It is time to speak. Time
folds under the weight of our broken neck fantasies
futility flies in our faces; dreams abandoned
aborted at the ports of immigration
imagination had each appendage assassinated
from the rooftop snipers fixed focus on
our lives one by one we lose our will,
or will we will difference defiantly
Led to our shallow graves
starved cattle led to cages turned caravans
desperate for pasture
we will be led
will resistance co-opted by cooperatives
turned against communes
turning against the ebb and flow, tidal pull
of european universalisms that lick our wounds
with tongue that stretches our scars apart
It is time to speak. Time bends as easily
as water; casual as circles; our elders stare emptily
into empty parking lots; they say their history resides in the
gravel of the earth; listen to the longing lingering in the spaces where loitering is illegal not allowed;
do not disturb the ghost who sleeps in the back of the bodega; near the beer and exposed piping, wires; it is time to speak and confess:
there are no bamboo metaphors to twist creative around this dreadful silence, no poetry to pull the dead weight of a dying hood;
i have run tired and, please forgive me, collapsed in the street
with an old woman's heart unfolding in my chest
pulse
pause
pulse
pause
I am trying to hear my feet hit concrete:
all i ask is this
let me hear this                        sound
pulse...pause
It is time to speak a grandmother's revolt
amidst all this
travesty and deception
our chess pieces chip and splinter, left
under park benches
left by the limelight
my community craves citrus and ginger, color that is not gray
rain that does not discolor our statues of garvey and zapata
It is time to speak syllables that sound like people's war
cuz
my mother comes home
optimism beaten by minimum wage slavery
calcium deficient
skeletal system exhausted
from curving her tongue into vowels
that violate her senses
my father comes home
stunned and stupid
shamed into smiling for white folks who infantilize him,
the son of a carpenter; he who raised half a dozen siblings
in Hong Kong by boosting shit from the british
food was easy to steal - education was not
 
I come home from work
heart deflated, spine shifting leftwards from all the years
left leaning against all those damn walls
lips blistered and bleeding
feet calloused
How do we stand for this?
anarchist press keeps asking
hour by hour, i say
one day at a time
one 
pulse pause pulse pause pulse p.a.u.s.e.
at
a
time

I was recently involved in a heated argument with a person in power over something that has long been an issue: dress codes, specifically, and the middle class in general.
So, as some of you know i've been fighting a long two and a half month battle with NYC's Dept of Education to keep my job after i was dub "ineligible" to serve students when i was unlawfully arrested. This past friday, i learned that i could return to work BUT;
the stipulation is that i need to forfeit the hood as manifest in my appearance and disposition. for the record people, i've been told to change how i look several times for some time - and each time i've spat in its face. let me break shit down and make it plain:
fuck the middle class.
lets be sure about this. the middle class systemically keeps the working-poor buffered away from the upper-class, and effectively serves the wealthy by quelling revolution. the late george jackson wrote about the inter-class relations eloquently in his book/manual, "Blood in My Eye". the vast majority of socially produced desire is rooted in the ambitions of the middle and professional class to the detriment of the working poor. look at television and the rest of "popular" culture. the population its referencing in its iconographic index is the middle class. so many of us who watch the shows and commercials are included in the experience only via the dynamics of window shopping, and vicarious living. we cant buy any of that shit, or live any of those fantastical lives. but the escapism and voyeurism that we have with middle class popular culture keeps us drunk enough on our own salivation; sustaining us to work another day, and another day, and another day, and another day.
the working classes are so throughly saturated with the jingos of the middle class, our subjectivities so codified with the decrees of white supremacy, we lose sight of the manipulations that massage the deep tissues of society. we begin thinking that whatever the middle class wants, the middle class should get, and that the working poor should have all its resources and loyalties rerouted if necessary to serve the agendas of these bourgeouis motherfuckers.
in the argument that i mentioned, i was explaining myself to a woman who wants me to "dress up, separate yourself from the student population, and win their respect as a professional". first off, lets call a spade a spade. dress up means dress white. for those of you like me who cant stand white supremacist capitalist patriarchy's lust for painfully transparent euphemisms, you know how often oppressors rig language to masquerade their politics and intentions.
so i told her that the transformation that matters is the awakening and cultivation of what angela davis calls "habits of critical consciousness". this is the transformation that personally dislodged me from the constant suckling of White Patriarchal Capitalism's tits; the mental emancipation from their constant droning. it is this critical consciousness, history, and theory that is responsible for the reclaiming of our individual and communal lives. this is change, the real change, the difference that actually makes a damn difference. and it is this that i work with my students on creating within our lives. in reclaiming my life, i also reclaimed the politicization of the working class - especially the working poor communities of color. critical consciousness returned to me the analytical lens through which i can see how race, class, and gender converge and coalesce together to form the subalternatized subjectivities that occurs in my hood.
when i told her that i would be duplicitous and hypocritical in "dressing up" (and thereby legitimating middle class supremacy) while simultaneously talking to them bout revolutionary self-reclaimation as people of color from the working class, it was her time to balk.
"its not about the middle class! its about RESPECT"
bitch please. dont fuck with us niggas that found marxism. we will cut your ass mad quick and you will SETTLE DOWN. first off, CLASS MATTERS. and we WILL name our enemies. the inability for us whose heads are kept under boot heel to say, "white", "capitalism", and "class" would be a fuckin death sentence. these bourgeouis motherfuckers are always working to deprive us of our language: indigenous, analytical, slang or otherwise. they're always trying to rob us of our ability to deduce and make charges against exploitative domination. check ya history: there was wholesale lynchings, rapes, robberies, and massacres against blacks and asians when we were legally precluded from testifying in court. it was open season on our health and humanity cuz our inability to name our devils meant that unless some white abolitionist went against community, death threats, and ostracization to testify on our behalf, the perpetrator would face zero consequence. reality was: countless black women were raped and/or killed, black men lynched and castrated, and the same went for the chinese men and women (except the chinese men would've been scalped instead of castrated - an interesting but telling difference illustrating how each's masculinity were conceived and dealt with).
I say to you all now that we need to recover ourselves by recovering our language and our ability to track White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy's movements through our conversations, our workplaces, our intentions, and our daily occurances. Until we wipe the delusional shit from our eyes, we will never be able to recognize our killers in the line-ups of our lives, and the fucking bourgeoisie will have quietly standardized themselves into every corner of industry, culture, and psyche.
e.

Where u goin, samurai...
got some rust to shave
got some snow to brave

Where u goin, samurai...
the streets been indelicate but kind
the guitar's been restrung so many times

and if there's a song in here
then i'll be a cut-throat singer
let melancholy bleed joy
bleed wisdoms from these stories
of when glory waved like serpents,
like children dropped off at school
- taking apart the master's tools
- taking back the friendly fire whose euphemisms flew like stray bullets
hailing down like manhattan cabs;
and they too would never stop for us;
shredding our muscles, they pressed themselves close to our bones
to whisper
"hello"
and a
"how are you?" -
the last thing remembered before the back of my skull hit concrete
was not genius or profound -
just a mix of colors that looked like the sky dancing into the trees
and then a whiteness that overtook the retinas
and a sound like bees
calmly making honey
overseen by a patient queen

Where u goin, samurai...
a breast plate of ancient steel
a chest full of nicotine
a fist clutch of lovers' numbers

on a continent that laughs every thousand years

..

..



..

I want to draw attention to the ongoing imprisonment of freedom-fighter and political prisoner, Leonard Peltier. The following is taken from Workers.Org (Workers World). --- BULLETIN URGENT! Leonard Peltier’s Safety in Jeopardy! Peltier was severely beaten upon his arrival at the Canaan Federal Penitentiary. Call and request Leonard Peltier be treated with dignity and respect. Canaan Federal Prison 570-488-8000. Peltier's register number (prison ID) is: 89637-132..... Also let the Bureau of Prisons know that the public will hold them accountable for the safety and wellbeing of Leonard Peltier..... Contact:.... Warden Ronnie R. Holt, Warden USP-Canaan U.S. Penitentiary 3057 Easton Turnpike Waymart, PA 18472 Phone: 570-488-8000 Fax: 570-488-8130 E-mail address: CAA/EXECASSISTANT@BOP.GOV.... D. Scott Dodrill, Director Northeast Regional Office Federal Bureau of Prisons 2nd & Chesnut Streets., 7th Floor Philadelphia, PA 19106 Phone: 215-521-7301 E-mail: NERO/EXECASSISTANT@BOP.GOV.... Harley G. Lappin, Director Bureau of Prisons U.S. Department of Justice 320 First Street, NW, Room 654 Washington, DC 20534 Phone: 202-307-3250 Fax: 202-514-6878.... Ask President Obama to investigate this incident:.... The Honorable Barack H. Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Comments: 202-456-1111 Switchboard: 202-456-1414 Fax: 202-456-2461 E-mail: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.... .... Editor’s note: U.S. political prisoner Leonard Peltier has just been transferred from prison in Lewisburg to a federal lock-up in Canaan. Both are in Pennsylvania. His supporters had tried urgently to get Peltier transferred to a prison somewhere closer to his family, specifically on Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota. Peltier delivered the following message by telephone on Jan. 12..... Greetings, my relatives, friends and/or captors:.... To my relatives and friends, I want to especially thank you for your generosity in this season of giving they call “Christmas.” I want you to know I’m mindful of the reason for the season as they say, for Jesus himself was a political prisoner. He stood up against the warmongers, the exploiters of his people, and he was imprisoned and hung out to dry. Likewise so many other people have also stood up against those who would exploit the lives and resources of people around the world. I don’t claim to be of any significance on their level; I am but one man of many who has stood up against exploiters that would use force to inflict their value system upon a weaker people..... I am in the process right now of being transferred; I had hoped to be transferred to a facility on the Turtle Mountain Reservation while I dealt with other legal issues regarding my imprisonment. My captors, however, have once again triumphed in their continuing efforts to break me. They have sent me even farther away from my traditional homeland. I hear them and others continually talk about justice..... One of the bureaucrats in North Dakota, when becoming aware of my efforts to be transferred to Turtle Mountain, spoke up and said he believed justice is being served in my continued imprisonment. I sincerely hope good people will take note of this person, Sen. Byron Dorgan, on the U.S. Senate Committee for Indian Affairs. It is quite obvious that he has no knowledge of true Indian history, no knowledge of my case, and is only a lackey for those who wish to keep us always subject to their version of what justice is..... They have at times called me a thug and a cold-blooded murderer, but I know historically they called Geronimo a cold-blooded murderer and savage; they called Crazy Horse a cold-blooded murderer and savage; they called Captain Jack of the Modocs a cold-blooded murderer and savage; they called Black Hawk of the Sauk a cold-blooded murderer and savage; they called Tecumseh a cold-blooded murderer and savage; they called Sitting Bull a cold-blooded murderer and savage, and the list goes on and on..... The one thing all these men have in common is they were all imprisoned or killed by this government; they were all patriots in their own land, trying to stop the illegal, immoral taking of their people’s land and resources..... They didn’t call the men who murdered our people at Wounded Knee thugs and savages. They didn’t call the snipers who shot Frank Clearwater at Wounded Knee in 1973 a murderer; they didn’t call the ones who shot Buddy Lamont a cold-blooded murderer; they didn’t call the ones who shot Joe Stuntz a cold-blooded murderer, they didn’t call the sniper who shot that young woman and baby in 1992 at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, a cold-blooded murderer; they didn’t call the ones who burned the men, women and children to death at Waco, Texas, in 1993 cold-blooded murderers..... I assume cold-blooded means you have no sense of right or wrong or something of that nature when you take a life. And if that is so, then this country is full of cold-blooded murderers and thugs because by proxy they have killed thousands of innocent men, women and children in Iraq and most recently in Afghanistan, I’ve seen them on TV. I’ve seen the pictures of children’s bodies piled on top of each other. And right now the U.S. funds Israel’s war machine as they kill hundreds of innocent men, women and children in Gaza..... Einstein once said, “All things are relative” and “For every action there is a reaction.” In the traditional way our people teach the same. In all the major religions around the world it has been taught the same way before Einstein ever drew a breath. Every person in the U.S. who allows this injustice to continue without voicing any opposition is a party to murder on some level..... Someone once said and it is a truism, “All that is needed for evil to prevail is for good men to say nothing.” And if Einstein is correct and Jesus is correct, then you reap what you sow, and Buddha is correct who said there are karmic laws that must one repay or be repaid for whatever you do. This nation had better start paying attention. It is financially bankrupt at this point. It is spiritually and morally bankrupt..... I’m sure this letter won’t buy me any favored treatment. Actually I don’t know that anything ever has. They had a plot to kill me once that didn’t work. They have denied me medical treatment that I need. I have arthritis in my knees. I have a semi-dysfunctional jaw from lack of medical treatment. I have 80 percent loss of vision in one eye. And I have internal organ infirmities that need medical treatment. But though I have trouble walking, I will stand and voice my objection to the cold-blooded mistreatment of indigenous people in this land and others. I will speak out always against the cold-blooded atrocities that are caused directly by military weapons and/or political policies that cause people to take their own lives, as in my country and other countries around the world. And though my vision may be failing me somewhat, I can still read the writing on the wall..... Though this country is in great financial peril, money is not the cure. There are some writings today that this country will be destroyed by fire. Well let me tell you, or should I say reiterate, the words of my elders and others: the fires are burning now, right now today all over the world the fires are burning. There will be natural devastation upon devastation coming to this country that has used the land and resources of my people to pollute and destroy the natural order of life. You reap what you sow. And as my people say, everything that goes around comes around. As Einstein said, “For every action there is a reaction.”.... I may live a hundred years or I may die tomorrow; but I will always have concern and sorrow for those innocent people that lose their lives. It is such a great tragedy that even some of those who pull the triggers and attack others have been convinced they are doing the right thing. And then some bureaucrat, with little or no understanding of life, espouses rhetoric about justice being served..... If I sound angry or hurt or disappointed or a multitude of other emotions. you would probably be correct. I remember once upon a time I naïvely believed that sooner or later I would be free and justice would be served. In my case, after 33 years of illegal imprisonment, justice will never be served, it will be up to the Creator to bring about a reaction that may in some future time balance the scales. But for me and the others like me, whether they are among other prisoners in the U.S. prison system or dead in the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza Strip or South America, or some reservation road or some ghetto street, justice is not being served at this time..... If there is anything further I could say that would affect you in some way it would be to encourage you to take a few minutes out of your life and quietly sit and reflect and maybe, just maybe, you can hear the mothers crying for their lost children and the men crying for their lost wives and daughters and the grandfathers crying for their lost sons..... I could say more but perhaps you may have grown tired of my commentary. Thank you for your time, thank you for reading this, and don’t let evil triumph. Say something..... In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and all the others who gave their lives that future generations might enjoy some time together on this beautiful mother earth,.... Mitakuye Oyasin (All My Relations) Leonard Peltier.... PS. I also want to take this opportunity to wholeheartedly thank all those who wrote the prison recently on my behalf seeking my transfer to Turtle Mountain facility in North Dakota. Thank you..... www.FreePeltierNow.org........ Articles copyright 1995-2009 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011 Email: ww@workers.org Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php .... ..

.. ....  ....

Posted a new track, tentatively titled "Ghost Dance". It is broken into two movements - Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud. The idea was to form a 21st century alliance between two of the earliest resistors to american imperialism. In this new so-called "post-racial era", i figured it was time to summon from the sediment the ghosts of this land, and speak kinesis back into the fossils.

In thinking about the different ways resistors have responded to violent dominating hegemonic systems, it would serve us well to stretch our attention past the iconic years of the 60s and 70s - years that have burned their effects into the collective national memory. Looking further back, we can see various experimentations and engagements with what we may call proto-revolution. And so, turning to Critical Native American history and ressurecting the numerous examples of self-defense and acts of liberation that decades of Disney's Pochahontas-Pacifism belies.

The track is divided into two parts:
the first is a quieter, more melodic take that takes into account the relevance (and devastation) of the protracted genocidal project that was the formation of the U.S. nation-state. The second movement is the declaration of The People's War. This is where the reformist discussions over land-rights and peacemaking abruptly end, and the silence is broken like (countless) treaties. Here the horses ride.

It is necessary to understand the Ghost Dance Movements of the late 19th century as contemporary with the end of the failed reconstruction, the establishment of the Jim Crow laws, and the Exclusion Acts of 1882. During volatile times of social unrest and mass disenfrachisement, it challenges us to begin weaving loose threads together as radicals who choose to organize together in political affinity and collective dissidence.

A great video of Brenda Stokely, who i am humbled and joyful to know. Her spirit and commitment to struggle and liberation is something that i can only call necessary urgency.

I wanted to share a news article with you, my brothers and sisters.
It concerns the behavior and trajectory of the local 110th precinct here in Queens - "my" precinct, you could say; a glimpse into the happenings, and the WTFs that affect myself and many many families (and businesses) of color.

PoPo 5.0 in Elmhurst, Queens

The club in the article is literally just a block away, and the way the officers in question attempt to dominate the owner is precisely the way the police-industrial-state attempts to manage communities of color here. It reminds me of the sergeant at 110th precinct fuming and barking so loudly he was spitting on those of us near the bars of the holding cell. The criminalization of the youth, especially young men of color. We who are held as exemplars of crime embodied, the atmosphere of soon-to-be incarceration surrounding us.

In related news, i just finished reading Abolition Democracy by Angela Davis (published by Seven Stories). Her analysis of the prison-industrial-complex as a lasting (and progressively growing) form of social-control from the failed post-civil war Reconstruction (as DuBois so extensively investigated) is on point. However, i think it would be interesting to extend the PIC further into U.S. history, cuz if you take it back you begin to see that some of the oldest resistors to U.S. (or i should more accurately say, Western) imperialism, like Crazy Horse, were brutalized and killed through and in early forms of prisons, jails, and detention centers. It gets live to begin thinking of political prisoners today (as well as the entire prison population, in general) as bodies caught up in the current extensions of modes of socio-economic paralyses stemming from the days the Americas were first invaded.

So it's about time to try and narrate the events of the past month or so. There are those who already know that on December 2nd 2008, i was illegally stopped and searched by plainclothes officers here in Queens. While waiting for the bus at around 8:30 P.M., an unmarked car pulled up, exploded, and five to seven white officers spilled out, and began questioning and searching me.
They found my trusty ol' knife on my person (which i was very open about carrying) and got cuffed, put into the car, and driven over to 110th Precinct. I should note that it was a knife legal in all dimensional respects (four inches and under, non-gravity, etc). When i'm led into the precinct, the sergeant behind the desk asks me, "Hey! You see 'American Gangster'? Watch it - you'll learn yourself a fucking something".
I didn't humor his provocations and was taken into the holding cell. I was in the cell around 3 1/2 hours with around 8-9 other guys. They were there from between five to thirty hours. While there i witnessed numerous transgressions of human dignity, rights, and access to support. The guy who was there for thirty hours was denied water the entire time. Another latino brother was exhausted and tried to sleep out of the reach of the awful flourescent lights, but one of the sergeants barked at us through the bars to wake him up - him spitting on us the whole time. Two young black teens sat in the back, and an officer eventually came into the holding room looking for them: "Where them nigger boys?".
I was eventually fingerprinted and mug shot. Afterwards, there was another latino brother who did not speak english well enough to understand instruction being barked at him from a younger white officer. The officer wanted him to put his summons in his pocket so that his hands would be free to cuff behind his back. When the latino brother looked perplexedly at the officer, the cop took the summons, shoved it into the guy's pockets and called him "a fucking retard!".
As a guy who went through years of ESL during my childhood (cantonese, my mother tongue) i took note.
They finally released me with my summons (which misidentified the knife as "gravity knife") and the court date.
On January 10th 2009, while walking from LeFrak to my block, an unmarked car pulled up along me. My first thought was, "what a fucked up moment to get jumped!". When i saw two white guys get out of the car i realized it was going to suck so much more. The one on the left said, " Hey! Hey! Remember us?"
"No"
"He don't remember us! Hey! Didn't you get locked up?"
"yea..."
*with a smirk "what you get locked up for?"
"i had a knife..."
while the one on the left was toying with me, the one on the right is going through my pockets and checking my pants. i'm getting pissed at this point cuz i've gone through so much bullshit and emotional drama cuz of the damages done since the Dec 2nd incident. its obvious in my voice and demeanor that i could care less what they thought, and who they thought they were. The one on the right then said, "i thought you lived in flushing". Camel and straws, man. I snap back that i didn't (not all chinks live there, asshole). He doesn't seem to bear resistance well and says to me,
"Shut the fuck up! You need to shut the fuck up! Lose the fucking attitude! You're gonna shut the fuck up! You think you're a tough guy? Huh? Shut the fuck up"
The other cop then says (ver batim),
"Yea...He's gonna get white washed real quick...".
At this point i want to murder me some of Babylon's Sons.
Since their dumb ass has nothing on me, they appear to let me go. But then to fuck with me some more, they ask for my ID. They take it and say, "we're gonna take our time with this one". They proceed to get back into their car and just chill there while im standing outside in the snow and wind freezing. They sit there for five/six more minutes before they pull their car out and hand me my ID. They circle the block and while passing me again they yell incoherently at me before speeding away.
Earlier today, the judge ruled to give me an ACD on the condition that i give an allocution of a possession of a knife. This effectively sealed the deal, and precludes me from filing a lawsuit against the city for any wrongful doing.
Between "dem nigger boys", being spat on, and their certainty of my yellow washed perfectly white (it's an old chinese secret!!!) i'm exhausted by the apparatuses of the state fucking wit me. But, cuz they have no fucking clue who this Chino is, imma be the inner-city alchemist and do some revolutionary magick.
Let freedom ring, and burst the eardrums of Jah's enemies.
In struggle, E.