Showing posts with label LGBTQ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LGBTQ. Show all posts

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Inxeba (The Wound)

The poster for Inxeba (The Wound)

Last year, a realist film set in Africa--South Africa, to be specific--debuted, both to great fanfare and considerable controversy that has only exploded in subsequent months.  Titled Inxeba, isiXhosa for "The Wound," and directed by white South African John Trengove, the story turns on a triangle of troubled desire involving three young Xhosa men, one a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, at an initiation ritual in the mountains of South Africa. Inxeba has since received a raft of awards, including the African American Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Film, the Durban International Film Festival's awards for Best Actor and Best Director, the L.A. Outfest's winner in the Outstanding International Narrative Award, the London Film Festival's Sutherland Award for outstanding first feature, and the Mumbai Film Festival's Jury Grand Prize. It also has provoked virulent denunciation, including a demand by the Xhosa King that it be shut down; death threats against its cast; and, recently, in response to the growing uproar online and on the ground, an extreme X18 rating, essentially reclassifying it as pornography, which is most certainly is not, effectively banning it from most movie theaters in its home country. This has sparked its own backlash online.

Nakhane, as Xolani, leading
a group of initiates; Niza Jay
as Kwanda is third from left
Critics have fixed on the fact that an outsider depicted a culture he does not know or belong to, as well as on the belief that the film reveals secret initiation rites, though the film's Xhosa executive producer (Batana Vundla) and writers (Thando Mgqolozana and Malusi Bengu), and its actors note that in fact, the charges are false, and that Madiba Nelson Mandela's 1994 autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom reveals far more information about initiation rites than the film, which mainly uses the ceremonial space as a backdrop. In fact, the director and executive producer even brought in a cultural expert to ensure they were getting this correct. What the protests obscure, perhaps intentionally in some cases, is that Inxeba is a groundbreaking film, for relative progressive (at least on paper) South Africa and the continent, as assured in its direction and action as in its cinematography, and the story it tells, about queer desire, masculinities, community, and cultural tradition in contemporary society, underscores the struggles its protagonist and so many like him face, not only in South Africa and across the continent, but the globe.
Nakhane, as Xolani, with his defiant
mentee, Kwanda, played by Niza Jay
The protagonist of Inxeba is Xolani (Nakhane [Touré]), a single, soft-spoken, DL factory worker, who heads to the Eastern Cape mountainside to participate in the annual Xhosa manhood initiation rites of ukwaluka, with other men in his community. In the all-male space, the organizers' goal is to create a deep spiritual, cultural, and social bond between and among the participants, thereby cementing their senses of connection as they age into fatherhood and the community's elders. Xolani has gone through the rites himself, and acquits himself with quiet restraint, thus making him suitable as a guide and mentee for a young man from the next cycle. This time through, a wealthy resident of Johannesburg requests that Xolani to serve as his son's guide, urging him to be tough on the young man, Kwanda (Niza Jay), whom he feels is "too soft." Kwanda is in fact effeminate, openly queer, and defiantly outspoken. He appears to care more about his expensive sneakers and the lack of comfort in his lodgings in than acceding to expectations of the initiation experience, which includes not just the traumatic ritual circumcision and gatherings with fellow initiates, but avowals and toughening exercises to ensure a particular understanding of cis-hetero patriarchial black manhood.
Bongile Mantsai as Vija, comforting
Nakhane, as Xolani
The third figure in the triangle is Vija (Bongile Mantsai), an outgoing, insistently physical, lighthearted former initiate who, we quickly learn, is also Xolani's secret lover. Vija is married to a woman and on the verge of becoming a father, but he also still possesses affection and desire for Xolani, and after their effusive greeting, they are soon making love in the secrecy of an abandoned building or the high grass, and openly tussling before a campfire, their embraces and exchanges hardly as innocent as the elders and young initiates around them may believe. While Vija enjoys the sexual relationship and is drawn to Xolani, his goal is to return to his wife; Xolani, however, is in love, but tries to maintain a thin façade of sublimation and covering, to use Kenji Yoshino's term, his struggle playing out not only in his attempts to regulate his emotions around Vija, especially when the other men are around, but in his treatment of Kwanda, whom he alternately approaches with severity and understanding. Above all, he offers the multi-edged advice, which he is trying his best to live out,  though perhaps he knows Kwanda is not going to heed it: "When you go home, you don't speak of what happened here."
Nakhane as Xolani, embracing
Bongile Mantsai, as Vija
This is not Las Vegas, and Kwanda, however, sees through Xolani's mask and performance. Representing not just a new generation but the product of decades of fight for racial, political but also social and sexual liberation, in South Africa and across the globe, Kwanda presses Xolani at one point, almost as a taunt and interrogation of his mentor's participation in the ritual, "What brings you back here? Don't you miss your friends? Or your girlfriend?" Later he sizes up Xolani in devastating fashion, saying, "I see what you are. But you can't admit it." The rites are not what is going to make a "man" of Kwanda, nor are the forced chants, the taunts against his sexuality, or the threat of violence. Instead, for Kwanda what counts is being true to yourself, whether that clashes with the society and culture around you. He even begins to orbit Vija's group of initiates, and Vija himself, spurring Xolani to panic. I will avoid spoilers, but Kwanda's instincts about Xolani and Vija are correct, his inquisitiveness upsets Xolani, and the results are tragic, suggesting that no matter how progressive national and metropolitan laws and attitudes may be, longstanding cultural strictures, and the worldviews they produce, particularly among embattled and oppressed people, can produce catastrophe when they collide. The wound remains open, and is bleeding.
Niza Jay, as Kwanda, with
Bongile Mantsai as Vija
Nakhane almost effortlessly captures the emotional and physical tension bristling in Xolani, his eyes dams holding back his longing, his suffering, his tenuous and continuous attempts at self-calibration. His ability to project a gentleness and fragility within an outward hardness rings particularly true. Based on this role, if he wants it and if there are enough roles for him, he should have a long and brilliant career. (Nakhane also is an acclaimed singer, and a published novelist.) Niza Jay's Kwanda is another linchpin, embodying both an acute and delicate vulnerability that leaves him constantly open to verbal and physical assaults, and a vocal, fearless defiance that serves, at least temporarily, as a shield, not only from the other young men and elders, but from Xolani. It would not be hard to imagine these two men standing side by side without incident or even interaction in a store aisle or in a gay bar in Cape Town, but in the socially pressurized space of ukwaluka, the actors convey, through looks, gestures and words, the cataclysm that ultimately seems likely to occur. Praise also should go to Bongile Mantsai, who effortlessly brings Vija to life. The viewer never once doubts that he can make love to Xolani one minute, then banter about women and be thinking about his pregnant spouse in the next. His ability to mark out the film's visual and psychic space, modeling a particularly form of corporeal hypermasculinity, also is impressive.
Niza Jay, as Kwanda
The writers have produced a taut, often tender, psychologically and socially perceptive script that, as Trengove, who served as a co-writer, has pointed out, took inspiration from but was not an adaptation of Thando Mgqolozana's A Man Is Not a Man. Cinematographer Paul Ozgur not only manages to show the striking beauty of the Eastern Cape mountain region, but also demonstrates an ability to provide visual clarity to Trengove's sometimes deep and carefully composed scenes. Perhaps in anticipation of the criticism to come, the camera often captures elders in the background, visible but somewhat blurred, seeing but not really looking at or grasping what is unfolding under their gaze; or rather, it is not their gaze through which we see what is happening, but the queer ones, of Xolani, Vija and Kwanda. Perhaps this is what has set off the critics more than anything. It also points to the fact that we--South Africans, Africans, and the world--need more such films, how uncomfortable they might make some viewers, to parallel and complement the deservingly lauded Afrofuturist fantasies of Black Panther. What we also need are stories that show the Xolanis, Vijas, Kwandas, and their cis and trans female, male and non-binary compatriots living their lives in a variety of settings; Inxeba demonstrates that if there is funding and audience support, the talent is there to make these future stories a reality.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Random Photos

It has been a while since I've posted any. Here are some (fairly to very) recent ones, including a series from Governors Island, which I visited yesterday.

Our increasingly luxury tower-
filled, hypergentrifying
downtown Jersey City skyline
A longtime business in downtown JC,
being forced out, now features
a retail space sign in its window
Strange juxtapositions: a rainy sunny day
in Jersey City
Late summer catness (cuteness)
At the Jersey City Pride
Festival 
Newark Avenue, the main Pride
thoroughfare this year 
People having lunch on the Upper East Side, Manhattan
High end tchotckes Expensive art
at an Upper East Side gallery

My ever-rising office bookstacks 
A badger, in South Kearney (NJ) 
On the Governor's Island ferry 
Leaving the South Ferry docks 
The Staten Island ferry, with Jersey City in the
background and Manhattan at right

Governors Island 
Disembarking 
One of the historic buildings on what
once was a strategic military base
One of the organizations based on Governors Island
One of the Nolan Park houses,
with a fascinating sculpture out front 
Another one of the organizations based on GI 
An outdoor exercise class in Nolan Park
One of the Nolan Park paths
DJs about to set up for an afternoon set 
Relaxing in the extreme heat 
Pershing Hall (I think), Governors Island 
Some sort of shooting event
(a reenactment?)
Looking toward Brooklyn
Pulling away as another ferry arrives
Brooklyn, from the ferry
Courtland Street, with the Calatrava PATH
hub looming like a giant rib at left
Santiago Calatrava's PATH station, with
One World Trade Center at rear
Inside the futurist PATH station--
with the Oculus visible at top--
now fully occupied and bustling 
One of the second floor commercial
arcades, World Trade Center
The stairs to the Oculus and main floor 
A couple photographing each other, World Trade Center
A restaurant demolition in Newark

Friday, June 17, 2016

Mourning the Orlando Massacre Victims

Several days have passed and I find myself still heartbroken, reeling really, in the wake of the horrific mass murder this past Sunday, June 12, at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Not long after 2 AM EST, gunman Omar Seddique Mateen slaughtered 49 people, and wounded 53, on the club's Latin Night, before police finally killed him several hours later. Nearly 90% of those slain were Latino, with the rest being Black American or both, and nearly 50 percent had familial links to Puerto Rico. The youngest victim was 18, and the oldest was 50. One of the murdered, 49-year-old Brooklyn native Brenda Marquez McCool, is said to have shielded her son from death by urging her son to flee rather than come back to get her, and thus also be killed in cold blood. (I should note that I cannot type this sentence, let alone think about or read it, without tearing up.) The Pulse Nightclub shooting was one of the deadliest mass shootings in the US since the 19th century Civil War and massacres of Native peoples, and the early 20th century anti-black riots.

Here, courtesy of the Orlando Sentinelis the full list of the murder victims, with brief stories about their lives. Every single one is poignant and worth reading. Please let's not ever forget them. If you are interested in helping out the families of the deceased and wounded, you can do so here.



Out for a night of fun and joy, in a space they thought was safe--multiply so, in that they could be themselves as Latinx and Black queer people where their sexual orientations, gender identities, and intersectional presentations of self would be affirmed; where they could be themselves as working-class queer people in a society and larger culture that regularly demeans, marginalizes and dehumanizes them; and where they could be themselves in a space where their race and ethnicity would not subject them to the erasures of the mainstream white LGBTIQ community--the 300+ people at Pulse instead found themselves in a killing field. How many of us brown and black queer people have been in these very spaces, carefree, shedding the burdens of the day, of everything, for music, dancing, companionship, laughter, the possibilities and enjoyment of friendship and love?

Instead, by early Monday morning, the news was of so many lives cut down, so many at the beginning of adulthood and in their prime, once again by homophobia, and common to so many instances of recent mass murder in the US, gun violence.

There currently are conflicting reports about the terrorist Omar Mateen's background and actions on the night of the massacre, but what is clear is that he is a native of New York City, and moved to Florida as a child. His parents are immigrants from Afghanistan, and the day after the murder, Mateen's father claimed that his son's response to witnessing two men kissing publicly might have been a factor in his decision to launch his rampage. Mateen was twice married, and has one child; his first wife, who now lives in Colorado, alleges that he beat her and was often angry, and that she had to be rescued from him by her parents. The FBI twice investigated Mateen, but supposedly dropped its investigation for lack of evidence. Despite this background he was still able to buy semi-automtic weaponry and deadly ammunition with relative ease. His second wife appears to have known about Mateen's plans, and allegedly even cased the bar with him and tried to dissuade him, though whether this is true has yet to be established. Whether she will be charged an accessory and conspirator is unknown. During a lull in the rampage, Mateen is alleged to have pledged allegiance to ISIS, and reports suggest that he had previously avowed support for the Taliban and Hezbollah.

Within a day of the massacre, witnesses came forward to say that Omar Mateen had frequented the bar and had repeatedly gotten so drunk he had to be carried out. A former classmate at the police academy told a reporter that Mateen had asked him out, and because the classmate was closeted he did not accept Mateen's overtures. Alongside this, there have been accounts that Mateen cruised people on gay male dating and sex apps, like Jack'd, and his first wife's Brazilian fiancé told a Brazilian news program that she told him Mateen was gay and that his father had called him an anti-gay slur. At least one account I've read, however, states that the FBI quashed all of these facts, but I find it hard to believe that so many people could have misidentified the wrong person. Whatever the case, and no matter to which religious or political group Mateen had affiliated himself, homophobia, cis-heterosexism, and a toxic form of macho masculinity, coupled with easy access to guns, appear to have fueled this terrible tragedy.

Once upon a time I would have said that a horrific event of this kind would occasion real change in our politics, towards a saner approach to the proliferation of guns, to hysteria about Muslims and immigrants, towards a shift against racism and homophobia. As we have seen time and again, however, over the last decade and a half, the opposite seems to be the result. Both parties appear to be in the thrall of the National Rifle Association. The GOP, which controls Congress, and its tribune, presidential candidate Donald Trump, are using Daesh and Islamophobia to gain votes and stir up fear. And although we have experience a sea change since the end of the 20th century on LGBTIQ rights, and have an African American president, we are neither post-racial nor post-gay, with racism, homophobia and misogyny still serving as potent toxins in the US body politic.

Where do we go from here? How do we heal? One step must be to be remember the names of those who were murdered in Orlando, to read up on their lives, and to vow to transform this society for the better, with one step being to vote, and urge others to, in November.

***

A few years ago, I wrote a series of poems recalling various gay/LGBTIQ bars in Boston. Here's one of them I've never published, but am doing so here, in tribute to the victims in Orlando.

NAPOLEON CLUB

Navy sky, white moon, red brick,
door and bell:  discretion was the precondition
for elegance.  Inside, gray hair peers

from every other head and open-collared chest.
There’s currency here in being the youngest.
I pass my dollars across the bar—no beer

for me though it’s butcher. A gin-and-tonic.
I sip and see how far my smile and wit and calves
sculpted in high school sprints can get me.

Nearby, men hover around a sleek black
grand piano, singing "My Funny Valentine"
in unison because it’s February, "Somewhere

Over the Rainbow" because it’s Judy.
On the dance floor beats tap gently
between the spinning bodies.  I ignore

the first two guys who ignore me, approach
a third brother, debonaire in his military-cut suit
and patent leather loafers, stout as a general,

ageless as a vampire.  To Duran Duran,
Gloria Gaynor we twirl out a sweat, mouthing
the lyrics to songs we recall without effort

into each other’s grins, glide closer, kiss,
return to bopping.  We agree that rhythm’s
a bridge to the soul and we'll cross it, grab

our overcoats, trot out into the Boston dark, fingers
popping to steps as hot as the groove in our hips, melting
night snow on the tips of our tongues: "Ain't no stopping us…."

Copyright © John Keene, 2000, 2016.

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Motion of Light: Samuel R. Delany Tribute at Jacket2


Last April 11 in Philadelphia, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania organized a tribute to Samuel R. Delany (1942-), "Motion of Light," honoring his "performative poetics."

Though I always associate Chip Delany with his native New York City, he has taught at Temple University for over a decade (and will be retiring this year), and has become an integral member of that city's literary communities, so it was fitting that he was honored there. A number of admirers of Delany's work were present; though invited I was already booked at a conference (&Now) in Colorado, so I sent my contribution, "Paean," to Tracie Morris, one of the organizers, to present in my absence. The original event was archived at PennSound.

Now Tracie has edited a special section at Jacket2 featuring some of the events' tributes, including work by Kenneth R. James, Ira Livingston, Sarah Micklem, Fred Moten, Jena Osman, Frank Sherlock, Anne Waldman, Tracie herself I, and, as well as Chip offering his own contribution to the event through a concluding conversation with Charles Bernstein. Although Chip needs no introduction and his work as a creative writing, critic and intellectual could fill a month-long conference, if you're interested in seeing others speak (or create Möbius strips in response) to his poetics, the Jacket2 features offers a fine introduction.

Here's a snippet from Tracie's warm introduction to the special section:

The magnitude of Chip’s impact in a variety of fields is impossible to calculate, much less organize into one volume. Here’s hoping for more and more celebrations, compilations, cheers, toasts, and discussions on his monumental work and importance to so many people and at so many stages of their lives. Chip is a constellation that continues to be fixed, yet revolves, for me and for so many lovers of poetry, of resonant words. I’m eternally grateful to be part of bringing these many hands together that have lifted a glass in Samuel R. Delany’s honor during his birth month in 2014, a microcosm of his worlds-full of admirers. As this is coming out in February, a month, in the US, given to emphasizing the experiences of Black people and Black culture, I’m especially glad to share this celebration of one of the world’s great Black thinkers, writers, creators. A maker of many worlds. Worlds for everyo

Here's a snippet from Fred Moten's perfectly titled "Amuse-Bouche":
Moved movers amid the intensity of the pas de deux my offering asks you to imagine, Delany and Taylor are bound in what Denise Ferreira da Silva would call the affectability of no-bodies.[4] Bound for that embrace, they hold, in their openness, to its general, generative pattern. Openness to the embrace moves against the backdrop of exclusion and the history of exclusion, which is a series of incorporative operations. This is how openness to being affected is inseparable from the resistance to being affected. Dance writes this push and pull into the air and onto the ground and all over the skin of the earth and flesh that form the city. The words of these moved movers have something specific to do with dance and I want to talk about that specificity as an interplay between walking and talking, between crossing and tasting, between quickness and flavor. Their words and work form part of the aesthetic and philosophical atmosphere that attends the various flows and steps that have taken place in and as New York City over the last fifty years, especially downtown in the serially and simultaneously emergent and submergent dance space between two churches, Judson and St. Mark’s.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Alain Locke's Proper Burial + Poem

Alain Locke,
by Winold Reiss, c. 1921
In 1954, Alain Leroy Locke (b. 1885), one of the chief intellectual forebears and anchors of the Harlem Renaissance, an important theoretician of philosophical pragmatism, and the author who coined the term "New Negro," which was the title of his landmark, eponymous anthology and essay, announcing the arrival of a new artistic, social and cultural movement, died in New York City. For many decades Locke had been Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Howard University, from which he was temporarily dismissed for three years in the 1920s, before being reinstated, for teaching a course on race relations. It was at Howard that he taught Toni Morrison and many other major African American artists and other cultural and political figures.

A native of Philadelphia, Locke had graduated from Harvard College with highest honors and been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1907 became the first African American recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, allowing him to study at University of Oxford's Hertford College, after which he studied at the University of Berlin, before returning to Harvard to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. All of the important figures in the Harlem Renaissance knew and interacted with Locke; for some, like Langston Hughes, who would study at Howard in part through Locke's urging, he played a key role in cultivating their intellectual development. Like a number of his fellow Harlem Renaissance peers, Locke was also gay, though this was not widely known beyond his close associates and other Harlem Renaissance figures until after his death.

The container that held Locke's ashes
(Astrid Riecken/Washington Post)
Despite his stature, upon his death and after his cremation, his ashes were not interred anywhere, but passed into the custody of his estate executor, dear friend and fellow educator, Arthur Huff Fauset, half-brother of Harlem Renaissance author Jesse Redmon Fauset. After Fauset's death in 1983, his 91-year-old niece, Conchita Porter Morison, received the cremated remains and she contacted her friend, Sadie Mitchell, who also knew Locke and Arthur Fauset. Mitchell would serve as an "intermediary" with Locke's longtime employer to secure a place for the late philosopher's remains. When Howard coordinator of music history J. Weldon Norris traveled to Philadelphia in the mid-1990s, Mitchell passed on the ashes to him. From Norris the remains went to Howard's renowned archives, the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where Locke's papers are stored, and then on to the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory, where they were repackaged in a simple urn and placed in a locked safe by then director Mark Mack.

Finally, as Frances Stead Sellers reported in a Washington Post article on September 12, Locke's ashes were buried in Capitol Hill Congressional Cemetery, in a September 13 ceremony funded by African-American Rhodes Scholars, of whom there are over six dozen now. This tribute and proper memorial, with an engraved granite headstone, arose during planning by the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, in conjunction with Howard, for a symposium to honor the centenary of Locke's Rhodes Scholarship. In the process of conceiving the symposium, the Association learned of the status and location of Locke's remains, and through the financial support of Black Rhodes Scholars, he is now properly laid to rest.

According to Stead Seller's article, his headstone appears as follows:
Alain Leroy Locke, it reads, 1885-1954: “Herald of the Harlem Renaissance, Exponent of Cultural Pluralism.” On the reverse side are four symbols: a nine-pointed Baha’i star representing the religion that emphasizes the spiritual unity of humankind; a Zimbabwe bird, the emblem of the African country formerly called Rhodesia, which the American Rhodes community adopted; a lambda, symbolizing gay and lesbian rights; and Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity Locke joined at Howard.

Alain Locke, by Betsy
Graves Reyneau
Some years ago, I wrote a short poem for Locke that I've never published, but in his honor, I'm posting it here. He was, as the Washington Post article notes, and as Toni Morrison described in her public conversation with Ishmael Reed at Margaret and Quincy Troupe's Harlem Arts Salon last year, utterly "fastidious,"  so I hope the poem possesses some of the spirit of his rigor too. He was an extraordinary figure, one of so many of his time and era, who have made so much that followed him possible, in this country and beyond. I thus share with you "Alain Locke at Stoughton Hall" (Stoughton is one of the freshman dorms at Harvard, Sever is the home of Harvard's philosophy department, William Henry Lewis was one the college's first and black football stars, William Monroe Trotter one of its famous black activist alumni. Du Bois needs no introduction).

ALAIN LOCKE IN STOUGHTON HALL
 
Between their theses he writes his own.
 
Between "the general theory of value"
 
and "beauty consisting in ideal forms"
 
he pens fresh hypotheses. Back, past
 
Pliny and Mary Locke to the first ones,
 
speechless and staggering sick with sea
 
and living memories of sour-sour, gold-
 
weights, delta deities ghosting

into mastlines. Dread of these forlorn

shores. Dread of salty tongues' renaming
 
them, their own names buried under winter-

ed paving stones. In the spirits' graveless

inquietude, the cries of two centuries'

mute nights, he has grasped his nation's
 
true history: resistance and the cold-
 
hearted ability to make oneself
 
anew remain his true inheritance.
 
***
           
His journey from colored Philadelphia
 
to the Square: the hero's solitary
 
trajectory.  Within the dreamsongs
 
guiding him out of yesterday's

sorrows furl maps of righteousness
 
and Quaker industry. Here he treads
 
as he did through the schoolyards
 
and alleyways of fists, brick valleys
 
of indifference. Tiny warrior,
 
he holds little fear of being the queer
 
exception defying local customs,
 
minister of his own natural law.
 
As for fools and impolitic white
 
people, he suffers them coolly as any
 
politico, performing the acrobatics
 
by which he balances his days
 
with "master minds" in Sever, nights
 
at the library, the Boylston laboratories.
 
Someday some will claim they knew
 
him. Some days he thinks they'll recall him
 
more swiftly than the footballer Lewis,
 
the agile scholar and gem-eyed DuBois,
 
the Boston-born rebel Trotter.
 
***


You are the emblem of Negro genius.
 
You are the affirmation of the plural cause.
 
You are the angel gliding between histories
 
you must use and ones that silence you,
 
man, African, American, Harvardian, human.

Amid this desert of touch, threadbare

society of friends who can never

truly comprehend or love you,

amid the arid propositions of Kant,
 
Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Santayana,
 
which once might have been your sextants,
 
you chart your passage into the bay
 
of your people’s stories, voyage

of a mind and vision honed.

Sunday now, and distant bells summon

hungry souls. Freedom is sailing
 
by the compass of possibility, fearless,
 
even if with no ship or sea at all.
 
You will stay and write until
 
your heart runs out.  You will take this
 
dark knowledge and spread it.


Copyright © John Keene, 2014. All rights reserved.