Oakland Poem (Pre-Occupied)

This is actually happening. We are really here.

One day after the revolution may or may not have been rained out (rescheduled for a sunnier day), I return from the heights of Big Sur, overlooking Salinas Valley, where, from a wind-topped perch, we looked west to the ocean and up to the stars and remembered that
This is actually happening. We are really here.

When boys in suits had eyes too aggressive and hungry for some flesh or money or something unseen and unknown, which colored their pallors jade with sunglasses and trophies, richly printed certificates and sent them into the shark tank, I closed my mouth, sat down thinking
This is actually happening. We are really here.

On the train as the colored peoples funneled into dirty openings, with eyes to occupations, some of which were predatory, while others were benign, there were stories printed on tearing staining pages about trauma and its resulting eccentricities and as I lowered the book to look around, it dawned on me that
This is actually happening. We are really here.

And I tried to tell him what I’d felt, I tried, and as his intellectual’s sneer took over across his face, I realized that my soul’s struggle was destined to be distilled to a rhetorical argument that could be won or lost solely on tact and I lowered my eyes, thinking back to all those who had not welcomed me into their home and walked on by with the word Sex written all over the walls and those others with hands extended to allies and eyes burning down for possible deception and the words and the ideals of the worlds we could inhabit and how it sounded to Her ears, the neverfading Her for whom all courageous acts are performed, and the necessity of violence, and the subtle insinuation of violence that was always already there all along, and the images of those in the streets with grins and brightly colored clothes, flowing in the winter wind, who came out in droves until there was the suggestion of a corporal threat, an economic threat, a smear on an otherwise perfect record, and the implications of what it is we’re all actually fighting for, and besides their points are those with clenched jaws, those who have been training, those who are willing to go down even if victory could be an illusion, and all the loads stacked up on their backs, stored bluntly in the corners of their eyes and muscles of their throats, and I look from face to face and am struck by something and I wonder how many others are also struck by the single outstanding fact that
This is actually happening. We are really here.

And back on that mountaintop, where there were no houses, and just beyond, Salinas Valley, East of Eden, making whatever was west, in this case, Us, Eden, and I thought of work and every body’s vision and what we are all each individually working for, fighting for, and how it’s usually the opposite of what those we are fighting against are fighting for, and generally hilariously different from what that fringe radical over there is fighting for, but beneath the surface bubbles a kind of conviction, and I looked up to the sky, which was still blue, in its last gasp of blue before a week of rain was to come to wash away the stories of last year, and I thought of you and how you and I had kissed once upon a time and how I knew in that moment that when things are right there is no fight, only surrender, and there’s something in that surrender that feels - dare I say – holy, except that was once upon a time, which was a time that has now since passed and I now find myself a lone ghost, walking amidst the ten thousand revolutions constantly being played out on a daily basis, but in that moment, that moment of thought, I found myself, I occupied myself and like a plane crashing into a tower on a television screen, I fumbled in the smoke with empty hands, repeating over and over the phrases
This is actually happening. We are really here.