A Good Fucking Start: For James Baldwin and the Contradictions He Was Forced to Live

“I want what you want.
I want to be left alone…”

This is probably the most powerful thing James Baldwin ever said
Because it speaks to an “everyday”
Where “nothing much happens”;
And, “everything is possible”.

It’s 2025, and there still hasn’t been a day like that in America for Black people.

People tell me that there has been progress and hope

But, it’s the hope that kills us.

Hope is not a strategy.

We are still crossing the Edmond Pettis Bridge;
Not safely reaching the other side.

And, that bridge is still named after a Klansman.

I want a day when Jackie Robinson isn’t deleted.

Or, the Tuskegee Airmen and Elenor Roosevelt aren’t a blow to the status quo.

Celebrate Ira Hayes — hands clutching a flag while under fire at Iwo Jima.

And, Native American Code Talkers who performed the healing ritual: “Where the Two Met Their Father”

So, that they could return home safely from World War 2

Celebrate Japanese heroes who were the real Mr. Miyagis.

While little Mr. Sulus languished in American concentration camps.

While some of their dogged brothers on the other side refused to surrender and fought WW2 until 1974

Shout out to Ononda, hero of Japan;
Who proves to us how difficult it is,
To just surrender;
And, let it go.

Celebrate the masculinity of Black soldiers who liberated concentration death camps.

And, recognize their efforts to bring that virility home from Europe
how it fueled the birth of the Civil Rights movement.

How it helped lead to the creation of a Jewish homeland
Black Dominoes falling against Middle Eastern dice
On a World Backgammon Board

Ebony reverberations!

I want Neo-apartheid: the sequel
And New Jim Crows
To be recognized at home and abroad

I reckon the 50,000 —and rising—dead in Palestine bring us back again to a cyclic return of blatant segregations.

States formed exclusively on ideology must first drive out the Undesirable
Other.

And, criminals must be deported without due process.

I’m looking at you MAGAmerica with your gerrymandered voting districts
And voter suppression laws.

I want that to be well known and taught in history classes — the violence that led to non-violence.

And, I don’t want my history to be deleted from text books published in Texas.

I want people to remember that Patton requested the Black tankers.

That men who flew the Flying Fortress requested the Red Tails to escort them on their suicidal missions to fight Nazis.

Nazis that seem to be rising again here in America;
Along with hooded and masked assistant tyrants who terrorize Americans

Only to be mass pardoned.

I want to walk into a store and not have people come up to me and ask me to help them find a sweater.

‘Cause I don’t work at the fuckin’ store; I’m shopping too.

And, I want cabs to stop for me.

I don’t want the Enola Gay stricken from American History because of the word “gay”.

And, I want James Baldwin
Langston Hughes
Billy Porter
Billy Holiday
Jackie “Moms” Mabley
And so many others to be recognized for what they contributed to American culture.

Who and what they choose to kiss behind closed doors is their own goddamn business.

Take your hands off women’s wombs
Especially when
Menstruation
Female orgasm
Fertile mucus
Embryo implantation
And, menopause
Are still mysteries to you.

That’s what Baldwin meant when he said “I want to be left alone,

Just like you”.

I want to see subaltern lives in textbooks;
Because we are the history of the everyday.

And, I don’t need Taylor Sheridan to explain me or my Native Brothers and sisters to me.

We were Sheriff Bass Reeves
And, Buffalo soldiers
And, cowboys
And, calvary men
Before he was a gleam in his daddy’s eye.
Way back before John Dutton was a MAGA masturbation fantasy.

And, I don’t want to be a sidenote in a Francis Ford Coppola movie either.

And if you have stayed with me this far and seen the contradictions inherent in this poem;

Well.

Life is deeply ambiguous.

And “#COMPLICATED”!

This is NOT a DEI poem;
It’s an American and World History poem.

Is that all I want?

No.

But it’s a good fucking start.

(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)

(Image Credit 1: Marc St. Gil, “Jesus Christ Hope of the World” / Smithsonian National Museum of American History)

(Image Credit 2: Edward Ruscha, “HOPE” / Tate Gallery)

The Gold Formed in Supernovas

Out of the Supernovas
Where we
And all the gold were formed
We fell nightmarishly into a world of dreaming

From the crowns of our mother’s heads
Into swelling hopeful wombs

We plummeted

Mothers, you did not come from a rib

And, we definitely fell from your celestial wombs
Skies under the sky

The Twice Born
Born from two sacred furnaces

This is for every woman who has ever held a child’s hand
Until it was strong enough to walk

And, for every woman
Who has ever had to have her hand held
When choosing
Not to bring a child into this world

O-o-h child things are gonna get easier
O-o-h child things will be brighter

We waited until it was our turn to play

I came to earth to reclaim my Stetson hat
A cosmic Staggerlee

To hang on to this world as it spins around
And to not let the spinning get me down

The stars are both my cradle and my cenotaph

And in this līlla where our dreams collide
Spending lifetimes running from all the reasons
We came here in the first place

Running from each other

Why not build a world
A stronger world
A strong though loving world
To dream in?

Cowardly dreamers

Often our dreams dare not speak their names
Falling out of the strangeness and the charm
Like purposeful precipitation

We are the faces of our mother’s and our father’s
Agony and ecstasy.

We are the chain reaction

We are atomic shadows
Tattooing the ruins and the wreckage
Of yesterday’s dreaming
The wreckage we must stoop to rebuild
With our broken tools
And burned hands

We are the quantum miracles
That force the gods to come to earth
To intervene on our behalf

And a mother to offer us her milk filled breast

This Song of Experience and human abstract
Living in the concreteness
Where the mundane and divine clash

Our Ideas can’t be killed
Only their containers smashed
And their advent delayed

Rebuild the Tower of Babel
Five Stairsteps
Earth
Water
Fire
Air
And space

Build it high enough to shout at god
And to say:
Your confounding of our languages
Has never stopped us from writing a poem
Or a song
Or a prayer
Or even attempting to be reasonable with each other

We are many
нас багато
[nas bahato]

Thousands chanted this in Russia
At Aleksei Navalny’s funeral
Where it was illegal to be

And they aren’t covering their faces, either.

This is for Lulia and Daria Navalny
Who have vowed to carry his dream
And for all of the hope that Putin can never kill

Ideas can’t be killed
Only their containers smashed
And their advent delayed

This is for the sacrifices of
Myrlie and Medger Evers
Bayard Rustin
Mamie Till- Mobley and Emmitt Till
And the open casket that forced America to gaze into an abyss
That was also gazing

And for the patience
Of John Lewis
And all of the people
Who still continue to cross the Edmond Pettits Bridge annually

Even though it still continues to be named
After a Klansman

This is for the voice of Fannie Lou Hammer
Who told us
“Stay together children”

And the music of Martha Redbone
Who is a lover
And a Mother
And a sister, too

She is bold enough to ask god:
Why can’t we talk about it?

And for Donnie Hathaway who fell
And Roberta Flack who supported his sky
As long as she could

For Tammy Terrell who consorted with Marvin Gaye
Their words and music still work
And still matter

You are my loves
You are my heavens
You make me sing
La Dee Da

This is for all of the Women who
Like an Egyptian Goddess
Hold up the sky
Giving shelter to the earth

For the rage of Nadya Tolokonnikova,
Lead singer of Pussy Riot
And for Harvey Milk
And all of the us’s in the U.S.

And, for a bunch of other people, too
Who you won’t ever learn about in school
Because they are too diverse to be included
In orthodox versions of Ameri-can’t History.

Let our actions in the world
Build elegant lattice like ladders into afrofutures
In the likeness of the subatomic grid structures
Found in the gold formed in supernovas

(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)

(Image credit 1: Untitled, Firelei Báez / Smithsonian) (Image credit 2: Untitled, John Armleder / Museum of Modern Art)

At Play Amidst the Strangeness and the Charm: for Black “Mystery” Month 2024

Is there a 30,000 foot view
Above the burning and banned books
The global rise of Nationalisms
And the desire for new Green Books
For Black, Brown, Purple, and Rainbow people?

Above the Operation Wet Back interment camps
And gated country
With gated communities
And gerrymandered voting districts
Where guns speak louder than people
And Headdresses, fezes, or yarmulkes
Are tantamount to wearing targets
And, a pregnant woman has no choice?

Is there a place where our greatest thoughts and Ideals have gone
At play amidst the strangeness and the charm?
A  Black Mystery poem
For Black “Mystery” month
Because suddenly it’s becoming forbidden to be taught about ourselves

As if words hurled at eternity
Can be made to disappear into Black Holes
To be forgotten and spaghettified
Passing the event horizons of cosmic shredders.

May we, Ray Bradbury-like, become the books they burn
Before 2024 becomes 1984
And we all die because of 451 degrees of separation
The resulting carbon emissions hastening global warming.

(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)

(Image credit 1: Léon Ferrari: ‘Justice’ by Rogelio Irurtia + ‘The Seven Apocalyptical Trumpets’ by Dürer” / Tate)

(Image credit 2: Gabor Peterdi: Apocalypse / Smithsonian American Art Museum)