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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Passport-photo-by-Gary-Lindorff-Poems_Poetry-210909-36.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
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September 9, 2021
Passport photo followed by reflection
By Gary Lindorff
Take off your glasses / Don't smile / That's what they told me
::::::::
Take off your glasses
Don't smile
That's what they told me
When I had my passport photo taken
So I look like a drug smuggler
That's what they want
I look tired and pissed
And a little dangerous
If I was security at an airport
And I saw that face
I would take me aside for questioning
Seriously
A person who looks like that
Might be hiding something
Somewhere
It's in my eyes
That I want to take down the government
Even more seriously
Why do you want me to look like that
On my passport?
Why don't you want me to look
Like I'm having a good day
A good life
Like I'm someone who believes
That we're really here to learn how to love?
Why do you want me to look like
I want to take your head off?
Hand me my glasses young man
Hand me my smile
Hand me my dignity
It's not your fault
It's no one's fault
We're just along for the ride
Only where are we going?
..........This poem came forth in one piece. No edits. It was just sitting there in the poem ready-room, waiting to be summoned for its mission - to draw attention to the joyless, loveless, soul-less system of ID-ing ourselves that we submit to, just to be able to (drive, travel, or work for a company or corporation) . . . In this poem (which on the surface, seems mostly humorous) I am shining a harsh light on my experience of having my passport photo taken at CVS. The young clerk was nice enough, but he stuck to the book: He actually said, "Don't smile." When I take my glasses off I am like a deer with glaucoma, if there is such a thing. Everything is blurry. (Very bad for the deer.) If I was in a big city I would feel extremely vulnerable without my glasses. (Which makes me feel bad for our homeless people, many of whom [due to natural aging, poor health, bad nutrition, lack of sleep etc.] are probably subsisting in a blurred universe! Hard to imagine what that would feel like, since even with perfect vision they are surrounded by risk and danger 24/7.) So the poem tracks the complex of emotions, or my rapidly darkening / deteriorating state of mind, that I can easily trace in my expression which that seemingly innocuous official snapshot brilliantly captures.
(Article changed on Sep 09, 2021 at 1:29 PM EDT)
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.