LIVING IN THE USA: MALCOLM LONDON, NICK MAKOHA, LADAN OSMAN
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MALCOLM LONDON

Never Too Late

There’s one thing the richest man can never purchase

Yesterday

It feels like

Yesterday I sat Indian-style around my grandfather’s armchair

Suspended above my head

Like a skyline

His belly beneath denim overalls

Wreaking of Old Spice and drinking Mississippi Cotton Gin

He would say

Before nodding off the the Wheel of Fortune

and waking up when someone turned the station

If you are early

You are on time

And if you are on time

You are late

But it is never too late for your time

The richest man can never purchase

Yesterday

Yesterday my grandma says she sees

Everything

On the block

She complains about friends

My cousin brings into the house

Off the street

Late at night to use her bathroom

She fuss always,

But always

Let folk use her bathroom

The richest man can never purchase

Yesterday

But could purchase

A new bathroom

Every morning

My granddad

A construction worker with massive forearms

Building up a city

Tearing down his pension

Unfurls his bones

At 6 am to read the bible in his pickup truck

I’ve never seen him go to church

But make a chapel out of the garage

He was never fully awake

Until my grandma handed him his thermos

Of coffee

The richest man can never purchase

Yesterday

But could purchase

A lot of coffee

I am a poor man living in the same neighborhood

My grandparents could never afford to leave

Every morning I read

Headlines

18 shot in a weekend

300 dead in a summer

50 schools shut down

Public funding cut

Trying to turn poems into eulogies

I find in the newspaper

Everyday I teach

Students their words into new front page stories

The richest man can never purchase

Yesterday

But could purchase

A news station

My grandmother is a woman carrying a house on her back

Shelter more people walking in without wiping their feet

On the mat

My grandfather a clock

Ran out of time

Before he was ever late

My gandmother’s favorite past time

Is dreaming of my grandpa’s past

Everyday I sit in a classroom

Pointing to the granddaddy armchair pointing in the sky

Telling my students

This city

Is yours

This is your house

With all its late-night

Back alley bathroom visits

Under all this construction

You are builders

Hold your dreams

At the lovers hand

Hand the next person you see

A thermos of coffee

Wake them up

Wake them up

No headline defines you

No amount of money can take your yesterday

So pickup truck

Where you left off

And keep going

No hands control your time except yours

It is never too late to wake up

For your wheel of fortune

No matter who controls the station

Wake up

Wake up

It is never too late

like my gandma taught me

Never too late

To love yourself enough

to purchase a new beginning

_________

TPB's notes:  n/a - a poet and activistvery active on social media.

NICK MAKOHA
Beatitude

When a rebel leader promises you the world seen in commercials,
he will hold a shotgun to the radio announcer’s mouth
and use a quilt of bristling static to muffle the tears.

When the bodies disappear, discarded like the skins of mangos,
he will weep with you in those hours of reckoning and judgment
into the hollow night, when the crowds disperse.

When by paraffin light his whiskey breath tells you
your mother’s wailings in your father’s bed are a song
for our nation, as he sits with you on the veranda to witness the sunrise,

say nothing. Slaughter your herd. Feed the soldiers
who looted your mills and factories. Let them dance
in your garden while an old man watches.

Then when they sleep and your blood turns to kerosene,
find your mother gathering water at the well to stave off
the burning. Shave her head with a razor from the kiosk.

When the fury has gathered, take her hand and run
past the fields and odor of blood and bones. Past the checkpoint,
past the swamp, toward the smoky disk flaring in the horizon.

Run till your knuckles become as white as handkerchiefs.
Run into the night’s fluorescent silence. Run till your lungs
become a furnace of flames. Run past the border.

Run till you no longer see yourself in other men’s eyes.
Run past sleep, past darkness.
Stop when you find a country where they do not know your name.

__________

TPB's note's: n/a - More original of the three.

LADAN OSMAN
Situations Wanted

I am looking for a man who will let me
make myself small then crawl
into his pocket as he watches TV.

He must know how to love his shadow,
how to say “I love you” to even the periphery
of his body.

Let us be like wrists rubbing against each other.
I will pay you with good intentions.
I will be your friend, in the way mirrors befriend,

then grow water. But my face is a black mug;
you can drink its water and not know its bottom
until a bug bumps your lip.

If you are willing
let me show you how fingers know each other.
Even birds try to build their homes again and again.

_________

TPB's notes: n/a -Heavy lifting off Sylvia Plath here.

WEST AFRICAN LYRICAL POETS: J.P. CLARK & LENRIE PETERS
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J. P. CLARK
Abiku
 
Coming and going these several seasons,
Do stay out on the baobab tree,
Follow where you please your kindred spirits
If indoors is not enough for you.
True, it leaks through the thatch
When floods brim the banks,
And the bats and the owls
Often tear in at night through the eaves,
And at harmattan, the bamboo walls
Are ready tinder for the fire
That dries the fresh fish up on the rack.
Still, it’s been the healthy stock
To several fingers, to many more will be
Who reach to the sun.
No longer then bestride the threshold
But step in and stay
For good. We know the knife scars
Serrating down your back and front
Like beak of the sword-fish,
And both your ears, notched
As a bondsman to this house,
Are all relics of your first comings.
Then step in, step in and stay
For her body is tired,
Tired, her milk going sour
Where many more mouths gladden the heart.

__________

TPB's notes:See a blog review of this poem: https://afrilingual.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/abiku-john-pepper-clark/

LENRIE PETERS
We Have Come Home

We have come home
From the bloodless wars
With sunken hearts
Our booths full of pride-
From the true massacre of the soul
When we have asked
‘What does it cost
To be loved and left alone’

We have come home
Bringing the pledge
Which is written in rainbow colours
Across the sky-for burial
But is not the time
To lay wreaths
For yesterday’s crimes,
Night threatens
Time dissolves
And there is no acquaintance
With tomorrow

The gurgling drums
Echo the stars
The forest howls
And between the trees
The dark sun appears.

We have come home
When the dawn falters
Singing songs of other lands
The death march
Violating our ears
Knowing all our loves and tears
Determined by the spinning coin

We have come home
To the green foothills
To drink from the cup
Of warm and mellow birdsong
‘To the hot beaches
Where the boats go out to sea
Threshing the ocean’s harvest
And the hovering, plunging
Gliding gulls shower kisses on the waves

We have come home
Where through the lighting flash
And the thundering rain
The famine the drought,
The sudden spirit
Lingers on the road
Supporting the tortured remnants
of the flesh
That spirit which asks no favour
of the world
But to have dignity.

__________

TPB's notes: See a blog review of this poem: https://afrilingual.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/we-have-come-home-lenrie-peters/

J. P. CLARK
Olokun

I love to pass my fingers

(As tide thro' weeds of the sea
And wind the tall fern-fronds)
Thro' the strands of your hair
Dark as night that screens the naked moon:
I am jealous and passionate
Like Jehovah, God of the Jews,
And I would that you realise
No greater love had woman
From man than the one I have for you!
But what wakeful eyes of man,
Made of the mud of this earth,
Can stare at the touch of sleep
The sable vehicle of dream
Which indeed is the look of your eyes!
So drunken, like ancient walls
We crumble in heaps at your feet;
And as the good maid of the sea,
Full of rich bounties for men,
You lift us all beggars to your breast.

__________
TPB's notes: See a blogger's review of this poem: http://rukhaya.com/poetry-analysis-john-pepper-clarks-olokun/

LENRIE PETERS
Homecoming

The present reigned supreme
Like the shallow floods over the gutters
Over the raw paths where we had been,
The house with the shutters.
Too strange the sudden change
Of the times we buried when we left
The times before we had properly arranged
The memories that we kept.
Our sapless roots have fed
The wind-swept seedlings of another age.
Luxuriant weeds have grown where we led
The Virgins to the water’s edge.
There at the edge of the town
Just by the burial ground
Stands the house without a shadow
Lived in by new skeletons.
That is all that is left
To greet us on the homecoming
After we have paced the world
And longed for returning.

__________
TPB's notes: See a student paper on Lenrie Peters' poetry: http://nurt9jageneral.blogspot.ca/2014/12/theme-and-style-in-lenrie-peters-poetry.html

ZIMBABWE, LAGOS, & SOUTH AFRICA
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LEBOGANG MASHILE
ABCs

It takes just 26 letters to create a universe
The world is dismantled and then reassembled
Through the lens of a pen and verse
I have lost myself in books
And then found myself in words
Living in a world without imagination
I can think of no fate that is worse
I’ve walked through the lives of individuals
Whose eyes I’ve never known
I’ve been to cities and villages and country sides
Whose skies, to me, have never been shown
It was in this solitary cell
That my greatest strength was honed
I saw that my mind was just a shell
And it’s abyss simply a hole
And the hell of a heaving heavy heart
Is still my friend
Every story has its place
And history never ends
The writer is an architect God child at play
On a canvass of memories
She lies naked between the covers
Her own lover
Her own worst enemy
Navigating between extremes
She is both the judge and the judged
The vile despised and attacked
The unashamedly beloved
The unassuming friend who’ll tell your business
When you’re not in sight
She pulls commotion out of stillness
In the cavern of the night
And South Africa is a fractured mirror
A paradox of schizophrenic selves
Who don’t talk to one another
Who fear each other
Who revere each other
Who loathe
And pretend
And try to blend in
With each other
And this is the time when you can become
The greatest substance of your dreams
Unless you live in a shack
And don’t speak English
And don’t know what this poem means
Tell me how it’s possible for people
Who walk on gold to not know how to read
Tell me how publishers who’ll never taste their tongues
Can comprehend the words that these people need
Because they’ve never been scared of stories
The ones who uttered the very first
The ones who’ll hand them to their children
Calling out the rivers of their self worth
The ones who’ll write a narrative in the ear
But who won’t call the ear a page
The ones who’ll rhyme without pens
And perform without a stage
I don’t have all the answers
I’m just a colonized African
Who breaks down the Queen’s English
Until Sesotho understands it
Still I’m compelled by those
Who may never inhabit my language
I wonder if trials and translations
Could help them to traverse my landscape
South Africa is an old fashioned mutt
Who knows how to sing
And knows even better how to cuss
Who knows how to piece together prayers
When she’s about to run out of luck
Who knows how to laugh real hard
When the tears have run her into a rut
Who knows that race is a farce
Because when the light’s are off
Every body’s fucked
And when the welts and wounds
Demand healing salve
Words are just enough

________
TPB's note: http://www.african-writing.com/hol/lebogangmashile.htm

ANDO YEVA
No One Lives Here Anymore

on all the homes
that lie bereft
along the plains
that line Zambezi's shores
on silent farms
of extinct tribes
that nurtured yams
and coddle mines today
we found the hands and feet and
decapitated heads
that lay like pitted blackheads
on the turning cheeks of Africa
and know for sure
that no one lives here anymore

________
TPB's note: http://www.african-writing.com/aug/

RASHIDAH ISMAILI
Lagos

Lagos you are dirty
Your sand is soiled
Your fruits pithy.
I am tied to you
in a strange land
by lines that queue up
for foodstuffs you
should be eating but
ship off to me here
where I stand on check
out lines and marvel
at the cost of one
paw paw, just one mango
singular, along and apart
from you my dirty city.
O Lagos, your streets
are packed and pollute
the air while here in
a smug smogged city
I choke.

Your cord cuts my throat.
I am hurt and I cry like
my Mami market mothers
who go home night after
night with the same tin pots.
Their food is rotting and
ought to be thrown out to
the birds and beasts of
the forest/ but the lines!
O God, these lines are so long
and between the houses and
the foodstuffs so many palms
must be oiled.

Nairas are dripping with black gold
and yet a beggar man’s lot is the
same/ He covers his shame as best
he can and little boys skip school.
A policeman holds his right hand out
a green car passes him dash. And we go
dash you dis and we go dash you dat
and mek we do business.

O Lagos, Lagos, ah say, you don tyah
fo dis? Yousef wey you de com fom?
Me, I long for the cleanliness of
sand roads that breathe long in carefully
spaced intervals between cars running
wild like mustangs roaming the plains.
There are no drivers to speak of.
They have vanished over the hills and
into gulleys.

The seeds have been planted. It is a
bitter harvest we reap. The deeds have
been done. What has been sown is the
flower of our calabashes on the eve of
harvest. If only the waters in the Marina
If only the waves would whisper
louder the secrets of her beaches I would
know all/

My harbour is named after a queen whose
son’s footprints are planted like a bad
seed on the headdress of my children.
Lagos, lay your plans carefully. There
is no way to stop the rise of bicycles
and lorries, hopeful bodies and empty
pots. You divert dash for food, care
for business. We are not an oasis in a
dying desert/ Have we not learnt, o
Lagos, the sound of seductive songs
and sights that blind us

between need and life there must be hope/

________
TPB's note: www.african-writing.com

THE LOST BEAT: THREE FROM BOB KAUFMAN
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There are beat poets besides Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman is one of them - along with Ted Joans, Quincy Troupe, Frank Chin, Cal Hernton, and others (if you have poems from any one of them, do share)

BOB KAUFMAN
A Terror is More Certain . . .

A terror is more certain than all the rare desirable popular songs I
know, than even now when all of my myths have become . . . , & walk
around in black shiny galoshes & carry dirty laundry to & fro, & read
great books & don’t know criminals intimately, & publish fat books of
the month & have wifeys that are lousy in bed & never realize how
bad my writing is because i am poor & symbolize myself.
A certain desirable is more terror to me than all that’s rare. How
come they don’t give an academic award to all the movie stars that
die? they’re still acting, ain’t they? even if they are dead, it should
not be held against them, after all they still have the public on their
side, how would you like to be a dead movie star & have people sit-
ting on your grave?

A rare me is more certain than desirable, that’s all the terror, there
are too many basketball players in this world & too much progress
in the burial industry, lets have old fashioned funerals & stand
around & forgive & borrow wet handkerchiefs, & sneak out for
drinks & help load the guy into the wagon, & feel sad & make a
date with the widow & believe we don’t see all of the people sink-
ing into the subways going to basketball games & designing baby
sitters at Madison Square Garden.

A certain me is desirable, what is so rare as air in a Poem, why can’t
i write a foreign movie like all the other boys my age, I confess to all
the crimes committed during the month of April, but not to save
my own neck, which is adjustable, & telescopes into any size noose,
I’m doing it to save Gertrude Stein’s reputation, who is secretly
flying model airplanes for the underground railroad stern gang of
oz, & is the favorite in all the bouts . . . not officially opened yet
Holland tunnel is the one who writes untrue phone numbers.
A desirable poem is more rare than rare, & terror is certain, who
wants to be a poet & work a twenty four hour shift, they never ask
you first, who wants to listen to the radiator play string quartets all
night. I want to be allowed not to be, suppose a man wants to
swing on the kiddie swings, should people be allowed to stab him
with queer looks & drag him off to bed & its no fun on top of a
lady when her hair is full of shiny little machines & your ass
reflected in that television screen, who wants to be a poet if you
fuck on t.v. & all those cowboys watching.

_________
TPB's notes: Bob Kaufman, “A Terror is More Certain . . .” from Cranial Guitar. Copyright © 1996 by Eileen Kaufman. 

BOB KAUFMAN
I Have Folded My Sorrows

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its alloted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingles hippo becomes the gay unicorn.
No, my traffic is not addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters. Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.
The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

_________
TPB's notes: see http://www.litkicks.com/BobKaufman

BOB KAUFMAN (All Those Ships That Never Sailed).

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls...
Today I bring them back
Huge and transitory
And let them sail
Forever.

All those flowers that you never grew-
that you wanted to grow
The ones that were plowed under
ground in the mud-
Today I bring them back
And let you grow them
Forever.

All those wars and truces
Dancing down these years-
All in three flag swept days
Rejected meaning of God-
My body once covered with beauty
Is now a museum of betrayal.
This part remembered because of that one's touch
This part remembered for that one's kiss-
Today I bring it back
And let you live forever.
I breath a breathless I love you
And move you
Forever.

Remove the snake from Moses' arm...
And someday the Jewish queen will dance
Down the street with the dogs
And make every Jew
Her lover.

_________
TPB's notes: see https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/bob-kaufman:

"On April 18, 1925, Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of thirteen children. His mother was a black Catholic from Martinique, his father a German Orthodox Jew. As a child, Kaufman took part in both Catholic and Jewish religious services; he was also exposed to the voodoo beliefs of his maternal grandmother. At the age of thirteen, he ran away and joined the Merchant Marine, surviving four shipwrecks and circumnavigating the globe nine times in the next twenty years.

When Kaufman left the Merchant Marine in the early 1940s, he went to New York City to study literature at the New School, where he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The three went to San Francisco, joining Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the center of the Beat scene. Drawing inspiration from the improvisatory bebop jazz featured at the Beats’ favorite North Beach watering holes, Kaufman began reciting his spontaneous compositions in bars and coffeehouses and on the streets, earning himself the nickname of “The Original Bebop Man.” Hardly any of this early material was written down; most of his publications were transcribed from his oral performances.

In 1959, Kaufman, Ginsberg, John Kelley, and William Margolis founded Beatitude magazine, which would help launch the careers of many aspiring poets. The following year, Kaufman accepted an invitation to read his poetry at Harvard. In 1961, he was nominated for Great Britain’s prestigious Guinness Award (T. S. Eliot received the prize that year). Despite his successes in the public sphere, Kaufman’s personal life was deteriorating; the next few years were marked by financial hardship, methedrine addiction, and imprisonment. John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 prompted Kaufman to take a Buddhist vow of silence. He withdrew from society and did not speak again until 1975, on the day the Vietnam War ended, when he walked into a coffee shop and recited “All Those Ships that Never Sailed.” A period of intense activity and productivity ensued, but Kaufman again withdrew into solitude in 1978, after telling editor Raymond Foye, “I want to be anonymous . . . my ambition is to be completely forgotten.”

Kaufman is credited with popularizing Beat attitudes and philosophies in Europe, and especially France, where he was known as “the American Rimbaud.” His books of poetry include The Ancient Rain: Poems, 1956-1978 (New Directions, 1981); Watch My Tracks (1971); Golden Sardine (1966), collected by Kaufman’s friend, Mary Beach, during his first period of silence; and Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness (1965), comprised of three earlier broadsides, Does the Secret Mind Whisper?, Second April, and the Abomunist Manifesto. Kaufman died of emphysema on January 12, 1986."

"