Attached is a spoken word poem I wrote dealing with my personal thoughts and
feelings experiencing Africa for the first time (in northern Tanzania) this past fall.
Within the document is a youtube video of myself performing the piece. If this
would be viewed during the review process I would greatly appreciate it since the
poem was meant to be heard and seen, rather than read.
Africa –Cali Bushman
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGXTz3aJr-4 )
My heart is heavy.
Its blood flows slow through,
Twisted aeorta alleys, backstreet vessels.
Winding listlessly through curves, swerves, and nerves,
With no place to go- where?
Here? This brain breaths air invigorated with the polluted promises of yesterday’s
industrial age. It’s voice wheezes futile asthmatic pleas for just another day, all the
while denial of an addiction to filtered oxygen, pumped in by who?
The man? Are you talking about the man?
Oh yeah I know him. Doesn’t everyone?
He’s got that iced out bling that blinds the eyes,
With images of what I what he wants to be. I mean what you want to be, I mean
what I want to be… now I’m confused.
Choose. Between 5star or MickyDs. Toyota or Mercedes. Suburbs or cities. Does it
really matter whether you shop at Walmart, 5th Avenue, or Salvation Army. It’s all
the same… dream. And you’re living it.
Cause either way I’m driving with my crew to eat food processed into chemical, salty
sweet oblivion.
Before I go home to my perfectly artificial environment of 72 degrees Fahrenheit,
24/7 three hundred and sixty five days a year. It’s always the same… dream.
No man, there is one difference and you best get it straight. I don’t dream of making
money for materialistic manifestations of my needs.
When I sleep I fall up into a higher tomorrow with less wrongs and more rights.
You heard right, I said rights. Like everyone should have the right to speak, to live, to
choose.
Choose for themselves what they think is right or wrong. What is right and wrong?
I think I know. Cause democracies are right and free, but what about those
anomalies?
Like, weren’t we a democracy- no, more land of the free- yet for a hundred years we
had slavery.
And speaking of irony… freedom ain’t free, as in freedom cost lives, ours specifically
cost genocide.
Or genocides. Of how many cultures with histories and traditions, expressions of
love and hate, standards of right and wrong we will never know.
Well, at least that was then and this is now, right? Wrong. Right now we force our
hyperbolic hypocrisy overseas.
Aid shipped in neat white packages. Funding democracies, I mean kleptocracies, I
mean what?
By what means do I help this fucked up situation?
All I know is I know nothing, but if knowledge is nothing and life’s pursuit is
knowledge, then nothingness is life’s pursuit, so why live?
That is after all the million, I mean billion, I mean nothing seems to be enough
anymore question…
And I have no answer.
So please.
Leave my weakened voice to its self-prescribed suicide that may or may not lead to
my heart’s harmony, but will most definitely lead to my mind’s apathy, which
contributes to my generation’s complacency which translates to what?
More of the status quo? No.
I know myself and I have eyes.
And all they see is inequality. Whether it be overseas or inner city.
So argue all day about right and wrong,
But while your at it argue me thisWhere is the fairness in a minority thriving on the majority’s aching hunger?
And our brother. Mister man. All he has to do is sit up there on his screwed up
summit of self serving success to make that hunger all the more acute.
So shoot me in the foot.
But I choose my heavy heart over no heart,
My unsure mind over no mind,
My feeble voice over no voice.
What you do with yours…
that’s your choice.