Testament

1

I was once a long-hair freak.

Fact: Back in the day I was stopped on the highway,

Searched and frisked a number of times

Between 1969 and approximately 1973.

But I never felt my life was being threatened

By the law except, briefly,

When they wanted to draft me,.

That is where the difference lies.

And that difference runs as deep

As the very soul of this country.

When they stopped trying to draft me

(Because I got my deferment)

I was back to feeling relatively secure

In my skin, albeit, I actually wasn't.

It's hard to describe, but even though

My choices probably did place me in grave danger

I felt protected!

2

Grave danger? Just for example,

It was as a long hair in bell-bottoms

That I ran a light in Albany once

On my way to pick up my girlfriend at the bus station,

And caused a minor accident.

My insurance and license had expired

And I was thrown in jail,

A holding cell, for 6 hours,

While my girlfriend raised my bail.

If she hadn't raised the money to spring me

I would have been sent to the penitentiary at 6:00 PM.

Calling my girlfriend was my one-allowed call.

I remember them puling my bead necklace off

And watching a hundred beads bounce and roll

Around the office of the on-duty guard.

The guard made sure I knew that

If I had been transferred to the Pen

They would have shaved my head and

Kicked the sh*t out of me.

3

Now something has finally shaken those foundations

Of that quasi-magical protection.

That something is Trump.

Almost every day I hear myself thinking,

Wait, He can do that!?

Most of our presidents do their dirty work

By stealth behind the scenes.

What is most shocking about Trump's ascendancy

Is not so much what he is doing

But how easily he does it

And then, that he gets away with it.

(That part is on us!)

This is my testament:

4

As a white activist poet, age 74,

I have always felt well protected by my magic circle

Of race, class and education.

Protected from powerful people in office

Whose agendas keep me busy

Writing poems and commentary

So that my brain stays limber,

I continue to feel somewhat relevant.

But that magic circle is turning out to be

An illusion.

I guess that is why I am having flashbacks

Of the days when I was harassed and marginalized

By the system" for wearing ragged clothes

And growing long hair

And bad-mouthing the government.

5

After 1975, age 24,

In school, post Watergate, Vietnam over,

No longer threatened by random shakedowns

And harassments from troopers

And being harrassed and roughed-up by red necks

I shaved my head, and shifted my attention

To what was really "rotten in Denmark",

Namely the soul and karma of my country.

I was still writing about real corruption and real crimes

But the scope and scale of the corruption

And the evil I was discovering was turning out to be

So profound and bottomless that

I began to turn to metaphor

To comprehend and process what I was dealing with --

Genocide of Native Americans,

Ubiquitous destruction of the environment,

Baked-in (systemic), constitutionalized racism,

Corporate greed being folded into university curricula,

History being rewritten to whitewash

Obeisance to Nuclear-monotheism,

(i.e., there is only one God

And that one God gives us permission

To drop the bomb first.)

(Somehow I have managed to grow up in a monoculture

That thinks that is OK, to run with the nuclear football!)

6

The funny thing is,

Even though I saw all this

And conceived metaphors to write about it,

Nobody noticed and nobody cared!

But there was power in that.

Like Dylan writes in "LIke a Rolling Stone"

"You got nothing to lose,

You're invisible now, you got no secrets

To conceal."

7

The people who have the power to make me miserable

Were right in my metaphorical crosshairs.

As I became a better and better poet,

I began to feel special and invincible.

But I didn't realize it until fairly recently,

That my real superpower was my color.

8

That may not be the case much longer,

But for most of my life, except when I was a long-hair

Fighting the draft and protesting Vietnam,

Being white and heterosexual was a like a pass

To keep moving around the board

Collecting dividends here and there.

9

I actually think that, because John Kennedy

And Roberty Kennedy,

The whitest of white privileged, heterosexual dudes,

Were assassinated first (followed shortly by M Luther King Jr

And Malcolm X), that made me feel less invincible,

Being cut from the same cloth as those Kennedy boys

Was not a bullet-proof defense.

I actually thought (a few years after the fact)

That their executions leveled

The field of racial inequity when it came to

Vulnerability to evil, and I still think it did,

For a while.

10

But there was a shadow attached to liberal whiteness

That I couldn't detach from or outgrow.

I think smart well-meaning people in my life

Have tried to point this out over the years,

Even my own son,

But I was too committed to saying what I had to say.

To listen.

There was a bag I had to empty.

My disdain and loathing for what I saw

When I looked into the soul of my country

(and into the soul of the Western world for that matter)

With my poet's X-ray vision,

Was running the show.

11

Even as I initiated over the decades,

And became more real to myself and resilient,

The shadow of white privilege stalked me.

What woke me up to how I can't outrun it

Or initiate out of it, also opened my eyes to how,

No matter what I do, I am stuck with that shadow

Until I segway out of this life!

12

Trump's ascendancy has given me one thing

For which I am indebted to him.

He has returned to me the integrity

That comes with being vulnerable.

13

There have been moments,

Even phases in my life, when

I actually thought, "This is going to work for me,

Being this person, this poet, this artist, this pacifist,

This dreamworker, this nature lover,

This father, this shamanic practitioner."

But the shadow of white privilege was perennially there

To whisper ". . . ah-ah-ah, not so fast mister. . ."

What Trump has done for me is,

He has made me feel almost genuinely relevant again

For refusing to trade in my X-ray vision for security.

Because it is quite possible that, maybe not he,

But his successor, might start arresting

People like me, white or not,

Like the Thought Police in Orwell's 1984.

14

I'm going to finish up my life,

Continuing to find ways to metaphorize my truth

Even if it comes with the shadow of white privilege.

I am only human.

And what feels really good is,

I know what I mean by that,

And what I mean by human

Transcends my white ass.
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