1. |
Charlottesville
02:20
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Fuckheads of the world unite;
Defend your credibility ‘till you feel Alt-Right
Tell me more about your Freedom
How it’s leaving
Now you’re seething, yea…
You want to have the right to be an asshole
Without the repercussions that accompany the trash you talk
But I’m not here to validate you.
Complain about the Snowflakes
Like a person pointing out a problem makes life hard for you
So plug your ears when a queer kid talks
Tell me again how it’s good Arpaio got let off…
…Are you kidding?
Was that a funny?
If I want to see a fucking racist I’ll just look at the MONEY
We don’t have time for you.
Oh we hate the government, they’re a burden
Except for the instruments of coercion!
You’ve got to love that Thin Blue Line
Between the savage and the civilized.
Imprison the former; you’ll enrich the latter
Baptize your kids in the black blood you splatter
Nixonian Law & Order
Fill the prisons and close the border.
I’ve got a bone to pick with folks who don’t see eye to eye
With other people who they’re told they’re not supposed to like
A shit conception of your problems that pins all the blame
On simple, honest folks who try to make the world humane.
It’s not a violation of your rights for someone else
To make historically denied space open for themselves
It’s not undemocratic to let your community
Determine the parameters of socially accepted speech.
The violence in our politics relies on historical fictions to validate it—
If you think we should tolerate
White nationalists in our public space
You probably think the Civil War was fought primarily over the rights of states…
…And you’d be wrong.
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2. |
Toronto
02:37
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Health isn’t a joke.
No one laughed in my hotel room in Toronto.
Panic-smoking by a church
Message Lou in the states
Plug the levy for a moment, holding back the wave’s break.
Make it normal fetishizing my neuroses
All charming Woody Allen quirks, it’s all so funny!
I’m freaking out at the car next to me en route to the highway interchange
So how will I cope when faced with real shit?
Student shushed me;
I lost my cool.
I snapped a pencil that I lent her like
“Now who’s cool?”
A funny reputation
That guy’s a little crazy
But oh,
No one laughed in my hotel room in Toronto.
I was scared I’d slip away.
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3. |
Pollen Season
01:43
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It’s pollen season again
The landscaping people are chopping of the heads
Of the dandelions and the lesser weeds
And into my open windows a spring breeze
The season of sneezes again
I’ve got an allergy headache and I forgot my Claritin
The view from this classroom is great in all seasons
There’s something to love even when it is freezing
But as the new condos rise off in the distance
As development money is borrowed ham-fistedly
By this growing city
The kids all say goodbye; they go out and start their lives
And I’ll still be here sneezing
When they cut the weeds on the first day of spring
Yea I’ll be looking at the new Y(MCA) building
‘Till it becomes the old Y building
Me chilling out in my rented apartment
4,000 roommates to keep down the costs
I’ll make jokes about how I could have been something
Then sit at my desk staring straight at the wall ahead
Until retirement
And then until death.
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4. |
The Bagel Shop
00:56
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I saw a friend in the bagel shop today
They asked me how my day was looking
I said, “another one in paradise!”
They smiled politely
It sounds like a phrase a sane person would say
Then I tried to smile normally and then looked away
That could have gone weirder, let’s call it a victory?...
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5. |
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This road is now called Kahekili Highway
But once it was just the road
Through the bustle of Wailuku
Past Takamiya Market // plate lunch // Korean short ribs
Through communities whose roots are sugar cane sweet
Whose deeded land passed down through time from broken backed farm hands who did better for their families
Past the newer housing developments
To the old quarter
To Waihee
The road to Waihee
To Great Uncle’s one-story concrete block // corrugated tin roof // noni and avocado trees backyard neighbors chickens clucking // hang dry the laundry // drive to town to meet the meals on wheels truck // last of his generation // home
Two blocks down // the thicket that was the family store
And back towards Wailuku, on the left, past the baseball field or maybe shortly before it
The Chinese Cemetery
Tiny, jagged tooth headstones, a bed of bent nails for the long dead to rest under // half-collapsed red awning in the visitor area, right on the benches! // no visitors now
Where are your kin?
Are they late?
Did they swing by Tasty Crust for a bowl of saimin before bringing the garden sheers and flowers and water bottle, to wash and tend to each grave with stoic ancestral obligation // set them each aright // bow their heads in silence // mutter // rip a hole in time and wave to a lost Great Uncle before packing up and heading back toward town // to the market // before returning home // be back soon? Are they with you down there, too?
Where did they go?
When I was a kid, Cousin Sandra had to fly to Oahu to go to Home Depot
Today things are different.
Puunene plantation closed its doors and the last cane crop waves cheerily, unharvested in the fields for miles around the growing airport; but the yoga studios are still here. Or rather, are here now.
Angry young Haoles blow past me with resentment for Orientals on their intoxicant breath
And I treat myself to an expensive dinner in Lahaina
A restaurant for the tourists
Just a visitor
Of foreign birth
On soil that is not mine
Thinking
Will I pull up weeds at Great Uncle’s grave?
Mend the awning?
Straighten the headstone teeth?
Or will some wayward mainland transplant // here for paradise, for the air // clutching at the exotic // getting to know the locals // walk by Great Uncle’s modest plot in some forgotten Japanese cemetery // on land so long ago chosen to house the dead that no living even claim to own it anymore // a community of the departed as old as the plantations // and wonder
“How long has this been abandoned?
Where are their kin?
Where did they go?”
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6. |
"Free Speech"
03:34
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Free speech nerds
Are gonna catch a big loogie in their ignorant eyes
When they see me coming down the hallway
On my way to the past to prove a point about why
The people who whine about ‘political correctness’
Are willfully ignoring history’s important lessons like—
The Enlightenment-era notion of ‘universal rights’
Was conceptualized right alongside
The individual agent in the context of the nation-state
And as such the universal has been constructed from
And exclusive philosophical subject which has never included everyone…
Cause the colonized
Indigenous
Enslaved
And stateless peoples
Have long been barred from the benefit of personhood as equals
So when, when, when, when, when
Were these better times
When everyone could speak their mind
Without fear of repercussion?
Oh, I don’t think that you know what you’re talking about…
Exhibit A:
Back in 1868 a guy named Edward Pollard
Wrote a book (The Lost Cause Regained) in which he posited
The most important problem of his day
Was to determine if black folks were real people
Or a sort of lower order (‘cause sub-humans can’t be equal)
He called racial equality a “violent experiment against nature”
Don’t care if Freddy Douglass never did debate him
I’m not sure how free your speech can be
When you have to waste your time asserting your basic humanity
Against what racist pricks believe
Against transmisogyny
Against the rampant and dehumanizing stigma of poverty (yea)
Still today all David Starkey wants to do
Is exercise his freedom to call all Muslim people atavistic throwbacks
Even as he panders to a backward xenophobic kind of evil
What a dick
Fuck David Starkey
Civilizational hierarchy of culture?
Man, I’ve heard that one before—
From Richard Pratt to Gavin McInnes
The same old bullshit
The same prejudices
“Kill the Indian in him and save the man” or
‘Muslim countries are 500 years in the past’
This quote unquote “Western Chauvinism”
Is just recycled white supremacy
Isn’t it?
So free speech nerd
You can debate Richard Spencer all day
If you damn well please
But I’ll be on the beach
Pissing in both your mouths
Yellowing all your teeth, man!
So now—
Peter Hitchens and Steven Pinker
Are sure that PC kids threaten all free thinkers
Complain at Oxford Union that they get afraid to speak
While a black kid in an all-white class spends every day knowing that
Everybody in the room is gonna hold their breath and see
‘Maybe we can get through this lesson about…
Slavery
Black Codes
Sharecropping
Convict Leasing
Jim Crow
Redlining
Cointelpro
Without a peep from you.’
‘Then maybe we can get through this lesson about MLK
With just a little peep from (you).’
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7. |
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The Department of Agriculture
Feeds more people everyday
Than your anarcho-communist pamphleteering
Ever will.
And that’s just a fact.
But what do we do about that?
What do we do about that?
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8. |
Stay
02:53
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Everything’s going fine
Not much variance from year-to-year
I’m an aggregate of modest improvements
A patchwork I hope looks sincere
I’ve got my Labor Day sale Macy’s suits
I’ve got my $3,000 brace-less smile
I’ve got a comfortable bed to come home to
I’ve got some time; we could hang for a while.
The train runs ‘till midnight
Or maybe 12:30am
We could probably make it
If we run straight to Park Street.
I used to wander around downtown at night
When I was just 18
Alone in my cargo pants
And my loose-fitting ska band tees.
I still love the light from these streetlamps
Amber and lovely
The chill of a cool breeze
Wet sidewalk and canvas sneaks.
I tasted freedom in a late-night drive to a diner in Philly
Connor’s cousin was the head chef
And he made this fancy fucking mac & cheese.
Underage drinks and triple parking
Making out on a flat modern sculpture
A summer fling
A autumn heartbreak
A college song
A new apartment.
Everything’s going fine
Not much variance from day-to-day
I still hurt folks with my indecision
I’m still basically selfish I’d say
Still chasing the high of a late-night drive
But the thrill has gone away.
If 10,000 miles in five weeks won’t cut it then I’d say
I’d rather stay.
I don’t want career change
I’d rather stay
I don’t want to chase fame
I’d rather stay
I don’t want to move to Philly
I’d rather stay
I don’t want to lose you, baby
I’d rather stay.
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9. |
28
03:55
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Neat gin; the cheap shit
Miscue at the solo table
Go home early, get home late
I’m freakin’
No reason
Making breakfast weird, man
I’m sorry to harsh your vibe.
Nothing’s felt right since last June
I’m sitting in the same chair
Working at the same school
I see the same people exactly like I used to
So why can’t I crack a fucking smile when I should do?
Ten months later I feel better—
Forward, out the door go
Ten months later
Washed up on the beach
Heartrate steady, breathing normal.
I feel fine about my future
Still got a past to figure out
But I’ve got an act to get together
To be useful now.
Still I wanna go back
I’ll be 26
Back when I gave a shit about the quality of the gig.
Used to believe I was gonna get a doctorate
Now I can’t write for shit, I’m imposter-ing.
Moonlight over the Wash n’ Dry
Gonna wait out the rest of my cycle
Like I’m gonna wait out the rest of my life—
Staring at a glass screen
Posture like a bread line father in the ‘30s.
Now I wonder why it’s hard to say
This is exactly what I asked for
But I’m not sure I’m happy that I have it.
So Peter got the condo in Colorado
And Lou, he fell in love
And all the hype bands got written up
In the taste-making blogs where the writing sucks
Yea, the writing sucks
I’m not jealous, oh…
But Wendy says that time is just a context
So it’s not too late.
No use lamenting an unchecked box at 28.
I’ve got a full-moon face;
Tomorrow I’ll wane
But not before a new day
Of staring at a glass screen
Posture like I know
Exactly
Where
I
Could
Be.
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The Michael Character Boston, Massachusetts
It's political music, whatever. Based in Boston, MA. Absolutely willing to drive very far to play for you and five of your vaguely alternative friends in your combination kitchen/laundry room. Hit me up. I'm fully serious.
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