Big Bam Boom

(Old College Poetry -haha)

I am sick of the poetry readings I attend.
Bored with poets reducing
City warfare
to the sounds on a page.
Bing Bam Boom, they shout,
Bing Bam Boom, they yell.

Bing fucking bam boom

doesn’t even speak of the sounds I hear,
outside my window on Westminister
in Venice
at night.
Bing Bam Boom,
those poets said.

I wanted to tell them
when the gangsta kids
in my neighborhood
practiced shooting
on the murals
of superman, and wonder woman,
in the elementary school
next street down
It fucking doesn’t sound like that
I didn’t even hear the sounds
of the gunshots
that killed my neighbor
by the bank
Monday night

When I heard that poem
When I heard that last Bing Bam Boom
I wanted to
go home,
rip up all my poems
because I tell you
I cannot describe any of it
And if writing poetry means
reducing what happens in too many
neighborhoods to Bing Bam Boom
or reducing human suffering to pat digestible
sound bites
I am ready to quit.

That’s why
I never wrote about the time the helicopter
circled my apartment.
I so mesmerized
by the sound,
it so similar to the sample on my CD
that I walk out onto the street
and followed the spot light
until the police officers yelled at me
to

STOP,

GET BACK

and questioned me if I saw a man with a knife

So I never put it on paper
because on paper
because on paper
because on the
computer screen
or the
best stereo equipment

Can never capture the
music
of helicopter wings
of police yelling
or the sounds of gunshots
or the sounds of mourning
or the despair I feel when it all happens.

Because in the echo
between shots,
in the silence afterwards
when
the only sounds
are cars passing by

What I hear are histories

OUR

HISTORIES

OF
GENOCIDE:

slavery
Jim Crow
the failure to up hold
the Treaty of Guatalope
and all the other treaties
Operation Wetback
the Vietnam wars
and it’s refugees
Laos, Cambodia
Segregation
the Trail of Tears
the Chinese men
being blown up
by dynamite
while building the railroads
and in the gold mines
the Internment camps
and Sugar Plantations
the Cotton Plantations
the Reservations.
and the suffering of women of color
and 209
and 187
the LA Uprising
and Vincent Chin,
and more
many more

And in this silence,

Now

I can hear my own
inability
to convey it well.