historically true, that God acts in time.  It also established what I have argued is a strong masculine cult, which characterizes the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  It has also made of those traditions an activistic cult, in that we are required to participate in religious life as actors in history - just as God does - rather than ejecting ourselves from history.  This is a powerful idea, and  our present calamity has come about because the desert religions are at each other's throats.  We find ourselves faced with a religious experience which is only masculine, and nowhere more so than in Islamic fundamentalism, almost to a hideous degree.  The feminine impulse is largely missing from that history.

While I continue to find abortion abhorrent, I no longer trust male domination of the woman's body.  I also have my crisis of faith.  As a gay Catholic, I find the sexual breakdown of the clerical order astonishing and not without interest, not only in that it has been so predominantly homosexual, but in that it is infantile, preoccupied with children almost as though it were an expression of a kind of unformed sexuality.

-Richard Rodriguez

*For Mrs. Hawkins

This poem is addressed 2 Mrs . Hawkins

who lost her son 2 a racist society

I'm not out 2 offend the positive souls

only thre racist dogs American culture plagued with nights

like the night Yusef was killed

if it were reversed it would be the work

of a savage but this white killer was just strong-willed

But Mrs . Hawkins as sure as I'm a Panther

with the blood of Malcolm in my veins

America will never rest

if Yusef dies in vain!

-Tupac Shakur

O's birthday

Seven years have died

since the call o'er the wires

of the phone in my room.

Even the promised two have died

like he is dead, I'm sure

as dead as bullets box a life

bringing dreams to a halt

and promises left as memory

An ear from the past waits

the voice that stoked a fire

of worth and hate and fruited nights

when doubts ruled the imagined heart

He was and more than son

"Lovers" too trite a word to write

though joy with tears and agony

ran wild by the river's side

along banks tramps occupied.

It was sure mixture of 

sin and grace, as God knows

the core of creatures of his shaping

of mortals fleeing him for

other arms, for a while-till death

O's birthday pressed the bar

opening the vault where treasures rest

from past exploits and ways to be

of hoping's for the next, "Good-bye!"

*What bothers me about the rhetoric of victimization is that it implies that we can belong to only one side of history, whereas the moment you participate in history, you participate in impurities.

-Richard Rodriguez

*The notion that somehow I can claim victimization implies too easily that the lines connecting us to the past are innocent lines.

-Richard Rodriguez

*Just a Breath of Freedom

                                                             4 Nelson Mandela 

Held captive 4 your politics

They wanted 2 break your soul

They ordered the extermination

of all minds they couldn't control

4 u the fate was far worse

than just a brutal homicide

They caged u like an animal

and watched u slowly die inside

As u Breathe your first air of freedom

on the day u become a free man

Raise your Regal Brow in Pride

4 now you R in God's Hands

The life of many were given

so that the day would one day come

That the devils in Power at Pretoria

would pay for the evil crimes they've done

-Tupac Shakur

Lick your air, lights
    for the honoring of the Crucified
    in wood of old;
    flames a-praying, I hope
    begging, praising the true Light
    signed and sealed in wounds
    of Friday's ordeal at Passing Time
    some moments ago

Yours is a quiet ceremonial
    a testimony of "Yes!" singing
    down the Church's hist'ry lands of faith
    lifting high the expectant card
    "Come to me.  I'll give you rest."



*I also wrote some of this book in great anger against the Church, which describes my own love as a vanity.  At the very end of the book I describe being in bed with a man whom I would die for, a man whom I have lived with for over twenty-five years and who distributes communion to the elderly and the dying.  He is as good a man as I can imagine.  I am in a rage precisely because the Church is more easy with crimes of hatred than with what he does.  Nothing disturbs me more than pious church leaders gathering to denounce hate crimes, when in fact the most devastating crimes the Church has stumbled over have been crimes of love.  The Church has not only tolerated massacres, but has refused to admit the possibility of interracial marriage, and now the great crisis of our faith has to do with whether or not homosexuals are capable of loving.
-Richard Rodriguez



*And Still I Love You

I don't have everything
as a matter of fact I don't have anything
except a dream of a better day
and you 2 help me find my way
Being a man I am sure to make mistakes
but 2 keep u I would do all it takes
and if it meant my love was really true
I'd gladly die and watch over u
I wish u knew how much I cared
u'd see my love is true by the life we'd share
Even if u changed your mind and said our love was thru
I'd want 2 continuously cry and still I'd love u
-Tupac Shakur

Spanish Christ, of wood, of grace

flamenco dancing upon the cross

faith's fire-lights playing at your feet

how bent and twisted you've become

in writing pains' obedience to God

to teach us mortal ones a song of hope

Funky sweat drips down upon the floor

with blood stains mingling from your pores

so hard you dance beneath the sun

with Aband'ment's music as the score.

We sense not the freedom in your call

the grace had in dancing 'pon the cross

Our songs and dance take different turns

in pains and wounds in search of joy.

We, often, kill the spirits of our love

with spirits that drown the Spirit of your love.

But dance we must and dance we will

while unto song you invite us sing

So, dance on, master of the steps of life

reaching out, coaxing us from your cross

to dance with you upon its floor

to dance with freedom round the land

and dance in hope 'pon Mother Earth

to dance to rising to eternal life

*God's willingness to participate in history is still little understood.  In some sense, as the Irish nuns quite properly taught us, it redeems history.  It redeems our bodies, and it redeems creation. Everything becomes holy; everything becomes blessed.  But at the same time, God is willing to become contaminated in our history, to become brown with us.  I find this quite moving.

-Richard Rodriguez