For Malcolm

For Malcolm by Peterson Toscano


I am your younger, lighter brother.
You exited in a bloody burst of gunfired four days
after I
Endured my own bloody ordeal called birth.


You're buried,
Yet live.
You resound in my students,
Young, displaced Africans.
You are their shining prince;
A fortress of a Black Man.


But were you a man like I am a man?


Were you ever unsure?
Confused?


Did you ever speed recklessly down?
Riverside Drive in the summer with
the windows closed so tight no one
heard you screaming?


Did you cling to Sister Betty, a
climber grasping a jutting rock on
a barren mountain face?


Were you a man like a I am a man?


You drove truth daggers into weary, Black souls.
You proclaimed what silently festered within.
You diagnosed the sickness.
You grouped for a cure, then
You left us like the cheetah bounding into the
forest.


It is your fierce manhood we crave.
It is your proud manhood we miss.
It is your profound manhood we must have.


You are a shining prince;
A fortress of a Man.


Will we be men like you when you were just a man?



Peterson's literary metaphors resonate over and over for anyone who knows anything about Malcolm X, or who was alive when he was and remembers reading about him in the newspapers and hearing about him on the evening news. Malcolm was an intelligent, sophisticated and articulate individual and created crowds to gather around him to listen to what he felt was important for others to know about.


"My alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity." - Malcolm X

"Without education, you're not going anywhere in this world." - Malcolm X

Vietnam

The Vietnam Wall by Alberto Rios (1988)


I
Have seen it
And I like it: The magic,
The way cutting onions
It brings water out of nowhere.
Invisible from one side, a scar
Into the skin of the ground
From the other, a black winding
Appendix line.
A dig.
An archaeologist can explain.
The walk is slow at first,
Easy, a little black marble wall
Of a dollhouse,
A smoothness, a shine
The boys in the street want to give.
One name. And then more
Names, long lines, lines of names until
They are the shape of the U.N Building
Taller than I am: I have walked
Into a grace.
And everything I expect has been taken away, like that, quick:
The names are not alphabetized.
They are in the order of dying,
An alphabet of-somewhere-screaming.
I start to walk out. I almost leave
But stop to look up names of friends,
My own name. There is somebody
Severiano Rios.
Little kids do not make the same noise
Here, the junior high school boys don’t run
Or hold each other in headlocks.
No rules, something just persists
Like pinching on St. Patrick’s Day
Every year for no green.
No one knows why.
Flowers are forced
Into the cracks
Between sections.
Men have cried
At this wall.
I have
Seen them.


The archaeologist goes back in the past to document history and statistics. He learns how things were before the bloodshed and guerilla warfare, the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ridden veterans, those who have suffered from Agent Orange, various types of cancers and constant reoccurring dreams, hallucinations, and feelings. He learns how things were before the veterans became addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana. Before the homelessness and the drug rehab programs that constantly fail because the Vietnam veterans are permanently traumatized by their experiences, so their addictions continue, month after month, year after year.
At this wall, it is even socially acceptable for grown men to cry, and there are plenty of them too. There are those who go to visit brothers, uncles, fathers, sons, nephews, cousins, grandfathers, and best friends, and then there are those who just go to pay their respects, even though they might not know or be related to anyone whose name is engraved on that vast black marble wall that seems to stretch for an eternity.
Individuals take pieces of paper and crayons or a pencil with them when they go to the wall in order to etch the name of their loved one or friend onto the paper to save so as to remember the person who died.
Vietnam was a vicious place to fight and both sides had hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered, wiped off the face of the Earth forever. The people that were killed in Vietnam weren’t just men either, they were women and children also. Whole villages were being ransacked, destroyed and obliterated, and bodies strewn everywhere in the landscape.

Walking

Walking softly
not making any sounds,
but still leaving those distinctive
footprints in the sand
all along the beach.
The shadows dance lightly and
quickly to and fro.
Palm trees wave in the slight breeze up above
and the ocean beckons to me. I sit and
meditate
in the cool dawn air and wait ......... peacefully
for sunrise and all of the possibilities that this
new day will bring to me.

Florida

Walking,
sand between my toes,
sunshine upon my back,
luke warm ocean water,
so clear and blue, like the sky above,
ahead cars zoom on streets, highways
hot pavement in February, palm trees line roads,
canals through cities, looking for alligators, but, alas,
unsuccessful,
snakes and lizards on concrete sidewalks
the sweet taste of a fresh orange in my mouth, untainted by chemicals
orange and pink pastel painted houses,
like the sea shells beneath,
one pina colada and a day of snorkling
swimming with the rainbow colored fish
some call it vacation in paradise,
I call it my life, after all, I wasn't born for harsh Maine winters.

Jack Kerouac

I was first introduced to Jack Kerouac during my
English class freshman year in high school. My English
teacher that semester spoke of books, writers, poets and
poetry. He taught me the wonders of reading and
writing poetry. He was the first poet to join what would
end up eventually amounting to quite an extensive
collection of books, lots of them being poetry, but also
including novels, high school yearbooks, and a few comic books.
I learned a lot from Alex McLean in high school, including how
to write sophisticated, intelligent, and articulate poetry.
Now I have started to write a book, and I will partially credit
that to Alex and partly to a professional actor by the name of
Peterson Toscano (Shhh.... Peterson doesn't know about this yet.) .
Jack was quite like I am now, wacky, creative, and intelligent.
Soon to join Kerouac on my bookshelf at home were Ginsberg,
Whitman, Dickinson, Neruda, Snyder, Wormser, Clifton and
many others. I even have a few anthologies already. It's
amazing what one can do with their life in such short
amounts of time.



http://www.jackkerouac.com/index.php