For Culrd Grlz who Yak on Phonz (when Afro-silence iz Enuf)

 

Babbling publicly into your phone
the tragedy’s yours, and yours alone:
messages from your dysfunctional city
inflicted in Afro-eccentricity.

Turn off your phone and spare us the drama.
Look for change from the Lord (not Obama)…
Quit twitching your neckline, stop making that face
there’s nothing you merit because of your race;
no right to entitlement. Take it to God—
we hope He will change you, but spare the rod.

And we pray He does change you, put “yes” in your can;
and that change that’s left over (from Savior to man)
might enlighten your heritage, lighten your load
help you calculate more or less what you are owed
in dollars or dignity (afro-semantics)
while twittering radically militant antics.

A debt unforgiven: this claim someone owes you
some change in a can that black history shows you
your hopeful presumption is scant reparation
for ghetto entitlement fouling our nation.

Go harvest your madness and reap what you’ve sown
now that tares have sprung up as you blab on your phone
now that reapers are ready—the data-plan paid
and our melanin levels beginning to fade…

I’ll shout from your rooftop until you’ve heard
and the crackers get fed to the mockingbird.

Cosmoetica NAILED HER to a pedicure

 

 

¡ Viva el LIMERICK !

Un joven Marxista peludo
(mejor dicho: tirano barbudo)
adornó camisetas,
también pantaletas –
irónico chiste agudo.

Maldito malandro Guevara
alabado por voz y guitarra,
fue la gran obra-maestra
(pero no de la diestra)
y queda la pata con garra.

A Marxist Messiah named CHE
was mistaken (by night) for the Day.
Bringing light to the masses
(who wore their sunglasses)
the luminance faded away…

The image of CHE on a shirt
always triggers my right to assert
that the crime of the Left
is not property theft,
but Idolatry: blind and overt.

The communist rock-star Ernesto
never dreamed that his mug would be blessed so –
re-branded revision,
immune to derision.
Would history ever have guessed so?

The militant monogram CHE
was perceived as the herald of day-
from a murderous tyrant
to Christ-like aspirant:
reality withered away.

¡Cubanísimo!

 

I ask you righteous Justice-lovers:
can it be that art uncovers
fiction passed as fact?
(is Cubism abstract?)Rage CHE DISTORTED

Behold the Caribbean glory.
pass the bong—uh, torch. My story
cries for sober ears
to modulate our fears.

Ask the ones who fled that island
why they left their tropic homeland;
if they think it’s cool
to glorify Red rule…

The noble face of Revolution,
CHE provides the cheap solution;
earnest young Ernesto
lived out the manifesto.

Martial hippie, beatnik butcher
bravely gazing toward the future
beams the brow of CHE
their shining knight of day.

Brand-new bloodshed, same old songRage CHE
for guerrilleros of the bong
who rage against machines
confounding ends with means.

Such semi-informed fools display
a heady ignorance of CHE—
as if he played the bass.
(I hold them in disgrace.)

Though CHE was tough on Rock n’Rollers,
he abetted thought-controllers;
jailing small and great
in Fidel’s prison-state.MAD for CHE better

Yet they’re convinced that CHE was righteous:
militant against injustice;
worshiping his name,
impervious to blame.

“Yo, CHE wuz for the PEOPLE, man.”
(They’re not too sure about his plan…)
He died to make men free.
Immortal… isn’t he?

Vaguely Leftist youth display him,
not quite clear on how to play him:
Bearded god of Vision—
immune to all derision.

Ahem. A different Bearded One,CheCHIMP
God’s other revolutionary son
borrowed from CHE  (or stole)
The liberator’s role…

Yet, let us not be blown off-course.
My words must gather rising force
to set the record straight
and hotter heads deflate.

The hairy Argentinian medic
left a lucrative esthetic:
facial meme of war—
his T-shirts rock the store!

Outworn by posing poetasters,
dreamers, thugs and hero-wasters
ignorant of history
and high on Marxist mystery.

He glowers with a lit cigar:puro CHE
the noble hippie Commie/czar
for kids who went to Kollege
emerging void of knowledge.

Now hailed by rappers, clueless starlets
Hollywood saints (and leftist harlots);
everyone’s a fan
of Cuba’s Magic Man.

What was his plan to save the nation?
Proletarian dictation!
Eliminating classes
while kissing Party asses.

Classic Leftist liquidation:
bathe the land in blood. Salvation
comes much later on.
For now let’s get it on !

(Let’s get his T-shirt on that is.
The taste is flatter than the fizz
of Revolution Cola;
go ask the Ayatollah).

Anti-Che T-Shirt Design by godemperorofhell

One serious thing I beg of you.
Do NOT discern the truth. Just view
his face with pure devotion
to set it all in motion.

CHE was a merciless father-mucker
(translate THAT to Spanish, sucker).
Put away your bong.
My poem’s too long.
Thus ends my song.


MAD poster
available from Dark Arts
IMAGE CREDITS: kgbclothing.co.uk
nevermindthebuzzkills.com
libcom.org
godemperorofhell

Featured Poet:

 

 Femi Abubakar: Curating Diaspora

 

Confronting postmodernism’s strident “no”, blithely pessimistic in its desire for organic negation of its own existence, Femi Abubakar’s Manual of Dispossessed Motherlands repeatedly says “yes”. Throughout Abubakar’s collection of poems, affirmations, and acceptance are lines of flight that ally “with striated territorialities of occupation” harmed by the system and its outmoded, “illogic of whiteness.”

When Abubakar arrived in Omaha in 1994, the same year that Reagan-era poultry farms were finally deconstructed, he initially “refused” to identify as an African, and, instead, “celebrated whatever was not Eurocentric, working in meat-processing and youth centers… and thinking the only community possible was a community of resistance.” Now he admits that “poetry is also a city,” and writes of the diverse cities, past and present, inside and outside of Greater Africa—of the way that identity, for people of color, actual and virtual, has intersected the orthodoxies of the African age and fractured and liberated its content, both bride-price and wedding guests. In syntax that is intentional in its non-whiteness, Abubakar acknowledges that a sentence and grammar itself can contain or oppress. He writes, for example, after Mugabe’s “Non-native Agricultural Appropriations Act,” of:

[…] the exhausted government ministers who, as development loans defaulted and life blossomed into a bloodless auction, had to choose between educating their children in the U.S. and selling their Mercedes fleet or acquiring the confiscated farms of people who might and did hurt their wives and mistresses, who made the decisionless-decision of continued personal enrichment or the impersonal impoverishing of a racist agricultural sector that regularly humiliated Africans for being African and for being married, for having women of no color who had children or women of any color who had children by many fathers or black women who had children with fathers who were not white.

 

Recollected in diaspora: The Bride Price

White goats, pale camels, filthy sheep
and colorless apes of finance
hail the bride-to-be.
They gather in the lengthening shadows of the West
bleating and chattering in that unsafe space
where colonial powers hoard deceptions.
Silent, in her hut,
bound, excised, sewn shut, she sits
sullen, coagulating:
an African body, a fetishized continent
commodified non-event of bargained victimhood
and among the bloodied baobabs and dusty thorns
we wait for a wedding
to burst forth with ululations of victory
from innumerable hot gun-barrels.

 

Femi Abubakar is an Omaha-based poet and essayist, and a professor at the Diaspora Arts Collective. His works include The Camels of Ouagadougou (Nomad Press, 2003), My Transplanted Nation (Inshallah Press, 2011), and the 2014 Trinidad/Tobago GRIOT award-winning Beads for Slaughter (Carnival Books, 2016), which Shoshana Mandelbaum described in the New York Times as “bold, beautiful, challenging verse that bankrupts the political economy of poetics and of art itself.”

Abubakar’s poetry (he writes mainly in French) has been translated into a number of languages, including Tuareg, English, Basque, and Arabic and his chapbook Tea in the Desert (2013) was published by the collective Djema el F’naa in Amazigh translation. Abubakar’s other chapbooks include Al Haji Masra’s Wedding, and Holy War of Poetry.

In 2016, Abubakar was diagnosed with highly-aggressive case of Trump Derangement Complex which led to his work on the politics of resistance in the age of tolerance. According to critic Idris Washington-Jones, Abubakar’s work “butchers the fatted calf of poetry and culture as we know them.”

( Editor: Harrison Tsinakut-O’odla )
Harrison Tsinakut-O’odla  is a First Nations poet born on land belonging to the Hootenani Nation.
He grew up in Ininew,  Oji-Crow, Dene, and the Ts’msyen Tsimshian territory of Kitsum’k/Kitsalas.
He also lived on Pemmikan, Snuneymxw, Qw’tsun, Anishnabg, Ha’denoyni and Wendat/Tlohtià:ke.
He identifies as a white woman who voted for Donald Trump.
His preferred pronoun is Kootu.