Cuba, NYC 1987: Brush Away Troubles With A Transformational Grin

Cuba New Year’s Eve 
a crammed outdoor sports stadium.

Gyrating dance, jazz, 
drinks, eats and smokes. 
All along a river

sweating with 

coupled demonstrations 
of contact life and love.

Beach salsa parties 
tart with rum 
end in early morning,

when bus stop vendors 
dispense espressos 
to wrinkled clothed insomniacs.

Sunshine lightens the load, 
by exposing each day 
to what is concealed.

The dawn opens
energizing endurance 
into those who continue to live,

We who learned,

from those who passed, 
We search for our legacy 

via human history.

Standing on the beach of Cuba 
looking towards the Americas, 
I see a mirage.

erroneous rubber rafts, 
elusive floating barges,

mythological people 
shipping out on a miracle.

Fueled by the reverie 

of a blessing from a creative force,

who loved humans, 

even before 
humans ever dreamed
of praising and loving 
the creativity within themselves.

I witness 

sanctimonious ceremonies 
swim the hallowed gulf,

life-savers of discontent 

snug around waist.

I watch the dolphins laugh 
at the competitive distance 

needing to be dogpaddled, 
and at what deathly pace.

To close the spiritual 

and material gap 
between the worlds -

we all swim the seven seas 

of enchanting the disenchanted,

transforming experience into wisdom,

and ancestral perceptions 

into more than wounded egos, 

but sensitive souls 

and sensational spirits.

Only the graveness

of water's current knows 
where the boat floats to next.

I drift from Toronto

to Cuba to New York City 
Awash in the community of exiles 
who keep their culture alive,

in small backrooms, 
in cities on the edge of transforming
material and spiritual bankruptcy.

Discovered and undiscovered

places and spaces,

rich enough for immigrants 
fresh from other worlds.

No one shares 

with the new arrivals 
that this land 

is in the grips of recession.

So the immigrants celebrate 
feeling born again with privilege 

they make merriment.

Yet homesick they feel 

dead tired from scaling wealth 

ever up, towards, to be come

tomorrow's class nobility.

In New York 
the clouds above 

the skyscrapers demand 

that this city share space 
with occasional rain falling -

from far above ground, 
down onto industrious faces.

Men sitting in parking lots 

control damp streets 

with the wit contained 

within their occasional

moistened bodies.

They chair meetings of the boards, 
the homeland turf needing defending

as Little Italy fights Chinatown 
from unplanned expansion.

These territory wars separate people 
from self, fulfilling their dreams 

of personal individual liberty.

Adults could choose to live free 
and walk the neighborhood streets

eating dumplings, noodles and pizza. 

They could choose to digest the riches of our 

shared cultural culinary histories.

Instead of creating territorial boundaries.
Instead of creating unsustainable wars over resources.
Instead of consuming fear.

Instead adults teach their children to fear, 
to be in terror and to terrorize.

Adults stage grudge matches 
which threaten the community,

create next generation teenagers 

terrified of becoming teenagers in terror.

We all know from human history lessons 
that teenagers in terror terrorize -
and that groups of people 

when they gather - gang up.
Charged up daily 

by the energy of the Sun 
and becoming so heated 

that we create living battles, 
which scorch the earth dry, 
from the fiery extremes of passion.

There is no middle ground under the Sun.
The hottest ball of energy in our system is solar,
Creating solitary independence 
for each individual fused with atomic reaction.

We all know from human history 
that groups of peopled-atoms, 
when gathered protest'

resist becoming a vibrating mass -
an uncontrollable spontaneous 

combustive force of nature.

An argumentative augmenting power 

unyielding therefore an alterer

capable of altering all past forms.
That which causes reform,

dematerialization, reformation,

decomposition, decentralization.

All that exists as a previous generation,

all that which was generated by those before us,

all of that regenerates, rematerializes, reforms -

after the fall, post-dematerialization -

follows the un-forming into reshaping new forms.

All that was new renews 

and becomes renewable.

The renewed energy'

of the last felt experience,

expended energy creates expanded energy -

and all of these cycles of existence

create our newly formed uncertain futures.

The highest audience 
looks down upon Broadway 

claps thunder -
delivers lightning strikes

sharpened toothpicks 

which clean, clean bright 
the lofty pearly whites 

of caretaker smiles.

Smiles that flash-brighten 
our subways and subroutines. 

caretaker smiles that beam,

lighten up the darkness of those 

living underground unconsciously.

Like clockwork arrangers avenging,
street cleaners and sanitation engineers,
we periodically lift the concrete carpet 
to sweep under its under belly, 

and hide away for a later time,
all the dark unresolved human shame -

the hidden grudge and unseen grime

of valueless value systems.

This teeth-clenched cities.

They daily amaze and astound us.

House and cloth us.

Feed and shelter us.

Protect us from our own choices,

and daily acts of brushing away

our nightly troubles.

These streaming cities

cannot be steam-cleaned,

become so sanitized,

that their smirk at humanity

is wiped clean off,

removed from their urbane faces. 

Unseeingly and seemingly we all

wear worn-down smiles,

smirks and frowns reshaped

and when the occasion illuminates,

we are made constant, consistent, reformed

through loving choices 

and love for our choices.

The choice pieces that bring peace 

to our warring parts within.

That part of our selves 

tempted to self-destruction.

We constantly save our selves

with renewed love, and so new choices.

Eventually each one of us 

is reshaped by our choices,

remade and so inspired to remake.

Each one of us is magically shape-shifted,

bedazzled into wearing a transformational grin.


~~ Other People's Fingerprints ~~
After 1940, Miguel Barnet wrote;
“Now that the syllables of my heart
are awake in my house
I spread my voice to all the cardinal points
With a marimba and a drum
I proclaim my love for this land.”