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Life Arts    H4'ed 1/15/22

Three Poems on Race

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Three Poems On Race

by John Kendall Hawkins

.

I. Jordan Peele's Most Excellent Get Out!

was on TV streaming its violence

couched in potato chips not shared and dip

storyline goes Mighty Whitey in a new get up

wears Black Man as a suit, at last admiring

his born-with Cool, neat ability to see through

hard times, improv his emotions (doodly-doo),

riffs by the hour on the fatuous white power

structures of our collective doom.

My Black mate tells me what Coltrane means,

chides my bringing up Eastwood's "Bird." Too white.

He stretches his black skin in the mirror,

a maze of colonized cosmology, black

and feeling blue because it's cool; it's cool to be blue;

he stretches, I say, his integumentary apparatus

that has brought him inescapable conclusions

more potent than the dismal disillusionments that

the parasites he hosts barnstorm the territorial blues with,

and wonders will the Singularity fix this problem or

I'm gonna haffa torch that motherfucka, too?

He lays an all-too-willing white girl.

And they have cute kids, mulattos who face off:

Key and Peele funny (but not really).

End up in Jordan's other film Us peeling

off black for white, and whiter --

Boko Haram Darker Shade of Angry Black

to Procol Harem Whiter Shade of Pale, middle class

Obama strutting (see, a Black Man made, now you on you own)

And when climate change comes home to roost

like a sad clown drunk stereotypically devoid of love and insight,

before going off angry storm cloud cumulus (be-bop!)

like the proverbial co*k-a-doodle doo through the raging corn,

well then.

.

Is there any more onion dip?

.

II. Sick and Tired Blues

.

I'm sick and tired of race

Tired of wondering what it would be like

to wake each morning with a Black face in a "White" world

knowing that it was a matter of time

before even my best vanilla buds betrayed me with a kiss

rather than endure the martyrdom of a crucified morality

symbolized by the still-burning crosses blazing on trimmed lawns

and a Marxism that never really seems to include them specifically.

.

I imagine waking and pulling at my face,

as if to say, Get Off Me, terrorized

by my own simple being-in-the-world

feeling a need to justify what needs no justification

uncomfortable in my own skin

needing to go out into the world full of smiles

that say, drink the milkshake,

like the grins at the end of Rosemary's Baby

.

I'm sick and tired of being white

trying to find a way to apologize for slavery

that has yet to end in the minds of bankers,

educators, politicians, football owners, Trump and Biden

and terrified that that moment may come

when I will slip on a banana peel of insecurity

and show my true colors, terrorized by race

.

III. White Policy Down Under (Sorry)

.

Down Under they still beat the snot out of "abos,"

once in a while, in jailhouses, cops with far flung minds,

though that has slowed down some, I hear,

since Kevin Rudd apologized, on behalf of all the whites,

for f*cking with indigenous thisses and thats --

dream time, boomerangs, cask curfews, what-not.

No one "sensible" believes he meant it, they say,

Think of William Hurt in Broadcast News with the onion.

No, they still suffer the same way, hard yakka,

and the Sorry didn't include talk of reparations,

so it's a freebie for forgetting about them again.

.

An interesting side note is that the US Congress

quietly and unceremoniously apologized to the Injuns

around the same time for injuries caused, et cetera et cetera,

and Obama quietly signed the reso as part of the Defense Bill.

As far as I know, no Injuns were invited to the Apology.

So, no reparations could be discussed.

.

But back to Down Under, aborigines have disappeared,

and tourists can't go to Uluru anymore because they defecate there,

and now we have the Chinese to worry about due to the Pivot.

I worry that subs in Freo harbor, home of America's Cup.

and the USS Carl Vinson stopover after the bin Laden sea burial bit,

will bring unwanted attention, make Oz a target of supersonic missiles.

I worry that I'll end up on a chain gang building the railroad

of the New Silk Road, a white coolie with a pigtail,

Cool Hand Luke and all shaking it here, boss,

meaning my doodle, behind a bush, making my escape

down Attila's lost highway that flows all the way to BaÄŸdat Caddesi.

If I'm made into an abo, I have it coming, I reckon, fair dinkum,

me whistling Dixie, having burned my bridges, along the River Kwai.


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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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