Jocko as myself
Jocko Graves two: Dreams
Was Jocko Graves real?
He was as real as the meanings of myths and symbols
As real as flags
And paper dollar bills
As real as non-ethnic statues of Jesus
Adorning the churches of Black and Brown People
Who willingly participate in a prayerful contradiction
As real as dreams
As real as The American Dream
What is the difference between a Bitcoin
And a hundred dollar bill?
Can the subconscious mind differentiate between
The real and the imagined?
Do you know who you are in a dream?
Are your dreams and nightmares
More real than mine?
Martin dreamed.
Gene Roddenberry dreamed.
George Washington Dreamed.
A patriots dream
That saw beyond the years
Where alabaster cities gleamed
Undimmed by human tears
Jocko Graves was as real as the patriotic songs I had to sing
To start my day
In elementary school
As real as The Pledge of Allegiance
And The Star Spangled Banner
As real as Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling
And the Diplomatic boycotting of
The 2022 Chinese Winter Olympics
Although we can’t seem to decide when athletic events
And athleticism
Can be allowed to be used
To make political statements
Waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep
We sing
In all three states of mind
But are most creative when we dream
Bring my dreams and songs to me when I awaken
So that I can refine them when I sleep and dream again
Let me inhale my whole day and reforge it as I sleep
And heal myself in the most ancient of ways
As I blissfully inhabit one third of my human life
Let me sing the songs of my childhood again
Because they still work
And now
I better understand their meaning
Master Blaster Curtis Mayfield
D.C.’s own Marvin Gaye
Tell us.
Tell us: What’s Going On.
Tell us: people get ready.
Mercy, Mercy Me!
Everybody
It’s a Future Shock.
Again.
And the world is still so full of WTF!
American miasma
And the mindless chanting of
“Make America Great again, again”
To reaffirm a nightmare
Rather than to refine George Washington’s dream
I mean
That is
If he actually ever had it.
Who broke the unwritten laws
To cause this dark virtueless cloud
To overshadow us all?
COVID-19 proves that separate but equal is still alive and well
As we live and die
In the gigantic shadow
Of the microscopic
Although separate is doing much better than equal
And equal has only ever been an American dream
The difficult conversations that America should have
That we have been having for a long time
Since before Archie Bunker got kissed by Sammy Davis Jr. on national TV
And before George Jefferson got sassed by his Black maid
Because the network wouldn’t let him have a White one
Before Petula Clark held hands with Harry Belafonte
And Sidney Poitier sang Amen to Eastern European nuns.
Swing low sweet chariot
Swing down sweet chariot ship and let me ride
Before Martin Luther King Jr. asked Nichelle Nichols
Not to leave Star Trek
(Because Diahann Carroll in Julia was still two full years away)
And before her character, Lt. Uhura, kissed Captain Kirk on a planet full of
sadistic
decadent
telekinetic
psychic
aliens
Who liked to watch
Before there were three Catwomen and one of them was Eartha Kitt
But she couldn’t kiss Batman
Even though the other two had
And before there were no Blacks in Mayberry RFD
But do you recall any in Friends or on Seinfeld?
Out of 8,000,000 stories in the five boroughs of The Naked City
Quite a few of them were missed
Because even if “you” are one in a million in New York
There should be at least eight of you
Before Granny freely waved the confederate flag on network television on the Beverly Hillbillies
Proving that you could live anywhere in America
As long as you were rich and White
And before there was a Hooterville Junction
Or, an acid trippy Green acres, too.
Before Sticks, one of the few Black men on Happy Days, played the drums
And before he — the actor Jack Baker — actually died of cancer in real life
After a marginal career in golden age pornography
America has needed to have a conversation
That, actually, it’s been having.
And we’re not yet finished talking
Not by a long way.
Because conversations matter.
Hidden under the masks of The Predator
And dancing in the Xenomorph’s black biomechanical prosthetics
We are the voice of Darth Vader
The base voices that make the Klingons menacing
And the voice that invites America to eat at Arby’s, too.
Tell us fairy tales for troubled times
Or, of a past some call “the good old days”
Which weren’t
When George Washington dreamed of a gleaming tomorrow
That has never come
Living in this once upon a time
Called right now.
But, I still like happy endings
Never no tears.
I keep hearing people say that both America
And American Democracy
Are a grand experiment
I ask
An experiment upon whom?
A sleep study?
Sleep better by problematizing the word:
“Woke”
While calling yourself contemporary non-religious Mindful Buddhist
Now that he’s dead, Thich Nhat Hanh can roll over in his grave
Jungian analyst say that this chaos is the digestion of America’s Shadow
Bullshit, I say.
It’s the American inability to digest the spicy masala stew
In in its melting pot
(Shout out Kamala Harris)
I say to you, co-opters
Thieves of the worlds great cultures
Ideas
And peoples
You imprisoners of the ancient arts and achievements of:
Persia
Africa
India
China
Japan
and Greece
Stolen treasures housed in Colonial museums
Where Keats contemplated his urn
And wrote an ode
Because contemplations matter
Was Jocko Graves real?
As real as Paul Reveres midnight ride
As real as underground railroads
That had neither trains
Nor tracks
Listen my children and you shall hear
All of it is as real as you want it to be.
And it’s only real when you want it to be.
Real
When we make it real.
The faithful groomsmen
(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)
(Art credit 1: Chase Hall / Dazed) (Art Credit 2: Jalen Law)