The black grind, the black rind
Dark as coal, Dark as kohl
Sinful and bitter as a cynic suckled on the
Fruit of a burnt scorched earth
The smell, the smell, oh gods, the smell,
A siren, a siren, and I give in.
My mouth, My mouth, the oil seeps in
A Styxian ambrosia
I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise
Of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity
where I have no choice but to breathe its gasoline fumes,
so different than the smell of diesel,
Wheat, and the hard honest sweat that you get
when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in
On a hot heavy day
I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay
My course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read
They inspired me, widened me, and taught
My mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around
Sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of
A chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields
where the harvest is coming in
And the row of combines marching in the lines
Of swath on a land like quilted cloth
With swatches of green and gold, a pageantry
As old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough
look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain
I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore,
I swore, I would travel, experience more
than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.
I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe
Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the
Desire to flee my own space, hearth and home
My feet were itchy, you see?
I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany
I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh
To my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care
For this city of the Bear
It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air,
In the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair
Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck
hung like a flag ready at the beck
And call of a protest at the Berlin Wall
Which had its fall not too long ago at all
You could feel the history in this city,
Sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag
Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag
From a World War where they exchanged
One dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged
In this city divided between East and West
You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest
Of a people who are charged with: Lest WE forget
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei
You can see it echoed in the eyes
The memories of a people who let the Jews die
But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age,
In questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,
There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create
A dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with
The willingness to encompass more than the limits of
of theology, nationality, and blind ideology
They taught me that it was ok to open my mind
to find conversation late at night in a coffee shop
Open far past the hour of closing
and well on the way to first light
I met the Prof, a man with salt and pepper hair,
Grizzled but with a statesman air,
He used to be an Anglican priest, ordained,
But found he was chained to the bedside
Of the old, and sought to find inside a faith that had died
So he came back to teach English to the senior high,
And to me, this English speaking guy,
A irony I saw and met with a grin, wry
He challenged my concepts, the hardened precepts
of a narrow neo-conservatism, airtight faith, trapped in the chasm
Of propaganda, and as he saw it - Indoctrination,
Opening the mind from the culture I lived in
I had to make the point, No... I'm not an American
So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty
For really good coffee and a company that delights
In the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far
From the plebeian woes of a city that has no personality
as far as personality goes
It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid
I'm in English this year at the University, I'm returning to my first love, after a long absence.
It was that old familiar sensation that came back that surprised me. You know, the one that you associate with going back to school, cheesewagons, stale lunch bread, excitement and anxiety all at once.
It was nostalgic, no, it is like living through nostalgia. I'm in English this year, and it's like experiencing my first year all over again. I'm reminded of this as I walk into the first english class of the day, and the teacher is abstract random, like a certain boss I had over summer. I'm reminded of this by the characters that walk in, there's a girl with make up like a geisha, another that is epically Goth, a guy with wire rim glasses who wants to be a author, another, a student from Iceland. You can smell the subculture.
I keep expecting the smell of ozone stress and slight panic I felt all of last year when I was taking the sciences. Instead, I have readings in subjects I find fascinating, instead of nigh incomprehensible. Metaphor is my territory again, no longer am I wandering in the strange land of nucleic acids, Lewis structures and elimination reactions. Some parts of today felt like walking through a waking dream, waiting for me to wake up and realize that I'm on a path I'd turned away from.
I have poetry class next. Oh sweet simile, rapturous rhyme and rhythm!
Yeah, I'm a geek.
