Here Comes A Wk In Prgrs: Crazy Goings On At Great Eastern Hotel

Prisoner

you ask me
if i have ever been to prison
been to prison
your world
of murderers
and thieves
of hatred
and jealousy
of death....
and you ask me
if i have ever been to prison

i answer
yes
i am still there
tryin to
escape......

Mutabaruka:

the work in progress called EXILE AND PRISON continues here...

'Dis poem is watching u
tryin' to make sense of this dis poem
Dis poem is messing up your brains
makin u want to stop listnenin to dis poem
But you shall not stop listenin to dis poem
u need to know what will be said next in dis poem'
 
Dis Poem - Mutabaruka
 
The snare of being a 'creative'...
We came, we saw Mutabaruka, we were happy when
Mutabaruka said 'american imperialism' and we laughed,
we saluted, we felt odd. It's the biggest cliche on
the planet but in the hands of the few who earned it,
it's just truth told simply and easy to see what the
totality of that phrase means (right now), cliche or
not.
It was free but not easy, they gave us free Guinness
Export all night. We got mighty drunk. We collapsed on
the floor at home and fell to sleep. It was at a posh
London bar. It was London contradiction.
Mutabaruka poeted veganism..they served free chicken
right after. He said 20 years ago, they would have
called the cops on him 'oh there's a rasta at the
door!", now he was taking the floor with the mic. But
(I presume) he had no illusions about the
precariousness nature of being 'accepted'. It was
supposed to be a free 'n' easy Liming event (from
Trinidad) but it felt like a publishing do where
everyone was nice. The music could rock the posh vibes
away, a little dub, reggaeton, rap..but no-one danced.
There were poets, people calling themselves 'poets'.
It's all unimportant. Just spices without the tofu.
Artificial flavouring.
In this sense, how many of us here tonight,
experienced that exile deja-vu. We were not supposed
to be here, but we were..had we crossed the wire? We
took a corner and held it. We erased a few fittings
back to our houses. We got really drunk and emo about
the possibilities, even if we are all tagged or locked
down. London contradictions...the spaces open up, the
social vector twists against itself..what could
be..could be here...a room and some people and some
music, a little beer and, and, and...
The snare of being a creative, the trap of reflection,
representation against self-expression esp. when you
have nothing to say, nothing poetic to really express.
Nothing to say about how you are living. Just seeing
things and finding a way to portray it. Simplicity for
the simple life.
It could be culture, it could be age, it could be
class..it could be me and could be you. In those
moments of sharing chips over the table, in those
moments of getting Mutabaruka right down in the soul,
in the tear duct, in the stomach...of laughing
together, of needing to cry from rightiousness.
Exile in so many people in the crowd, the poets, the
non-poets, the exile from themselves before they even
met us. We need to get our hands dirty. Dirty and
grimy from tunnelling? Some people are only getting
their hands dusty in Babylondon.

And so we continue on finally with this weblog thing...an experiment in anti-connectivity. Written somewhere..carried by laptop then disc then posted to email account then cut + pasted here...for you

autumnal winds bring on The Winter Wind

Next up experiments in amoral male utopian ellective affinty (in South London). I'm heading away from home to real temporal geographical EXILE.