Loves pile high as credibility falls flat
as my heart after another "button" is pressed

Impossibility creeps to the front of mind
wanderings in the shape of a girl's secrets

Summer haze cannot strip away things
present long before I met your mouth movings

(Poetry wreaks havoc of minds unaware
of my privy billiard and/or therapy sessions)

This heart does not move in halves
but moves out of a sincere need for shelter
that is built from something honest
within the self but has yet to be found
without the help of another moving being

So Teddy, Delano, Chagal, and Holy Ghost be mine
only loves and lovers and leaders till I meet my miracle

From
"no more rosy gardens
no more craving curving
Let craving call
and beg and bawl
and face it tall
Let my soft skin have more sweet soft air on me.
Let boulders drown."

To
"Because everyone that I know
Every place that I go
Every story that I’m told
Its love
Its love
It’s love that we’re looking for"

Four Freedoms Under Siege Serialized

"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms."

The first is freedom of speech and expression-everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-anywhere in the world.**

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Annual Message to Congress,
January 6, 1941

in east delano
with all the mirrors;
i am bohemian boy
canoeing trash river,
stapled to the floor
and gunning bigger skies.

serpent belly,
i know the earth
and wednesday to wednesday
there is press
of fern and leopard
and fermentation and sloshing
concussion.

i see brick
and black
right now.
i see pattern
and small print.

could you open your mouth;
as to pour out the rain?

in the moments before dawn you’ll hear whispers: haunted breaths 
that scrape your neck like glass fingernails, razorblades in the liminality of time; 
the music in your ears will ring like church bells and 
crack like porcelain spoons in ceramic hands. the clouds will call your name, 
dip it in the sea and stain it grey, and you’ll wish you could get it back
but you’ll find yourself muted, your vocal chords tangled, 
knotted, and slit by stiffened swords in the arms of the enslaved. Cape Horn beckons
and we pretend not to hear. Senegal polishes her silver knife & I pretend that I am not unfaithful to Alexandro’s memory. if there’s no way 
to unlock my wrists then don’t bother looking for land, just turn 
my vessel around and let my eyes search for the gaze of the mountain. if there’s no way 
to silence my mind then don’t bother whispering in my ears, 
don’t be naive, 
don’t play games with me unless you can dock the ship. when the clock turns three, 
go tell Bartholomew he can take my body, it’s not mine and 
I don’t want it anymore, the blood on my neck may be my blood but 
it belongs to the blade, so tell him,
turn my bones into skeleton keys and Aranda will show you the way. 
I’ll follow your leader if you follow me, I promise, 
I promise, I promise unbroken dreams in Delano’s unbroken hands. although
my wrists are bound by plastic chains, I’ll still tell you 
to watch your step because the planks beneath your feet 
are echoing with the phantoms of lost crowns whether or not you can 
feel the spirits in the air. you can’t see but your jeweled massacres 
have bled into the suds twined around your neck,
My Dear Amasa, 
I wonder what you’d say if you knew that
there will be no sunrise.

I saw the spirit of Dorthea Lange as I looked out my window two days ago.
It was not an accident. It was not an apparition. It is time for her spirit to
come again to the great American wasteland. It is time for Dorthea to prepare for another dispiriting, but at once brutal and honest, recording of the anguish and torment and crushing poverty that awaits so many of us in the near future. No, she will not be taking portraits of Bezos and Buffett and Gates and the other other American billionaires;  rather, her spirit will see again the homeless, the jobless, the hopeless, the hungry. the utterly forlorn and forsaken of millions of us in interminably long soup lines and fellow citizens lying on folded cardboard boxes on cold cement sidewalks of virtually every city
and town in our great America. Perhaps Dorthea will create another photographic classic like "The White Angel Breadline."  No doubt, the spirit of Dorthea will be joined by the spirits of the other photographers who chronicled the American misery of the Great Depression for the Farm Bureau Administration:  Walker Evans;  Gordon Parks;  Jack Delano;  Russell Lee;  Carl Mydans;  Arthur Rostein;  John Vachon;  Theo Jung;  Ben Shahn;  John Collier;  Marion Post Wolcott. The spirits of Dorthea and her colleagues will document again the scourge of rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant workers.  Dorthea Lange's iconic "Migrant Mother" is the photographic equivalent of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize for his literay canon. Dorthea Lange should have won a Nobel Prize for her photographic portfolio. Shortly, we all shall feel the presence of Dorthea and her fellow photograpers, for soon our fellow Americans will be without jobs, without homes, without food, without hope. In fact, the beginning of this abject disaster is aleady behind us, but we are blind to what is to become.

Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks