All the Soldiers, with their faces blown off.

s

Because it midnight is, I left her, in a car made of milk

she was drunkenly pushing ferns into the ears of small boys

(and the faces at the dirty window, of all the people I've hurt)

I entered the convent. It was made of rats' skins.

I crushed 12 bishops there with my left hand,

for I had fallen in love with a horse. I stole a dozen eggs for him. His coat was of meadowgrass.

Then I turned and saw my father rolling down a hill, into darkness. Night is a boney ear.

How thin the lake's door is, my parking-lot, my sweet savage. He said, Milk being dust, is an orange, is an all-night radio. I said, Captain, I will squeeze through, always.

local street, spring has sprung

...................................................................................At ease, Soldier!

..................................................................................................................Yes, madam, we'll make it look beautiful

m

rocks

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z

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,

"The petit-bourgeois intellectuals are introspective by nature. They mistake their own emotions, their uncertainties, their fears, and their own egoistic concern about their personal fate, for the sentiments and movements of the great masses. They measure the world's agony by their own inconsequential aches and pains."

...........................................................................................James P. Cannon

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Twatt

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k









v

electric cables






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The picture doesn't show it, but the strip of red writing above the door includes the words

'Black American Gated Community'

























This house, three blocks from where I live in North Seattle, is not really recordable with a camera. The picture of the 'Plantation' is the only angle visible from the street. The rest of the front is blocked by dense layers. You have to be there to nose into the layers. For example, the blue oil-drum shown below has painted on its' outside, in red, the words 'Tar And Feather Niggers', and sticking out of the drum are shoes that have been roped to sticks of wood to represent legs.

A sign reads NO TRUST..PASS. The house is one block from Interstate 5, the 1,375 mile vertical straight line that runs from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. From the house, while I was there, complete silence. But an imposing silence, full of power.

aaa

a

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bird and head, corner house

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e


Some-one said to me recently, you sure do swear a lot. I said, that's because I'm from a very poor background. When we were growing up, our parents were so poor, they couldn't afford to give us real words.

One day my sister, who's two years older than me, said, Dad, why can't we use adjectives, and pronouns, like the other kids at school?
My dad said, Listen, you'll use swear words, and you'll like it.

And we did.

*

I used to lie in bed at night and listen to the sound through the wall, of my dad beating hell out of my mother. And then there'd always be that silence, y'know, and I'd just be praying that he would beat her for ten more minutes. Just for ten more minutes. Because I was always hoping that he'd be tired, when he got to my room.



*

When I was 13, my mother took what some people call a 5-year 'Buddhist vow of silence.'

Others call it 'staying together for the sake of the kids.'



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