Undergraduphonia

This is the portfolio of poems I submitted for the first creative writing poetry class I ever did with Dr. Jennifer Rahim in UWI. Much of it is only slightly interesting, trite, embarrassing, rushed to submit at the deadline,  partially ripped off from a Black Sabbath / Ozzy Osbourne song...pretty much typical of any 1st undergraduate creative writing class. Fear of Flying was published in Dr. Rahim's compilation for the class Heart-to-Verse: Wordlines. I enjoyed the class just like I did the short story writing class with Dr. Merle Hodge, but these were the only two creative writing courses in the whole English Literature syllabus. Creative writing for whatever reason never had a priority at UWI.

Write A Poem On...

Write a poem on writing.

What, a sonnet on love?

Or a psalm to battle evil,

With a prayer for God above.

A ballad on bacchanal.

 A quaint portrait of home.

 A haiku on existence?

For those souls suffering alone.

An ode to beauty.

An epistle on war.

A sonata on moonlight...

But above all else, write.

For what we write,

Is nothing less than life.

The ‘Just Friends’ Ballad

Now when first you saw that letter

And you asked me who it’s for

I looked into your blank black eyes

And marvelled at what I saw.

You looked so cool and casual

Like Sunday afternoon

I could only jerk my head down

I felt like such a fool

I would have loved to skip this interlude

But my feelings were just a little bit too strong.

Just a little bit too strong.

Tanka

Unstoppable prose

Pause in anticipation.

Hurry laggard eye

Here impatient respite stands:

Pay grammar’s toll and run again.

Daisy and Jay 

Good morning, good morning.

The soldiers are marching
The war’s over today.

The top is down
On our silly great car
The wind blows my scarf
And we hear them say:

Good morning, good morning

The lovers are driving
Feel how the past slips away.
Ten thousand miles of longing
Ten million miles of doubting
In their car they’ve covered today.

The past no longer holds fast.
The fantasies no longer chain.

Good morning, good morning

We still believe in happy endings
Where the soldiers are
That’s where we’re going.

Six-Year-Old Sitting on the Red Steps – A Portrait

All I have are my lunch-kit and my bag.

Shoes laced up tight, a kiss and a Alright…

Eat your lunch eh, don’t throw it away,

Listen to teacher, don’t skylark whole day.

I am innocent, ignorant of good or evil,

Ugly or beautiful,

All children my equal.

A pure smile of welcome for all my chums.

A light empty heart with malice for no one.

But soon they will come,

With their daggers of judgement.

Herd us, segregate us, popularity is the currency.

Our sneaker brands, hair-cuts, eligible for mockery.

Fear of Flying

So then, nine thousand kilometres.
Twice that to go and back.
One hundred and eighty thousand tons of JET-A-1;
Light the candle at two hundred and ten degrees and we’re off.
Three kilometres of tarmac
To barrel down.
4 times the earth’s gravity
As we bend upwards.
With wheels up, flaps down, rudder centre, bank left, VSI rising...
They’ve done this hundreds of times right?
Two hundred thousand pounds of thrust
Blast us through space;
At Mach oh-point-eight – altitude forty thousand meters...
That’s a long way down...
For four hundred aunts, uncles, cousins, and comedians,
Serial killers, murderers, rapists and robbers.
5% incidence rate reported among general population
Of Agoraphobia, schizophrenia, dementia, paranoia.
Deported, divorce, laid-off, no breakfast, four hour delay, another Scotch, 
Turbofans, turbulence, fuse short-circuits.
Autopilot, radar, ILS malfunctions.
Emergency, black box, NTSB investigates.

Safer than driving right?

Martyrs: Film parody

I had no other purpose in mind than telling a story I felt connected to, doing a film I had faith in, and doing it with all my heart. When I was writing MARTYRS, I couldn't see another way to talk about all the things that were surrounding me. On a metaphorical way, horror was the perfect tool to react to the feeling I had, like a sad intuition, that the world we're living in right now is a brutal and unfair one. I mean, very brutal. It seems that the cynism and the power of the winners has killed everything. It seems that our urban societies are more than ever driven by the forces of jungle laws, by rules created by the strongest and the dominant people. I'm not saying anything original about injustice of our times, but it was strong enough in me to create the necessity of doing that film. The system creates a lot of losers, a lot of suffering weak people I feel very close to and MARTYRS in its way tells about them. So I would say that the horror genre is a way to talk about things that preoccupy me a lot. As a fan, I always took the films from the masters Argento, Carpenter, Polanski and dozens of other great artists as their own personal visions of life. That's why I liked them humanly too. And that's why I love horror so much. 

Pascal Laugier

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/474

So visionary

I really wish I had known a bit more about the film Martyrs so I could have skipped wasting the 1 and 1/2 hours I put in trying to watch this. Just word-of-mouth that it was supposedly "one of the best horror films ever made" made me decide to watch it. I'm not a fan of horror particularly but I enjoyed being scared by films like The Exorcist and Poltergeist, and I'm interested in good films regardless of genre. I did not catch on to the fact that the same people who were praising Martyrs probably thought that August Underground's Mordum was a masterpiece, and this naivete is what led to the experience I ultimately ended up with.

My experience watching this film was similar to the expereinces I had trying to watch El Topo and 120 days of Sodom and is probably the last attempt I am ever going to make to objectively view or understand anything in this niche of European films. I sat through a huge amount of gratuitous violence, torture, and depravity in the hope that at some point I would begin to find the beginning of the thread the director was trying to spin to at least justify all the crap that had gone before. Once I got to the point where I realized that such a moment was not coming and that despite the director's claim , there was actually no story being told, I stopped watching. In Martyr's case this occurred around 1:20:00. I really wish it had been less.

Martyrs is basically a snuff film that uses a 5 min monologue by a nameless character on a ridiculous paper-thin premise to justify the extended scenes of graphic torture and abuse of young girls.  Here's a synopsis of the film : a shadowy organization systematically drives young girls insane with hideous torture and abuse till they begin to 'see things that others can't'. That's it. fin. If a 16-year old high school student had written the screenplay of Martyrs for a term paper she would have gotten a D-. In this regard it's very similar in execution to 120 Days of Sodom. where depiction of the kidnapping, sexual abuse and murder of a group of teenage girls and boys is justified by the kind of  idiotic liberal moralizing that makes your ears bleed listening to it.

It's society that's killing you, stupid.

It's not the fact that Martyrs is exploitation torture porn that bothers me - there's hundreds of films made and being made like it, and films like Saw and Hostel are constantly trying to push this so-called genre into the mainstream. But the fact that people actually consider this film to have any kind of creative merit says a lot more about human nature than what was depicted in the film.  And it's the cynicism of the director/writer of this film that is a lot more disturbing than watching teenage girls in their underwear getting tortured. So apparently the trend in horror no is to see how many extended scenes of graphic torture can fit into 2hrs and just under an 'R' rating. And then some idiot on the Internet gets to write about how the destruction of innocent girls represents the death of God and of innocence and so on and so forth...

Maybe torture porn should become a recognized and clearly-labelled genre like XXX (TTT?) so stuff like this would not have to share the same space with The Exorcist and Poltergeist and The Ring. Directors could celebrate nihilism and depravity all they want without having to carry the bourgeois burden of plot, character development, etc. All that would be required would be a simple 5-minute setup scene - an analogue to the beginning of movies where a 19-year old girl dressed in short shorts and stripper heels walks in on 5 guys playing pool and tells them her car broke down and she doesn't have any money for a mechanic or taxi.

In films like Evil Dead or Alien the violence and fear and gore provided a visceral experience, but one whichwas always embedded in something larger - a fantasy about some unknown thing in the dark that we all have this primeval dread of, like the supernatural or alien species. The ordeal the characters went through always had a rationalization you could accept as necessary to the fantasy. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th and Halloween have always been about nothing more but entertainment - the kind of stuff you go see when you're 19 and with 10 people and you immediately forget as soon as you leave the car park. Nobody tries to sell House of Wax or Final Destination or I Know What You Did Last Summer as anything but 2 hours of teenagers getting killed in ways which were similarly gruesome and comical. But to me Martyrs is less horror film than parody. It's just a vehicle for sadism and depravity; that's all I can say about it. There's no difference between and it and any movie starring Lisa-Ann as Sarah Palin or Sasha Grey as a doctor.

Better than Martyrs

At least movies like the above don't insult your intelligence and pretend they're anything more than pandering to people's desire for visceral excitement. People who enjoy watching  torture and abuse will like Martyrs and praise it just as they did Cannibal Holocaust and every Italian and French exploitation film they come across. But here's a question to anybody who sees any artistic merit in Martyrs: why did the writer choose young women to be 'the most sensitive' to the supposed 'transformation'? Why couldn't it have been old men who were chosen to be 'martyrs'? The answer is that nobody wants to see old men in their underwear tortured, abused, and degraded. I guess that's not artistic enough.

Sure Martyrs is disturbing. But if I wanted to be disturbed all I have to do is get on the net and pull up pictures and news about the Somali famine or the DRC or Sierra Leone or Liberian civil wars. There's enough real-life suffering and depravity in this world to last 1000 life times. I really don't need films like this to supposedly tell me how screwed up life is

Jamey Rodemeyer

Watching this kid you can tell that he never tried to hurt a soul in his life. It's so ridiculous the answers he got on the survey he did - "Gay marriage shouldn't be allowed because it's wrong and disgusting and goes against the Bible." Right but psychologically abusing a 14-year old boy to the point where he commits suicide is A-OK.  But that is the wisdom of the foolish - it's just this way in Trinidad and Uganda and Nigeria and other 3rd-world countries. People will condone and participate in the most immoral and unethical and evil things but God help you if you are LGBT. Jamey Rodemeyer may only have been 14 but he had more courage and strength than most people I know.

It's not really surprising, actually, what happened to him and then after his death. When I was younger I used to believe that stupidity and hypocrisy and evil somehow arose in people's hearts after they became adults. Like that part of humanity that had its logical termination in Nanking and Dachau and Stalin's Gulag and Pol Pot's Cambodia, somehow is absent when we are children. But obviously this isn't the cause. People like Charles Taylor and Bosco Ntaganda and Robert Mugabe didn't just decide one day to act as they did. A lot of people, maybe the majority of people are born evil. It's just their Purpose I guess  - to appropriate a line from The Matrix. The only way that humans can move forward is to understand the way not to live - to cull people like those who bullied and tormented Jamey from our race. At least with technology we can now put a face on some of the nameless victims, whether from New York or Liberia or Sierra Leone or Rwanda.

I really don't know why things like this are allowed to happen, or even if a question like that makes sense. I don't know if his parents and friends should look above for a hand that could have intervened and stopped something like this. Death is part of life - only reason I'm here is that billions of people died before me. A lot of those people were like Jamey - innocent victims of evil people. But I mean from Death comes Life: stronger, smarter, more creative, more compassionate, more giving, more beautiful. Jamey Rodemeyer is dead but the innocence and courage he had inside of him will live on. I think everyone who listens to his Youtube channel videos or reads his blog and understands what he went through, will carry a piece of him wherever they go in life.

Under the vine

So Jonah gets pissed off at the world, forsakes mankind, retires to a hill above Nineveh to ponder and reflect while awaiting the fireworks which he had been promised, and which, suffice to say, he had been considerably inconvenienced for. And a gourd vine grows over the sulking Jonah and gives him shelter from the sun for which he is quite happy about, but curses when it dries up and dies. And then God shows up and goes LOL Y U MAD THO?

This day my major concerns were:

• Taking care of my dog who had surgery on her ear yesterday and convincing her to wear an e-collar.
  
• Worrying about finishing work for this open-source project I'm horrendously late with.
• Debating whether backbone.js and/or JavaScriptMVC is worth learning and using over plain old JavaScript.

This day the biggest issue for tens of millions of men women and children in Africa, and hundreds of millions all over the world, was whether or not they're going to get a drop of water or a bit of food, and whether or not they're going to be alive tomorrow.

So I've been pondering how many gourd vines have been sheltering me. I am so accustomed to thinking that everything I have is somehow the result of my own efforts, but the reality is far from that.


It's the kind of circular existential question which is strictly illogical and makes no sense, but still plagues us: What if I had been born somewhere else? What if instead of sitting here in my yard feeling the breeze, watching the sunset and writing a blog post,  I was trudging dozens of miles in the desert with my emaciated children to get to a horrendously overcrowded relief camp on the off-chance I might get some grain or water, which would postpone starving to death another day.

I didn't build this house - my grandparents and aunt did. The only reason I'm sitting here is because they worked all their life to provide for their family. The only reason I can read or write or use a computer is because they sent me to school. Having the chronic pain of depression and dissociation and social phobia is pretty terrible and leaves me wrenched and exhausted at the end of each day, but still why do I have the use of my two hands or two eyes or two legs or anything that works properly on my body, when so many people in this world don't? At least I have the ability to work towards getting better - while so many with chronic, debilitating illnesses have nothing. My life is a long way from perfect or even happy but why do I even have the things that I have when so many people don't? My family doesn't have a lot but still, why are our cupboards and fridge always filled? As much as evil has touched my life, why have I been spared the kind of horrors I see on the news every night - violence, destruction, death? Luck, chance, fate, karma, what is it? It's nothing I did, that's for sure. It's sort of frightening how little I have actually contributed to my own existence. The truth is that, like Jonah, I haven't had anything to do with the vines that have grown up to shelter my life.

It's like the older I get the list of things that are really important shrinks,  while the list of things that aren't important grows and stretches by orders of magnitudes. But the list of things that I realize are in my control also shrinks, while the list of things that are really outside my control also grows. Not coincidentally, each list aligns with the other.

There's so many people who go to such extraordinary lengths to acquire the things that are not important. The ignorant ones bow down to their idols: money, cars, clothes, parties, sex, approval, popularity, recognition. The evil ones lie, cheat, steal, injure, slander...every abomination and inequity their conceit can fashion, to acquire what their stupid small minds lust after. They both stack these things up like some massive altar and gaze on them, as if it can compensate for how stupid and empty they are inside. Everyday on these call-in programs on TV you hear people lamenting on how bad things are in this country. And I feel like if we could question the politicians and magistrates and lawyers and doctors and engineers and business owners and everyone in this country who have been given responsibility for other people's well-being, and force them to answer truthfully what they consider important, we might see the reason why things in this country are the way they are.

I've always wondered what it is people see in these meaningless things. It's just like Wallace said in the quote in the last post: when you've drunk your fill of these things what are you going to do? I can't understand how people can be so uncaring and selfish and ignorant. If you think life is only about having the most money and driving the best cars and having the most people comment on your Facebook profile, then do you realize what little control you actually have over what you acquire in this life? And when you lose them, which for most people is inevitable, then what are you going to cherish and hold on to? What about the people like in the picture above? Do people realize how close they are to being in a state like that: how easily fate could have given them that burden to carry? Do the billions of impoverished and disadvantaged people in this world really mean anything to anybody?

But I suppose that while most things in life change, a few things don't. The sun and moon and stars and planets change. The earth itself changes - the day that comes tomorrow is never the same as the one before. Knowledge changes, science changes, technology changes. But people don't change. I guess that's one of the main reasons I picked up reading the Bible - the recognition that the stuff that goes on today is exactly the same as the stuff that's been going on for thousands of years.

The truth is that as much as I want the same things other people want, I'd rather work for $20 an hour and go home to a one-room hut by myself and read all night, than to covet what most people in this country covet, and to act as they act. Because what is in my heart is the only thing in this world I can control. Whatever life brings or takes away I have to accept. I can't even control my own health or emotions or thoughts. But the one thing I can control is whether or not I do evil towards anybody else. And as much as so many things weigh on me, just like they weigh on everybody else, the thing that is most important to me is that I try to keep a clean heart. Covetousness, selfishness, deception, hypocrisy, ignorance, and all the myriad ways of evil people - whatever vines grow over me or fall down and dry up, the only thing that I can really control is how far I distance myself from these things.

I always remember back in July 1990 A.N.R. Robinson declaring "Attack with full force!" fully knowing the thing he heard next most likely would have been the gunshot that killed him. It was like the first time in my life I had ever really seen a politician in this country who believed in something beyond their own existence. It was like for one minute somebody put something greater before themselves. Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday, two of our greatest sons of the soil, had managed to find themselves elsewhere on that day, when their country needed them the most. I have a hard time seeing them do something like that. It's not really hard to see what they really believed in inside - what they thought was important.

 If somebody asks me to help them and it's within my power to do it then I usually do it. I've had so many people including my supposedly close friends take advantage of me for this, but it's cool. Because I believe it is what we were asked to do. And the truth is that I actually am an extremely selfish person. Whatever other people want or take from me they can have it - if it wasn't worthless I wouldn't give it. But see I'm not doing it for them. And I know that is something they will never understand. The real reason I do it is because maybe one day when I really need help, somebody or something might help me. Maybe if one day I'm stretched out hungry, emaciated, dying somewhere with the sun beating down on me, a vine might grow over and shelter me.

Even in darkness

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

David Foster Wallace-Kenyon Commencement Speech 2005

Sooner or later in life you're going to realize that the only people who have the opportunity to not believe in Something are the people who have been spared something really terrible happening to them. For the rest of us belief and worship of something good - some intangible thing inside of us that seems beyond reason yet everyday tells us to take another step forward, to bear it one more time - belief in something like that is sort of mandatory for survival. 

The crimes perpetrated against human beings like Jaycee Dugard and Elisabeth Friztl are so staggeringly enormous as to be impossible to comprehend. Everyday in this world we read about things like that and ask the same thing - how could men be so evil? Why are these things allowed to happen? That's one of the main reasons I suppose I always rejected believing in Something. There's just no way that something all-powerful but benevolent could allow what happened to those innocent people. But watching and hearing Jaycee Duggard get interviewed about living through an experience so horrifying as to be unimaginable, you can't escape one fact: she survived. Or rather the thing inside her, the thing that she believed in, kept her alive.


The knock against Generation X'rs - people like me who came of age in the late 90's and 2000's - has always been that we believed in nothing. We had no war to fight, no country to build. Most of us had sex as soon as could - we stopped believing in family and God and everything our parents held on to. The music we liked was subversive, counter-culture, a general FU to the whole pristine world of being an adult, transmitted by Nirvana and Blind Melon and NWA and Dr. Dre and Naughty by Nature and Soundgarden....We had nothing to test us and the things we believed in most.
 
This is why, as much as I rage against it,  I can't really fault entirely all the people in this country who worship the incredibly stupid and banal things in life - money, cars, clothes, cell-phones, looks, sexual allure, and sitting on top of the totem pole: the opinion of others. It's just I suppose a logical extension of what I used to believe. But what we were criticized for ten years ago seems a lot worse today. The kind of nihilsm that pervades the culture of young people today is frightening to me. At least people from my generation believed in creativity, being individual, making something new. Pearl Jam and Wu-Tang Clan were all about a new sound - something that had never been done before. But it's like the thing that people in this country fear most is not being part of a crowd. Like in our society there's two default roles: you have to be the guy on stage waving the towel or in the crowd following his directions. There's no place for real creativity or wanting or believing in things different from everybody else.

The kind of stuff that people worship today - it's not just, as Wallace says, that it's going to consume them and leave them broken and impoverished and disiilusioned in the end. But when something really terrible happens to them then they're not going to be able to hold on to anything.


In the Quran and the Bible and I imagine every major religous work is written the same thing: God sends the rain to fall on the good and wicked alike. He alone chooses on who He sends blessings and tragedies. Some people can live their whole life and never meet the psychopaths and sociopaths that stole so many years from Jaycee Duggard and Elisabeth Friztl - the kind of people who believe preying on the weak and vulnerable is what the world was made for. But a big part of the reason I like war films like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, is that they teach us in the midst of destruction and cruelty, human virtues shine through. Courage, loyalty, hope...even in darkness the best of what's inside us, what we believe in, shines through. It's a strange duality but the older I get the stranger life becomes. It's as if the things my family believed in and tried their best to teach me might actually have been true.

Elisabeth Friztl and Jaycee Duggard survived the most horrible atrocities imaginable, but it's like even in the darkest hour they found a way to fight through, to survive. That's really all the human race has been doing, from the beginning of time. And whether we know it or not there's no such thing as peacetime. We all fight, every single day, against evil, darkness. And maybe there is Something that could have intervened, but didn't, in order that something brilliant and dazzling could be discovered. If people choose to offer themselves up to the false idols that will consume them then I can't help them. But I'm not like that and I will never be. I went through the darkness. I know what I believe.