New letters

We gotta make
some new letters
got some truths
need saying
but 24?

Who you joking?

Get your shovel
Time to raise up
Those turns of tongue
That made space
For all
Those that turned
One into community
Shame into healing
Future-into-now-into-before

Find yours
Then we play
A rap
A beat
Tongue turned gymnast
A symphony written to be played by all

Pehiw W2022

"Old conventions like the horse before the cart"

“Old conventions like the horse before the cart”*
Like negotiation before the battle
Like the meek shall inherit

No compromise
No erasure
No lies

Reclaim your body
Let your Uterus wander**

Over to parliament
Down to the taverns
In the sky
Up above,

Let it “terrorize”
While we mother this economy
Send business to bed
No dinner
No dessert.

Then all who are left

Load ancestor plate!
Feast!

Take measure of abundance
And debate new words
Needed for better futures.

NanaBjörn Preparing 2022
*Leonard Cohen
**If you have one, otherwise send what you want

Meditations on shame

I thought you knew
-time to let the bad in-
Scarred hands
Open latch

Breathe

Exhale shame

Then the word

Then the very concept

That is the chains of church men

Put down that flog

IT IS DONE!

There are infinite versions worse
Same as there are better

Exhale envy

That better you
Let them lend strength
That worse you
Lend them yours

Give them hope

There is a time and place
When horror
Is not an all

A time to play with letters
A time to mix the colours
A time to swim in melody
A time to breathe

NanaBjörn Wandering 2022

No Room!

No Room!

At heart
At Inn
At table

No Room!

Lie down
Smell dirt
Gingers hear
Mossy truths
Spiky stories
Granite libraries

No Room!

Stay?
Fight?
Exit strong?
Eshew walls?

Oceans got room
Sky got space
Dirt got depth

Take your room

Make it yours

Pehiw W2022

Babies with new names for hard times

I ask the story
Knowing you lie
Like Cinderella
Stupid prince
This kingdom
Needs new carer

New words
New economies
New lies
Forged by communities
Around fires
Overseen by babies
With new names
For hard times
It was never right
You helped create this world
You don’t bother this lie
You can’t see the harm,
You fed hungry

A Wiitiigo
This hunger never ends
You got us used to feeding greed
Cinderalla’s Insta-party pics-
Shoe ads
Perfect wedding
Then what?

Then what?
Face blind moron.
Enlightened godessmothers
Raised on Greer and Marx
Intersectional warriors
At the last ball
Midwives of death

Last dance –
This lie too thread worn,
Midnight will come
And we will face it’s truth.

NanaBjörn Preparing 2022

The kids don’t mind

The kids don’t mind
Don’t expect more.
Didn’t grasp
As we watched walls
The lies of progress
The fantasies of civility
The shadows we loved

[The day shows the stage
The illusion is broken]

Avalanche
Artery to everything
Lost to hate scare men
Money greedy
Lonely makers

NB Preparing 2022

Taught ma kid bout the interest rates

Taught ma kid
Bout the interest rates
Of men in suits
Playing games of chance
Trying on futures
- Yours and mine -
For bigger house
Thinner wives
Who play the curve*
Like a slip and slide
Who juggles balance books
An intricate
Ballet
Even as fire
Consumes the stage
Audience chokes
No applause-
Too audacious
Performance art
it leaves us gasping.
Taught my kid
Correlation
Is not causation
Bout folks playing
R2
Con-fi-dence
Peer review
A trip tease
Shame
With no ending
Fake or real
All is artifice
Keep the lights low
Don’t want black and white
Ready for a rainbow
Truths
Encrusted in place
In communities of care
And the land beneath your feet.

NanaBjörn Preparing 2022
*Phillips curve

Strange geometries

Cat lets me
Writing desk
In return for soft touches

She don’t give a damn
Picket fence bourgeois values
Clever a/i(lussions)
Ivory tower cred

She bears witness
To the afternoon jewels
Dads with babies
Suspiciously unworshipful canines
Forgetful fellows
Ever happy for the daily updates

I got no “community” to return to
But I got the tools to make new ones
Tattooed with plans
By old ones
Like a puzzle

We gotta get together
Before we can see the image
Forget raising barns
Its time to raise people

Alone-(a)lie

Cause all those strange geometries
That make you
Have a counterpart
And a wholeness

Pehiw 2022

The sunrises of we

This reclaiming
Becoming

Is not

About what

I put on my body

Except the medicines
Feathers in hands

We work circle
Don’t be fooled

Our warriors
Walk many paths
Don many vestments

So let’s be kind

My becoming
Part bureaucrat
Service of the civil

Part gangster

Cause
Anger
Shame
Reclaim
Comes in many hues
Yours
Another
Color
To add to the sunrises of we.

Pehiw 2022