BaharMeansSpring

It was a life of half filled dreams.  Tea stained ceramic cups littered the windowsill, the cold glass muted the outside world, so that trees screech wild in the wind, branches convulse in the dry air, the sky falls like uncontrollable sobs of a delirious mourning mother, and all of the maddness would be silent, extremes in a quiet atmosphere, muted by a thin layer of glass.

She never listened to her own self.  Like millions of people who society expects to do what they are told, who society does not entrust with faith in their own intuition, she never opened her ears to her own maddness or dreams.  Behind the glassy eyes was a real human being molded into a perfectionist machine.  Like a sick scientific experiement of privilege, analytical skills, and indecisiveness, all she could remember was reading a line in a book on a New York subway -- again an extremely bright sunny day muted -- insulated by the air conditioned structure of the train.  The author, who himself had once enrolled at insane asylum, which was actually no refuge to begin with, had written that "the happier people can be, the unhappier they are."

The train headed into a tunnel, the lights flickered on and off, the world waited for her with great expectations, a dead grandmother talked to her in dreams, and all she could think about was how "the happier people can be, the unhappier they are."

In the dirty city, across the street from a shiny blue bank --  a bank brand new from punishing people with heavy penalities and fines, was a gothic church.  A place of worship littered with a circle of white cops, white cops with guns, batons, bullets and big iron-pumping muscles.  Two black men surrounded by six white cops with sterioids in their arms.  The steriod side of the street smiled steroid smiles and made steroid jokes.  The black men in their autumn jackets, holding their hands out of their pockets, in the autumn air.  Waiting.  Waiting for what?

Holding his wallet in his hand, his hand intentionally out in the autumn air, so that the police do not mistake a hand in a pocket for a hidden gun and shoot him in the name of habitually racist violence against black men and then rob the english language of meaning by calling it self-defense,

Who was in his wallet?  A christmas picture of a little girl watching cartoons on a saturday afternoon waiting for him to come home?

Or was she across the street too, watching him shrug his shoulders, standing tall, over six white rats in tight blue uniforms, with buttons bursting from too much fourth of july fruit salad or a lifetime of canned thanksgiving meals, their state sponsored laughter echoed into the city like a mean ghost hording and scavengeing the hollowed out hearts of people, stealing the air from breathing cavaties.

  Welcome to America!

Six white cops with steroids in their arms surrounding two black men with family pictures in their wallets.  At a place of worship, across the street from an expensive bank, and a downtown bus stop with Asians, Latinos, Christians, Muslims, and Jamaicans.  Everybody watched the black and white-ness of America.  The perpetual violence of America.  Welcome to America.

And at night, she could not forget, the next morning, she had to file papers and figure out a way to make money in a market economy maze, but all she could do was think about the six sterioid smiling po-lice, fangs coming out of their mouths, and two black men, standing with their hands intentionally out of their pockets.

bahar