Landlessness/Houselessness

“I know they never had any intention of us being here in their plans,” said Master Frohm as my Sun Tiburcio and so many young boys and girls call him who attend the beautiful school he founded that is Frohms Martial Arts Academy on BlackArthur at Seminary in East Oakland. Frohms Academy was just served an exhorbitant rent increase by the new owners of their building and are being forced to leave their neighborhood of 16 years.

Poverty is politics

Racism is politics

Sexism is politics

Classism is politics

Capitalism, politics

Fuck those politics

Sweeping UnHoused San franciscans like we were trash
On the last Friday in Black Herstory Month and fresh from the scab of the million dollar corporate sports giveaway that was the stupid bowl the City launched a wholesale attack on unhoused San Franciscans still remaining on Division street, most of them, Black Unhoused San Franciscans, whose homes were stolen by privatized lies of public housing theft, useless section 8 certificate giveaways  and greedy landlords.

“Paha Sapa, The heart of everything that is” at least that is what my people, the Lakota Sioux Nation, say about our homeland.  The dark black rolling hills filled with the smell of pure oxygen thanks to the pine trees, sticky with sweet smelling sap made by my peoples as a syrup source, small clear creeks filled with minnows.

“You can’t come in,” the oddly butler-esque dressed sheriff stopped me, my 12 year old sun Tiburcio and literally hundreds of members of the “public” at the door to King Lee’s (Not at all) “public” inauguration.

“We were told it was open to the public,” I countered, 

“It is,” a weird silence ensued and he looked above us. 

“So if its public, we are the public and we would like to go in,” I continued.

Side by Side 

This year, 5^th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

When I was a kid, my father would make me sit with him and watch old western movies on TV.  Those movies would be aired in the afternoon—cowboys on horses shooting at things—cowboys, stagecoaches, whiskey bottles—and, of course, Indians.  I looked more like an Indian than a cowboy and my dad would sit, his attention, his mind, his spirit inhabiting each scene, as if he’d been on horseback with a six shooter firing into the expanse of sky as the wild prickly cacti bore witness.  I’d see horses, badges, tumbleweed and gamblers on our little TV set

Gripping the steering wheel so tightly my hands hurt, I saw my mama so many years before, looking straight ahead to the road, trying to not let the mountain of tears crush her soft face. Now it was me and my sun alone on the highway, 30 years later, trying  to drive away from my torn and  crumbled  heart..