I’m happy to announce that my first poetry collection, The Blackened Blues, is available wherever you buy books (yes, *wherever*, so you don’t have to put more money in Rocket Man’s pocket; you can go directly to my publisher, Finishing Line Press, or support my pals (and 1455 partners) at D.C.’s The Potter’s House).
THE BLACKENED BLUES is part of a large and ongoing project that discusses (and celebrates) some of the author’s personal heroes who remain far less celebrated than they deserve to be. As it happens, many of them are musicians, hampered in various ways by discrimination, ranging from old fashioned racism to institutional and cultural indifference. Though there’s an elegiac sadness suffusing these poems, there’s also acknowledgment of defiant genius: they fought their battles bravely, in their art and in their lives. This collection seeks to capture something (or, hopefully, more than a few things) essential about their lives, bearing witness while also paying homage.
I’d like to introduce the collection, one poem at a time (in the order they appear in the book), and tell a little bit about the inspiration for each, by way of explanation and in tribute.
Next up is “Himmler’s First Blasphemy” (and thanks again to the great Exterminating Angel Press for publishing this one in January 2021).
Himmler’s First Blasphemy
Is it possible Hitler’s depraved accomplice had a sense of humor?
How else to account for those locales
he chose? Unsullied landscapes
unfit for grotesque deeds:
Assailing Nature’s mise-en-scène.
Or did he believe
he was acting in accordance
with his whiter God’s wishes?
Or worse, revamping the rough draft
of a divine architect—with infallible designs
but insufficient resources?
(So many things
to contend with, each second something else
He was obliged to oversee or invent.
We don’t, after all, judge geniuses
by scribbled notes left in drawers,
or the stalled progress of sketches
dropped on laboratory floors.
If not for the intrusions of bland men
with honorable intentions, the red ink
would be erased, a revised text enduring
as the permanent record. So
Successive generations would learn
differently, and revere these consecrated sites
where difficult work got done, inking
black numbers on arms, defiling
the flesh, organizing bodies like so
many library books waiting to be
checked out.)
His aspersive vision:
A new alchemy commissioned
by the uncorrupted hand of History.
A better future freed
from abominations, begging erasure
from a distracted deity
and stern disciples, willing to perfect,
at last, the little things
He lamented not making
less defective—the first time
He tried.
While I could probably get away with claiming this poem was written in recent weeks, it was actually completed before the 2016 election. It was inspired by a book reading I attended, where the author mentioned that, doing research for her project, she visited several concentration camps and was astonished at how it seemed the sites were chosen because of their physical/geographic beauty. Layer upon layer of irony and provocation; an in-your-face perversity that adds insult to injury, etc.
This stuck with me and caused me to acknowledge that, in the service of evil — and once one has committed to it, there is no bottom to the depravity. Even acts we can, without ambiguity, denounce and define (evil, period), are justified in the minds of those who commit them…what precedes such psychopathy (and yes, what does it say about history, and today, and the future)? If nothing else, it caused me to contemplate the mindset of a human being to not only advocate for, but help engineer such atrocity. Something is broken in them, sure; but something had to be built in order to do the breaking. That, it seems (and forgive the cliche) is the root of the evil.
