(This was meant to go into a challenge but it wasn't until

after I wrote and tried to post, did I realize I went over the word limit.

Sorry Harry_Situation.)

**********

“It’s just you and me here. Where are others like us?”

“I don’t think there are others like us, woman.”

“But Man, then it will just be you and me for all time?”

“Pretty much according to father. As long as we follow the rules

he set for us we can live here in this garden a long time.”

“What’s a long time and what is time. I never heard that word from

you until now.”

“Time is just a thing, like when the sun comes up, it is time to wake up.

When it gets dark, it is time to sleep.”

“Man, I have been meaning to speak to you about that. You make strange

sounds coming from your nose and it keeps me not sleeping a long time.”

“What kind of noises, Woman?”

“Like a—pig? But I do not know what a pig is but you sound like one.”

“I see. Since you brought that up, there have been times where you wake me

in the middle of the night with the foulest breath that seems to come from

another part of your body.”

“Foul.”

“Yes, like—poop, but I don’t know what poop is either.”

“I am hungry, Man.”

“Then go to the garden and pick fresh fruit, but remember—stay away from the red

fruit. Father says it is sinful.”

“I have been meaning to ask, what is sin?”

“I don’t know Woman, but Father says it is terrible to eat and a sin is all I know. Father

isn’t really big on explaining himself to me.

“Before I go get us something to eat, when do we get what he called a—name?”

“Not sure. But while you get the fruit, I’ll start building a small a—dam and maybe when it gets closer to eve, Father may tell us then.”

“Okay, but you know something, Man?”

“What’s that, Woman?”

“Father should have taken the rib out of me instead of you because I am stuck with someone that doesn’t know much about anything.”

This momentous decree came as a beacon of light to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flame of withering injustice, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. says in reference to the Emancipation of Proclamation which put down on paper as law that human bondage shall officially and forever be illegal in The United States. It was declared by Abraham Lincoln in the beginning of 1863 and it cost him his life and one hundred years later the Reverend King would put his own life on the line in America’s capital city to mend together yet a broken country, like a skilled joiner carpenter. His voice erupts and is poetic, filled with the lungs necessary to baptize an entire nation. He has a minister’s cadence and a bit of a Southern drawl. As though a prophet of God could come from the state of Georgia. He was thirty-four years old.

But a hundred years later the Negro is still not free. A hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by segregation and the chains of discrimination.

The Reverend was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929, the year of The Great Depression and grew up singing in The Ebenezer Baptist Church Choir. During the movie premiere of “Gone with the Wind” in his hometown, the Reverend was ten years old and the Ebenezer Choir was hired to sing for the segregated event--a cocktail party inside a house modeled after the antebellum mansion in the film--and made to dress up as nineteenth century slaves for an authentic essence.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution… it was a promise [for] all men, yes, black men as well as white men, the unalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It’s said that when his parents first taught him the history of the United States his immediate instinct was a vow to never forgive white folks and to hold a contempt of hatred in his heart for them for as long as he so lived. Twenty-four years later, he’d deliver the most powerful sermon in the history of The United States.

We cannot walk alone. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. We are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

A doctor highly advised him, during his fame and due to the stress he carried, that he seek psychiatric help which he refused, knowing the FBI would intercept any record of his most personal and vulnerable self and use it against him and his movement. The FBI so wanted to demolish the movement of equality and bury the impact of the Reverend that they tapped his phones and tapped his house and tapped the house of his mistress too and were destined to expose his acts of adultery just before he was assassinated. Late in his brief term on earth, Jesse Jackson remembers a sobering conversation with him that Jackson himself didn’t fully appreciate at the time, where the Reverend King admitted he felt so alone and awfully tired and on the very brinks of total collapse. His own childhood dream was to deliver sermons at a small Baptist church in a quiet country town but he gave up this dream to achieve a greater fate for America in its entirety.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Those closest to him remember him joking casually about his own death, as though he knew he had joined the realm of immortality and that his flesh was fixing to depart from this world. He often said that some of us won’t live to be fifty so we ought to do Good right now.

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside let freedom ring.

He was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 and taken back home to Atlanta where tens of thousands of Southerners mourned for a week.

At the funeral, when his father looks through the glass at his dead son, he screams horrid enough to awaken sleeping bears hemispheres away. It’s an uncontrolled and shrill screeching risen from the depths of pain and torture and grief in his Spirit. It was his son and his son sacrificed himself out of love in the ideals of his country to be baptized.

When we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

A sea of men and women in the audience of many races in attendance for the sake of dreams. It was a Wednesday afternoon. King opens by proclaiming what is fixing to occur will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

And it can almost be heard still, the booming and thunderous and biblical voice of the Reverend scoring our trials as a nation a half century later as we still struggle and strive to come together, to be born again in the name of Life and Liberty and Equality for all of Mankind.

Two boys or girls trying to live their lives

Wanting nothing but to be happy

Ending up getting killed with a knife

By people that know nothing about life

A sinner, that's what they see in us

It’s like the same god they pray for

And the same one that was on the cross

Threw us on earth and closed the door

Their dream is to see us dead

Drinking our blood instead of wine

Eating our souls instead of bread

For them doing that is something fine

Eating pig is nothing but a sin

But ruining lives is a virtue

Smoking and drinking is forbidden

But burning our skins is a clue

Questioning Satan's sexuality

Thinking that hell was made for us

They all believe in this banality

Won't even let us discuss

Even the anti-christ would agree with us

Love is in our hearts and souls

The only thing that they have is a golden cross

But who cares about their rules

Used to live inside a room

With no capacity to bloom

Scared to face reality

Ignoring his true face and beauty

The door was always open

But he preferred staying inside

Scared to see his happiness stolen

Killing the breath of every desire

Finally he decided to leave

Avoiding his own grief

His eyes married the darkness

Couldn't hide his true face

Crossing the door was his first step

The first time he felt like himself

Struggling for years, asking for help

Finally he will be happy in his shelf

Nothing on the list of his needs

Except support and time to proceed

The first second out of prison

Already able to see the horizon

Comfortable in his own skin

Not wearing a mask anymore

Happy with people around him

Giving him the feeling that he's gonna win

Many questions may be asked

A lot of whispers could be made

But whatever happens

He will always be him

the measure of my cup

cannot hold,

though in the negative

I see its ample

curve and mold,

like the world

pressed against

the bottom of

the universe,

and the itch

in my palm

to assess

my lifeline

is overwhelming

from time to time

I can only

stir,

a word

a line

in the ocean

of my emotion

that overflows

in this body

that is

never

really

mine

2020 APR 07

The facade

of normalacy

that so aptly

masks

humanity

in duress

of crisis

and calamity

peels like

laughter

off the cells

of our sanity

like nails

across

the bored

long since

unschooling

the mannerisms

of civility

growing

cold or weary

and unwieldy

amid signs

and cues

all baring

chains

of gravity

2020 MAR 25

Death's hanging on air. It permeates dialogue.

It’s in patterns of their Newspeak.

Media reeks of it.

Misreading fine print.

Lamplights dangle like glowering

vulture necks.

Today we walk with this heavy shuffle of the shoes.

Tonight we shiver under mountains of worries and what-ifs...

The shadow stretches down forbidden streets

where feet traffic has long been barred.

The stone starts to roll down the hill and gather speed quickly.

Vegetation becomes embeded in it’s grey belly as it rolls on.

I wonder when I’ll see another day that resembles the days of before...

...when worries were a simple breed...

A hunger for simplicity...

The stone continues to roll and pick up nightmares,

we see a giant darkness that is cast over the valley...

When will we be free again?...

Were we ever free before?...

Questions come and dance like rain

down upon our window-pane.

©

3/23/20

Fallen Sparrow (Alessa Cleanse)

Edit #2

Charged by the pressure in a whisper...

Hanging desperate on the edge of one response, like a junkie in a puke-stained alley,

I really had not one more place to go...

There’s only here, and what evokes raw fear...

The remnants of an age shout their blessings from their windows without pause...

A black light hangs deep within my heart...

The night draws down, and lifts me out...

It’s needle slips through my chest, and slips back out my back, making quick work of my exposed and pink sense of free will...

Now I’ll walk outside and pick up tickles from the crowd on my antenna...

“Are you coming in, Field Commander?...”

I can’t deny it or concur!...

...There’s so little light for humanity to follow, so we constantly bicker with ourselves over whether or not our existence matters when it’s bathed in longish shadows that consume each passing hour...

The bridge that takes us home will not stay still...It’s always trembling!...

The way back to who I was is marred by holes, and the languishing boards on the

bridge...

When I walk along it, I know there’s great risk, and I wonder who it is below

who watches with a sense of pride...

I’m sweating, and it soaks my brow...

We come together, like a gathering of stones upon a winding beach...

As the sun swiftly melts, the time to open like a flower beckons!...

Now the sweating sun; she’s gone in seconds, and in that time we sang and gleamed

like diamonds that discovered dreams

just when the world went up in flames...

I am now so charged by the pressure in a whisper.

©

2/25/20

Fallen Sparrow (Alessa Cleanse)

(edit #2)

How I wish to embed myself

into these tracks

that escape into nothing...

...No, their not coming back.

How I wish to insist on

this perilous act...

When you're doomed

is there room

for a blue rose

to bloom?...

How I wish to descend

with the fire at my heels

while my skin stretches back,

and the fast spinning wheels

make a rhythm that screams

of it all coming down...

...Grinding to a huge halt

At the end of the town.

How I know this will happen?...

What I think, and I feel

are two differing engines

that are closed off like steel

from each other, and what

you have all pre-supposed...

I am fucking with fire,

but I like where it goes...

©

2/14/20

Fallen Sparrow (Alessa Cleanse)