Stay Human: Poetry and Prose

Preface

In this material world in which we live, what part does the human being play in his or her own existence? Is perception reality? And if it is not reality, who controls perception, and how?

Considering what the world is now, with all of the conflicts and misery, the destructive brutality, and violence, man is still as he has always been. He remains callously competitive, acquisitive, and a narcissist; so, of course, the system which he has built around him is as he is. And what he is, I am, or certainly have been, a creature of materialism and mindless consumption, too well-adjusted to a sick society. Acculturated into a series of institutions, be they political, legal, religious, monetary; to institutions of familial values, social class, and occupational specialty. These are the places and structures that influence and shape understanding and create the perspective in which reality is interpreted.

Incrementally, society has been formulated to control thinking. Nothing is natural, and the so-called citizen knows not self-reliance, but only conformity. The government is God, and money is The Lord. We're born ignorant to ignorant parents in a society that's ignorant; so, ignorance is the norm. Indoctrination, we call “education,” hypnotism, “entertainment”; we refer to criminals as our leaders, and we “believe” that the lie is truth because our collective mind has never really been our own.

Our thoughts are like driftwood; society is the river, flowing always into the ocean, but we know not the moon. We are out of rhythm, off balance, and out of sync with nature. The very reason we do not know that we've been lied to, conditioned, and brainwashed is because we have been lied to, conditioned, and brainwashed! My identity itself has been prepackaged for me; so was my daddy’s, and his before him. Prepackaged at different levels for different reasons at different times.

A blind man's bluff is this game of compliance, and the pathology of the rich is whom and what we serve. For my entire life, I've recklessly wondered why all of this is, pondering who I am, and what the reason is for this madness. And I believed, attempting to make the world less complicated, gazing intently through the skewed lenses I'd formulated for myself simply by being alive, a slave to my emotions and the opinions of others. Unknowingly, we take the way from man; from our parents, teachers, coaches, peer groups, and we adapt to our environment accordingly, thinking thoughts manufactured by the machine, believing.

There's a quote by Langston Hughes where he says, “When you turn the corner and run into yourself, then you know that you have turned all of the corners that are left.” This is that. This is me, coming to a place in life and realizing that it was me. I am the world, and all of my observations of the world and its madness are observations of me. This book is, strangely enough, at its core, the long process of my individual attempt at change. Stay Human is me searching for my soul. It was written in various places in America. It was written while I battled with myself about the meaning of life, mostly straddling the fence with at least two or three toes still in the streets. A double-minded man, me, is unstable in all that he does. Stay Human is harsh and judgmental, and even vicious in spots. I decided to put it out while attempting to write a book dedicated to my mother about beautiful things. The poem “Stay Human” actually being the first of such writings for her book. I'm obviously not quite ready, shall we say, to being beautiful for an entire book. Not yet! I'd like to think, like Assata said, “I must confess that waltzes do not move me. I have no sympathy for symphonies. I guess I hummed the Blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.” [...]