ABSD X OSD

FROM MIND TO MASSES
by Ivan Penetrante
All poems are broken poems unless they are kiss or a raised fist
For Something, Someone, A cause
So the slogan better be worth something
so that poems can be worth something,
But don’t worry I hear you
and I love what you say
I love those words from the wise to Decolonize you mind,
But mind you that your mind isn’t separated from your body
and the bodies of others
Not separated from the material world,
Materialism
Not materialistic
Don’t get twisted
You missed it
When your mind didn’t see
The shadow of the laborer,
In the products that you buy,
And the products that you walk by,
That even the time for this poem is underwritten by the labor time,
The labor time that produces
The racial time
The gender time
The sexuality time,
In the products that you buy
Lifestyles that you buy into
The consciousness that you craft
The objects around you
laced with the voice of laborers
and the shadow of the wealthy few,
Only capital
is transnational,
We’re their tools
My identity and yours, supposedly free to float?
The multiple identities in you and me: a Body-moving-and-grooving-dancing-disOriently-disrupting-discourse?
Multiple identities free and in flux?
In that logic we’re still fucked,
Because the masters master that,
Multiple identities is fine by them
They love their glass ceilings
and
their multiculturalism,
The fluid self and Diaspora-moving body doesn’t make you free,
Know the conditions of possibility,
So restart the engine or start where you’re at,
Because that rationale
Ain’t happening now
When the echoes from overseas
Oversee who we are,
Echoes of the (neo)colonized
Landless and urban poor
To severing of ties
And the severing of tongues
The Balikbayan box coffins
The U.S. in us
from Hamleting and the scorched-earth-tactics-water-board-trajectory
Scorched our eyes and skin through time,
And we come across
when coming across
oceans
Like conveyor-belted products
Readymade, Racialized-gendered-fetishized,
Readymade-wealth making-wealth becomes an upward gravity
Money hand-over-fist to capitalist,
Trickle-down fist becoming a downward strike
And your identity
Manufactured like this,
has meaning
as it basks in the light
Of an exploitive
working
day,
But don’t fret, don’t fret,
learn the contradictions emanating from the
Basss…e
…Fret
That structures your speech, expression, and consciousness,
learn the contradictions, learn the many dimensions of you
and stay on that decolonizing mind-grind,
Or better yet,
just decolonize,
from the mind
to
matter,
Not an individual practice, be called and call forth the masses,
The decolonizing mind-grind in service
of the
massline,
Unravel the stoppage in your speech,
To express yourself,
So that we express
Ourselves
Our grievances
Our list of demands,
So that this
broken
poem
finds finality,
So that a kiss
becomes upward gravity,
So that this fist
Becomes an upward gravity,
And press it against your flaws and your privileges, bourgeois mind-traps of internalized heteropatriarchy and white supremacy,
Take inventory
take aim
remold
And upsurge the insurgent heart
and assert the brave mentality,
Learn, practice, learn, practice, learn, practice
Rectify,
Internalize to the mind
and
Seize the time
Seize the time
Seize the time!

Tags: 99%, Imperialism, occupy san diego