Life writings/

you gotta know the strings
tp pull your life together
look down at your feet and see if you need shoes and laces too,
to string em
so you can be strong in your step
which is yours, your own
footprints on cracked n split sidewalks
dont chalk cover it with your open mouth blindness falling out
it wont do nothing but trip you

yeah it takes falling down to learn your strength
some could argue
but why fall down when you can be aware
of the sounds of the street
the faces the people that you meet and be safe secure, and still sweet
dont miss a beat
be true and keep to the shade
in times of heat
too much too little? thats why balance is such a riddle
keep your mind your hands and your pace like a girl's got her base
like a bow's got a fiddle
to faddle and paddle up stream with
keep playing and keep praying
just
know where you are swaying and know protection is not laying
down in front of a car
mar-tyr
if you are,
you might not be for long, to see
the effects if you live positively
open, but wise, aware and unafraid
to ties those shoes
those shoe laces
so you can be keepin up the paces
over all the spaces you place
yourself

Findings

Sitting in apartment, cleaning room, preparing for school to start. Found the following, wanted to post, nothing to boast 'bout but, here it is-- give me a shout (something you've been styling).

Scraps of Poetry from Madrid


Prepare for rain to
stain yr heart
with fresh cool
natural drool
down the fabrique fringe
from the spool
across seams
until it seems
yr cloth can
hold
no
more

----

i dont believe
words spoken and not
how they tear our ropes into
impregnable knots
rope burns
time yearns
to soothe and heal
skin keps
peeling
mind-brain-gum
realing like
rope thats
tangled from the
heart thats said:
nope

Book Notes/2

With the left hand, I touch my hair above my ear. I hear the watch on an unchained left wrist. I vow to be responsible for the audacity of truth which respires involuntarily.

Reading a collection of books:

King Leopold's Ghost
In The Hot Zone
Writings For A Democratic Society
(and later, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda And the Road to 9/11)

Recently finished and recommend:

The White Tiger
My Guantanamo Diary: Stories The Detainees Told Me
Conversations With Saul Alinsky


Quotable quotes:

When I once wrote endlessly about the Vietnamese, I was now witnessing the suffering and struggles of Iraq. It seems like a circle ever enlarging, but returning always to its own beginnings. - Tom Hayden (Writings For... p15)

"When you get here, you'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us. Nonsense. The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly covered roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench-- the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above the coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleanginous with a coating of dark blood. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this country." Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger... p148)

So called power institutions get away with a lot because they’re not challenged. You see, power is not just what the status quo has; it is more in what we may think it has. It may have ten soldiers but if we think a thousand soldiers, then for all practical purposes the status quo has a thousand soldiers. Rarely do they have the power we think they have and it’s amazing what happens when you just suddenly stand up and say, “Who do you think you are?” Saul Alinsky (Conversations... p57)