Affordable Housing (For Chris Brown)

word: “affordable”

depends on average wages

(maybe it once did)

the word “affordable” does not

exist in a vacuum

and requires a holistic approach

considering employment as well as prices

If, for instance,

      The medium annual income

 of a neighborhood

is $38, 363

and a proposed housing unit

on the city’s public property

requires its residents to make

$120,000,

it clearly is not

                                “affordable”

But, in a global economy,

  where neighborhoods are negligible

  and blocks meant to be busted,

the word “affordable”

does not have to,

and in fact shouldn’t,

be measured

by the people

who currently live here

(even when they’ve lived here

for several generations)

To the ideal tenant,

the imagined millionaires--

so hungry to get here

but need a little helping hand—

to revitalize the city,

it’s very affordable

And while they keep the rent

At the low discount rate of

$3,100 a month

maybe one or two new folks

can be recruited

from the ranks of the $38 thousanders

who used to be called middle class

but are now the working poor…..

before the price goes up more

Ah, the American dream!

But the word “affordable”

despairs to the point of being suicidal,

bent out of shape, emptied

sick of the people speaking for it,

not letting it talk,

It misses its mommy

And its daddy

And grandma’s hands, and backyard

Back before the damn highways

Ripped the neighborhood apart

And all we got were these lousy projects

Subject to police terror

And Hud evictions if grandpa’s caregiver—

Unbeknownst to him—

Was caught with some coke.

That wasn’t what he and grandma fought for in the 50s and 60s!

Meanwhile, back in today

I gotta caress

The word “affordable”

Its need for a firmer definition

As I got a glimpse in the room

Where the developer tells of his plans for luxury condos

And the mayor responds

“call it affordable and we got a deal”

Someone’s banking on most people not looking

At the headlines

Which circulate, now, as fine print

In the era of click bait twitter titillation

and the ones who did being dressed up in media muzzles

(called ‘freedom of speech” on fakebook)

At a certain point, one has to ask the mayor:

Why do you want the rich here more than

the middle you now call poor?

A stupid question, no brainer. No doubt.

But beyond this:

How many rich do you want here?

How many rich do you think you can realistically lure here?

Do you see the new shiny revitalized Oakland

Stretching east past Coliseum City

To the heart of 98^th Avenue?

Wouldn’t that be cool?

Just imagine the tax revenue

A city of 416,000 millionaires would have!

Just think of its well policed excuse for night-life!

You’d be the envy of so many other mayors

Like the city of my birth, Reading,

Voted the poorest city in America as of 2012

(while little brat Taylor Swift

runs around denying it)

Imagine all the poor people in Oakland

Will be able to afford

The new improved high-rent standards

Set by the luxury condo developers

And venture capitalists.

Maybe this could be better for everyone!

It would show, beyond the shadow

of a doubt, it would vindicate,

the higher wisdom of trickle down economics

over the pesky regulated economy

and hands outs of the New Deal and Great Society—

Yes, like a flood in which all boats can rise!

Manna from our Job Creator who art in heaven

But if you’re not going to regulate

this “market rate” housing,

you’d have to recalibrate wages

so that they finally keep pace

with inflation (that sneaky

way of offering a pay cut

to those you’re “officially” giving a raise to)

that sometimes goes by the name

of gentrification

when it’s not called land grab

or ethnic cleansing….

And if you could pull this

DEVELOPMENT WITHOUT DISPLACEMENT off,

We could agree with you!!

We’d be your biggest champion!!

But

Your policies are doing exactly the opposite

Even if you deny that racism

(and, yes, economic racism)

has anything to do

with the 47% black population

dwindling to 25%

and falling even lower

through that wide gulf

in the social safety net…

We need—

          more than ever—

you, oh mayor

to step in and protect us

           from the wage-cost-of-living discrepancy

that creates the wealth gap,

and work on both fronts—

salary caps for greedy duopolistic developers,

rent control,

and create jobs for the public good

if, for instance, you’re hiring

a teacher at a state run community college,

that teacher should be able

to afford to live in the community she works

she’ll be able to do her job better

and the citizens will get more bang for their buck

(same for the janitor)

and even if all of this is

an offensive

rant

to the free-market apologists,

doesn’t it become

a little less so

once I acknowledge

that we’re talking about

public city owned land—

one of the last bullworks

against absolute privitization

that you could use,

for instance,

to make your proclamation

of a Black Arts District

more than an empty symbol,

or a badge of absolute

hypocritical

doublespeak

(first stanza is a haiku)

Kenny G Piece (needs title)

“What Can Brown Do For You?”

I don’t want to give this Kenny G. clown

The pleasure or privilege

Of letting him think he’s pried the knife

Into the wound and twisted

making the life that injustice couldn’t kill

Writhe with deeper (exasperating) agony

(while language says “lighten up”)

the glories of deep gossip

the art of the tweet

the ways ideas circulate on instagram

what you can say on a facewall post

buzzing with electrons of urgency

may make one turn to poetry

as if you can organize it in poetry

like a truce between Bloods & Crips:

“Give Us The Hammer And Nails

And We’ll Rebuild This City.”

(now that’s a found text:

http://gangresearch.net/GangResearch/Policy/cripsbloodsplan.html)

But to even out the field

and bring the conceptual mind SO HIGH

(as high as the sons of gold handlers and smiths)

to the “ungrammatical profundity”

of a showered, sweating, living, even laughing

mother like Yuvette Henderson

not enough of a thing for the idea—

The noble art of still lives

Alchemy algorithms

That fit in perfectly with the instagram agenda—

Transparent

Your ass

“to make nothing happen

on the condition nothing makes something happen”

an odorific octagon (of oppression)

the voice that loves to pronounce dead

(no ideas but in thing thugs)

but you’re even worse at freestylin’ than me

Maybe she can teach you the higher beauty

And ethics of the battle-rap you call bullying

The kids playing around making fun of a cop

On the one night they let the subway stay open past midnight—

To die for a smidgeon of the freedom and safety

You take for granted, but don’t even test

While priding yourself on an envelope push beyond “clowning”

(of course, “I’m just judging me, projecting on you”)

Your standards dance in my consciousness

Like steel scaffoldings in a Politburo’s deep freeze

(zero? Below zero?) so cold it burns the skin off

like nails in coffins of propriety

(perhaps a tender offstage aside

in your allegedly powerful coroner vox)

and even granting those stress-inducing standards,

leaning on their “transparent” scaffolding anchor

to gaze at the broad chokehold

of the ground zero sky, WTC towers going down

from the bloody eye of the concept

while the spirit that enlivened them

goes underground, diffused

like an oil spill with dispersants

realizing it doesn’t need a building

to be impersonal anymore and take the “I” out of tirade

as you mimic the “frictionless flow” of capital

(as satisfying as fruitcake, or fracking…

like a bikini bottom that matches the burqa

or backward baseball cap of geo weather engineering)

Yes, even by the standards you stress,

Within your time-tested terms,

of “found texts” and “uncreative writing,”

I wonder

why you couldn’t have chosen, say,

a highschool student paper

or perhaps the application form

that so charmed the college admission board

into accepting Michael Brown--

as a fascinating specimen for your schtick?

Maybe such texts would be too hard to find….

Would require some digging….

Befriending his parents, who don’t hate all whites,

Or even talking to the kid on the sidewalk

You apparently have to walk sometimes

Who might remind you of him…

I bet you’d still find a way to make this gesture

Strike oil, steal gold or otherwise offend

But at least you could counter

The stereotype of the voiceless black beast

Or even celebrate the beauty in the beat

Jordan Davis got murdered for….

April 2015 (Poetry Month)

For Theo Auer, Brian Lucas, and D. Scot Miller

The way the pain of a shattered leg can become beauty….

I remember Luke Riley.

He took the colored plastic trash bags

(pink, yellow, green, and blue….)

corner stores used to put your produce and stuff in

that wandered the ghettos of Ghosttown like sagebrush

and he burnt them with a blowtorch onto canvases

to create the most beautiful abstract art I’ve seen since Basquiat.

He had a near death accident, and the legs--

Whose nerves were so gnarled and dead

He envied me my ability to feel pain in mine--

That lead him there, on the back roof

Of the warehouse that had once been a Creamery

Whose horse drawn carriages had delivered milk

To the neighborhood stores

Before the whites moved to the suburbs

And had yet to come back as colonizers….

He mustered all his strength to steady his legs

To weld those plastic bags I helped scavenge for him

Onto the canvas---in this youtube era,

I wish I had a film----of the process…..

I knew….intrinsic beauty…marketable…

Hell, it even had a built in marketing hook

Since recycling was hyped in the weeklies

And increasingly the mainstream

Once the plutocrats realized they could make money off it

And wouldn’t really make a dent in Devo

And this angle, pitch wouldn’t get in the way

Of the beauty, the conceptual brilliance

Of his “heroic abstractions” (in the best sense of that art history term—

If he knew Pat Steir, could say, her Waterfall drip paintings

Ain’t got nothing on him….

I championed him….

Helped get him a show at the Esteban Saban gallery

Set up on 23^rd during the early day of gentrification

Back in 2007 when we tried to make it….something else…

He sold a painting or two…

But Luke was passionate, not so great at the business end…

(I can relate….)

Don’t know if he’s still alive

I think of him when I hear the post Love Supreme Coltrane

The pain of his failing liver, the feeling that death is soon

The beauty of grasping for a new sound,

A new spirituality, a more vital free and just

Community—

Though some white folks heard it as angry

In the turbulent 60s of black power.

His music sounded like a human voice

Liberated from

“normative discourse” (prison house of language)

but it was Reconstruction at its best

“breaking up the soil” (as Rumi would say)

so called sheets of sound

irresistible shivers down and up the spine

not dance music per se—but nerves were dancing

the realization we are cells

not confined in prison complexes smart phones.

Egoless, but not in a vulgar way

Anger as love, love as anger. Pain as beauty

Call it convulsive if not spasmodic

Or start an African Orthodox Church

And invite the tourists who don’t really get it.

But they’ll pay….and maybe learn.

Some haven’t of course…

Look at the Youtube comment boxes for Om

And see some of the compliments

At least they seem intended as compliments

By the white dudes: “Wow, Far Out!”

“Rumour has it they were tripping their brains out

on LSD!”

as if that’s the only way such beauty, struggle and passionate

meditation

can register to the “better living through chemistry”

mind

‘that Coltrane rejected years earlier

even though his liver was already paying the price…

So, yes, Baraka says it better—

It was the pain—felt physical— transcendent

Embodying of spirit—felt in sounds

And if brought down to the analysts with words

Many find it analogous to Malcolm

As say Curtis Mayfield was to SCLC

And I think of Dizzy (dizzy with thinking)

Saying how the blues is the spirituals

And vice versa

& how gerrymanderers need a psychiatrist

to understand the primal oneness

of the life force in an omnicidal regime

Poem from 1986 thinking about the latest blizzard

this was a "comic relief poem" I used to perform in 1986 when I first started doing poetry readings in Philadelphia

say there’s a week long blizzard

and just about eveything’s shut down…

you stock up coz you can’t shop

but if you have a job

your work place is shut down

which ain’t no tropical vacation

but hopefully you have an apartment

and even if you do have an apartment

the landlord ain’t giving you a discount on rent

and it’s fitting that this happens in February

3 days shorter than January or March

but you don’t get 3 days cheaper rent

and it makes sense they made this

Black History Month….                      (1986)