henry 7. reneau, jr.
Five Poems
The Second Sermon in The Trumpland
1.
In Hungerland the corporate blight eats the world: the swooshing
sound of cars, like hydrocarbons
blurring highways the bleeding mascara of oil.
The ICE Gestapo of tender care facilities, renditioned
infant enemy combatants, like Gitmo,
the forever foreign interred
in a country with no conscience, the cattle cars of deportation, &
conveyor belt gimp of post-racial,
the hyphenated way some are reminded that they don't belong:
the Trail of Tears ant-
like trudge a tortuous march of dispossessed,
the legislated genocide of Apache,
Comanche,
Blackhawk, Cheyenne & Sioux . . .
They are the tempered bricks in the walls of your house.
2.
Something glints /
like Tears / or shackles ironed to ankles or
foreign flight to dispossession
/ that can be seen from / space:
I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls
better than me, believe me—and I'll build them very
inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our
southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for
that wall. Mark my words.
3.
Amerikkka: the latitude & longitude of
expendable as . . .
Here where $$$ are Divine
because they mean to get what they wants when they want it.
Here where many more are Others. Because it is easier
to build fear of
than build a wall.
4.
Restitution: the Army naming their helicopters /
after the murdered Indians they disappeared //
5.
The outliers
in fear of the hate that makes hate.
Outside the bell curve entitlement
that turns a blind eye
whose true horror
is indifference: to make what is wrong
the right thing to do.
6.
If we do nothing / then so are we //
Note: Italicized quote by Donald Trump, 2015.
Penitentiary-fornia #1
In a society that imprisons unjustly, the only place for a just person
is in prison.—Geronimo Pratt
Cali paved the palms & orange trees
when fear gave way to greed, with concertina-wire, slab concrete
& steel—slumlord
to tattooed teardrop eyes that enumerated kills. They set-trippin’
bangers on swoll, hobbled Crip-walk. ball & chain draggin' 25 to life.
They bodies padlocked to foot-shuffle do-da, chain-link shackled &
waist cinched to profit margins, circling a Panopticon fish-bowl six by
twelve & count-time harried by Ku Klux badges of C.D.C. They Denver
Lane Piru sweating lock-down funk, once gansta' rap role model,
born on the wrong side of get rich or die trying.
They new-booty pumpkin-suits: strip-search, squat &
cough, dodging shot-callers & shanks, racism, shakedowns & fistfights.
They E11649, contraband tattooed with ambidextrous clowns: Smile now/
Cry later—once street corner balla' &
dope sack. Once chaos with bullets holding midnight hostage.
They 23/7, fetus-coiled in solitary confined, the gleam of Redrum
wound tight to madness
caged in a guv’ment-bland backdrop. They industrious lust ejaculates
wet sounds of sexual need &
material want.
They 24/7 the fires of the forge run hot,
fashioning the fallen from the abyss. They badly drawn boys
outside the lines,
cursing the free world &
perfecting their major-league, parolee pitch.
Soon, John Q. Citizen must leave the mall; so they pile the stones &
wait.
Penitentiary-fornia #2
there isn’t much out there
more terrifying to the powers that be
than a tribe of people
gyrating & drumming their entire damn selves
they bury them
in microcosms of Amerikkka
the punishment of poverty
for profit: slow simmering
out of sight
& out of mind
in cells within cell-blocks the Panopticon
of pie-sliced coffins
arrayed around a bull’s eye
the disobedient strong &
compliant weak the minds two jacks short of a full deck
poverty sewn into a kingdom of pumpkin suits:
the strip-search
squat &
cough
to show the small-minded badges
that the pockets
in their flesh are empty
the concrete & steel
of stark binaries: they must be guilty
because the po-lice came to they door:
the good & the bad
the innocent poor &
marginalized Other
the right & the wrong the legally sane & criminally insane
the dog chained to a post
& no love
for what exists
beyond its periphery
that seems to continue forever &
endure before us like the sun
Penitentiary-fornia #3
The first time they fall asleep inside,
they forget. They wake up free & then, they remember.
The whispering conspiracies of din, & Fuck me runnin!!
the morbid logic of the deviant tongue, the caged
Bedlam of their pacing, inside a perimeter of concertina wire:
circling, circling
& circling around the drama, the gray concrete vaults
of misery biding time, like alloys of different densities abrade.
But nobody cares
where or whom they are; because Nobody's there.
Imagine: a solitude so dark, you lose all sense of time,
of where you are, & whom you are.
Back in 2014,
a team of British researchers made headlines
for producing the blackest material known to science.
Called Vantablack, the material was so black,
it absorbed all but 0.035 percent of visible light, which means
to our eyes, it was borderline invisible.
The claustrophobic lock-down: every convict
is a bated anger &
maybe, the compression of remorse, scheming to javelin their spear
into the face of God.
The concussion of bodily harm, confined in tight spaces
of phallic anxiety. The ever-present jangling of brass turn-keys.
The cell-soldier who heckles: I could kill onna' these Laws!
The visiting room rants,
reckless as the seamless energy
of frustration. Does the container
change the contained? Every insult, a foregone conclusion:
what they were, before they came to the Pen,
ain't who they gonna' be when they finally get out.
Oz
when all else fails fear becomes the traditional response. everyone with bad dreams—
gears wheels & spindles exploded in all directions—a nation of foreign thoughts & voices
like isolated cogs in a machinery of many imported parts
an automated grinding away of civility. it’s the times we live in.
so hard to feel safe behind the police-state tape of yellow caution
the “please, move back” as we convince ourselves
that some of us are less than others of our species—
repeating traditional Cants of massive aggressive indifference
miming the oxymoron of deafening silence. the “i'm sorry” of false apology
that sounds like feral teeth sinking into hearts dying a Jesus-death.
going along to get along selfishly accepting what should not be allowable
when Law poses as stability so the few can rob the many.
the erasure of dreams in the lucrative space between atrocities &
that’s-the-way-it’s-always-been: have-naughts armored in silent scars
come back to haunt from the winter of their Malcolm-tent a great water
receding to the skyscraper arch of tsunami an imminent exasperation of protest
a welling of uprising & the slighted mob
entangled in the dimming light of change is gonna’ come: outside agitators heathen
indigenous illegal aliens & ISIS terrorists the labels that frighten the slumbering
masses dreaming security
their fervent desires masked as individuality. transfixed by the shiny &
the compact the debit card instant gratification & add-to-cart amazon.com cell phones &
3-D action movies—a synthetic push-pull force of conventional wounds
simultaneously enforced upon us & generated from amongst us:
a premeditated greed
within the corporate body & the small, more digestible parts
from which it gains its most agreeable profit.
we ain’t talking Chihuahuas nipping at heels herding the flock of activist occupy &
dissent to its allocated space; these be Dobermans & Pit Bulls under color of Law—
the bared teeth of decent society that crumbles dreams to rubble at Rev. Dr. King’s feet
legalizing dispossession
with the dark deportation agenda of Apartheid Arizona—the illegal
alien silhouette cast adrift upon a sea of tribal instinct & the seasonal lambs
in wolf’s clothing
posing as Occupy Amerikkka: an energy of blind hope both industrious & pernicious
like Mickey Mouse on spun
beneath the Land of Oz. their complacent hindsight of words unspoken
in contradiction to anxious hearts—
a relentlessly horizontal monotony of stuck-on-stupid
placated by guest-expert opinion. the talkin’ loud & sayin’ nothin’
recession of common sense & civility torquing the acceleration of greed
to an unnatural Pavlovian conditioned reflex. a lack of We the People
in fear of E Pluribus Unum like holding on to something dangerous & scared to let go.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, a spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance, and his collection, The Book Of Blue(s) : Tryin' To Make A Dollar Outta' Fifteen Cents, was a finalist for the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net.