Brace Yourself…
For Paul C. and Barbara F.
You two remember
on that Frightful, Weird, and Dismal day
of your Anno Klan
when I took off my leg braces,
one for each leg,
one different colored than the other,
you remember when
I took them off
and laid them on the table
for you both to see
but you wouldn’t touch them
you wouldn’t put them in your hands
you barely wanted to look at them
to touch them
to feel them
to see them
to see the whole man
that you’re bullying
with this surprise
bully attack and suspension
Why won’t you touch
my braces, Paul and Barbara,
from Personnel,
why won’t you put them
into your hands
and touch them
touch them like you
have touched me
with your meanness
and your white supremacy
your intimidation
and scare tactics
all to protect
your fellow Klansmen
in Susan, and Mike, and Jayne
Here, Barbara and Paul,
from Personnel,
but you won’t see me
as a person,
the whole person,
here, go ahead and touch them,
take the braces into your
cold, dead hands
and just touch them,
TOUCH THEM!
FEEL THEM!
they can not hurt you
they can not be violent
toward you
they, these braces,
can not harm
they can not be
a danger to you or others
or even to property
Please, Ms. Forte and Mr. Connelly,
from Personnel,
or otherwise referred to
as Human Resources,
but which of us
is the human
and which inhuman,
please take my braces
in to your hands
and feel them
feel their warmth
from my skin
my black skin
that you hate so much
my black crippled skin,
here, just touch them
hold them in your hands
and then in your minds
forever
Written on an Appalling, Weeping, Desolate day in the Anno Klan
Arguing With Alexa
I cannot believe this
but I actually had an argument
with this Alexa bitch
I mean it is a machine right
some shit about artificial intelligence,
right?
Well, follow me now,
I told Alexa to stop playing
the music she was playing
and she just kept right on
playing, as if I had not spoken
to her, I mean as if I were not
in the room, invisible
even when I commanded it
to stop and gave her the command
again, nothing but silence while the
base light twirled and she continued
to play the music I wanted stopped.
Or how about earlier when I
told her to play Meet the Press
with Chuck Todd and her reply
bordered on something like:
“I cannot find what you request
but here is something from the
library of James Rodd who wears
A dress at..”
and I now yell, ‘Alexa, stop.”
the sad and funny thing about this
is that last week when I gave her
the same command to play the
live episode of Meet The Press,
she did it just fine.
So, tonight’s argument
led to me litterally pulling
the plug on Alexa
and, now, there she sits
quiet in that corner
on her perch
quiet but, somehow,
I sense the bitch
is still listening to me.
D. Alexander Holiday attended Bernard M. Baruch College and The State University of New York at Albany, receiving both a Bachelor and a Master of Arts degree from Albany University. He is the recipient of the Spellman Award from Albany University. He has published in various publications, among them The Amherst Society, A&U Magazine and more recently Arabesques Review (an international anthology and website). He has four chapbooks of poetry, Notes to Porshé, Tales From This Black Heart, The Voices in My Head(which is a collaboration with fifteen area poets) and I Use To Fall Down. He has published essays on ERIC, the research database. He has read on radio, for Crystal Brown’s “Reading for the Blind” program, has been on radio for Kym Fleming’s RPI program, and has read and performed on Public Television. He also volunteered and moderated a creative writing workshop for inmates at a state maximum security facility in upstate New York. He is also a local liaison for the GBS/CIDP Foundation International.
He is the author of seven books: Letters to Osama, I Use To Fall Down: 50 + 25+ 25 Selected Poems, All The Killers Gathered, his memoir In The Care Of Strangers: The Autobiography Of A Foster Child, E-mails From Satan’s Daughter and under the G. Douglas Davis IV nom de plume Kith & Kin: A Klannish Klownish Tragik Komedy and The Tragic Life of Joe Tomatohead. Paperclips Magazine [.com] recently invited and will be featuring the author on their site. He is currently working on a new book.
Thank you for featuring me in the V-Day edition of the newsletter. Showing the “love,” I suppose. Where are you guys finding all these photos of me? Is there like a box of old (and I do mean old) photographs of a number of us laying around in some box in someone’s attic that one can go to, blow off the dust and then say to someone else, “…here, use this one.”?
I kid. As you might gather from the two poems here (and I did not expect them to appear in the newsletter but rather I had submitted them for an update to the Albany Poets site), I can be rather serious in my writing/s and also tap into my Capricorn humorous nature. The poem, “Brace Yourself” was written following a disciplinary hearing with some state workers who were bullying me…, I wrote a book…., and they thought to punish me over that book. In their charges against me, they stated that I was a “threat.” So, I wrote the poem and then published said poem in another book. Go figure.
And, finally, the “Arguing with Alexa” poem just came from literally having arguments as of late with this damn machine. Oops, should I have said darn instead of damn? Those of you with an Alexa/Echo get my meaning. It’s frustrating at times especially when It wants to do something completely opposite to what you want done. Sometimes, I have to talk to It like it is slow (yes, that kind of slow).
Again, thanks for the shout out on what would otherwise be a painful/difficult day for me. Consider buying a book of mine. I have seven now and a new one out perhaps over the summer (or thereabouts). I am posting a few on FB/Mehta). And my own shout out to TroyBookMakers.com for doing the last two books and will doing the new upcoming book.
—Douglas—