Submissiveness:
       give into man. silence yourself. his word is final. rush to his beck and call when he is angered. we are wrong. man is dominant, and woman is soft. if man is the bone, we are the gushy cartilage cushioning his fall. body dominated and composed of bone, but we are the organs that keep the body functioning. forever being transplanted, while our men are broken. submit.

Purity:
       save yourself for man. wait for him with all your white so you are not tainted. innocence upheld. it is all for him, only him. wait for him to take it all, whenever he desires. be pure.

Domesticity:
        the home calls our name. it is our calling. our knees bound to scrubbing, hands tied to kneading because our family needs us. we are to be the slaves of our homes just as we were to the white man. permanency of pressing collars that are not our own. domestic labor.

Piety:
        we come from the rib of adam. without the presence of man we, ourselves would not exist. for this reason, we worship. we worship to reiterate our purity, to maintain our sanity when others challenge our virtues of womanhood. the lord is our shepherd. we uphold our lord. besides our husbands, he is all that we shall want.

womanhood.

“I’m not sure if night is ending or day is beginning.  What time is it?” She asked as she opened the door.

“Its about 2:30” I answered.

She was pacing about slightly bobbing her head as she spoke.

“We're sorry to disturb you beloved.  We're conducting a homeless census. May we ask you some questions?”

“I don’t want to be put away”  she said.  “I have to be outside.”

“We’re not here to hurt you.  We’re here to help.”

"Where do you come from?" Ally asked.

She didn't remember where she was from and was uncertain why it mattered.

She knew she wanted to leave Paterson but was unsure about where she wanted to go.

She kept her eye on the McDonald’s across Market Street.  

"As long as the light is on, I know its still nighttime and I'll have a place to go if the cops kick me out of here."

Here, was this evenings lodging in an ATM vestibule.  

"I can also get something to eat when I'm hungry."

"What time is it?"

"Its about 2:30."    

She earnestly wants to know what time it is.  

"I don't want the people going to work in the morning seeing me sleeping here." she said, "It's embarrassing."

Her papers were scattered on the floor.

She had one shoe on and one shoe off.  A white sock gloved an indeterminate number of other sock layers warming her shoe-less left foot, sufficient protection from the balmy mist of this late January evening.   The orphaned shoe lay on its side in the corner of the Wells Fargo foyer.

White, black and yellow plastic grocery bags filled with the content of her worldly possessions lay atop the shelf housing bank deposit slips neatly stacked in cubbyholes.

A woolen hat circled her head.  Her tiny face shone through the gray skull cap tightly tied under her soft chin.

She looked to be in her 50’s.  She spoke in a pale uneven tempo with a quiet anxious voice.  Her eyes were clear.  Her pursed mouth bracketed by a trinity of long chocolate crescent winkles. The sounds floating from her mouth were gently angelic and the kindness of a tender smile was filled with demure submissiveness.

She swaddled herself in multiple layers of coats and trousers bulking up a waif like frame.  Her outermost cloak, a gray trench coat was secured with a tightly wrapped knotted cloth belt.  The coat was thoroughly soiled by a life of sleeping rough in the urban outback.  The fabric boasted a consistency worthy of an Abercrombie and Fitch oil finished coat.  The bulky layers rounded the frame of her shoulders.  She resembled a small granite headstone.

"Whats your name?" I asked.  She was reluctant to tell us.  “I don’t like my name”.

We gently coaxed her.

“Carmen” she whispered.

“That's a beautiful name.  Its the name of the most beautiful operas ever written.”

“I know.  I’m gonna change my name someday.” she answered.  “I never liked it.”

Ally finished taking the survey, leaving more questions unresolved than answered.  

We gave Carmen a blanket, gloves, a hat.  Some hot cocoa, two sandwiches and a chocolate bar. We implored her to visit our pantry when it opened in the morning for cloths, referrals and food.  She was very grateful; but I don’t think she’ll ever make her way there.

I gave her my phone number; but I don’t think she’ll call.

“You are not forgotten beloved.  You are deeply loved.  Please remember that.” I said cupping her calloused hands within my palms.

“I know” the dainty caged bird cooed with a submissive smile.  

“What time is it?”

As we left Carmen, I wondered how to count a person wishing to remain invisible.

Music Selection: Bizet’s Carmen, Habanera

Maya Angelou: I Know Why a Caged Bird Sings

Paterson
1/30/13
jbm

I woke up thinking about this.

         A Thought About Loyalty

I’ve been thinking about loyalty:
A many-sided world of nuances,
The subtle differences.
We all know it means faithfulness,
A sticking-to devotedly.
Unfurled it shows its nasty sides,
The negatives that worry me:
Allegiance and adherence -
-Ism’s steel prepared to go to war
Against all criticizers,
-Isms’ others
Carving up the brotherhood
Of man.
Not for nothing
That a missile system drawn
To sense and intercept an enemy:
Is named the Patriot:
A system to annihilate.

I worry ‘bout obedience,
Compliance and submissiveness.
I like reliability, dependability,
Dedication if it’s not perverted
Duty, if it leads to thought,
A moral sense,
An ethic that agrees with life;
Loyalty without the strife.
Loyalty to think about.

A Thought About Loyalty 9.10.2017
Nature In & Of Reality; Out Times, Out Culture II;
Arlene Corwin

An occasional gust of wind will lift the translucent white voile curtains and then drop them like a child losing interest. The effect is like flash photography, a burst of sudden sunlight that paints our irises, then quickly fades.

It’s a cool Paris morning. In the low 50s. The windows are open and we forgot to turn on the heat. It’s perfect ‘under the covers’ weather. We’ve succumbed to laziness, refusing to get out of bed. Lazing-in is new enough to us that we’re defining it with a gamut of synonyms.

“Listlessness, torpor,” Peter says, his index finger tracking the slow twirl of the ceiling fan.  
“Stupor, slumberous, supineness, ” I updog.
“Ooh! total submissiveness,” Peter said, drawing the last word out like it’s *****.
“Every man’s dream,” I confirm.
“Inertia,” he says, triumphant in finding an engineering word.
“Good one,” I compliment. “Lifeless, loafing laggard,” I add.

There’s a knock at the door.
We look at each other guiltily, like we’ve been caught.
“We ordered breakfast last night,” Peter remembers.
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you get it,” I suggested.
“Why me?” he whined.
“Because you can wear less and because what if it’s an ax murderer?”
“These people work for your grandmother, she employs ax murderers?”
“It could be a revolution - this is France - it happens.”

There’s another knock.
“Get it!,” I bleated, like a helpless goat.
“Am I expendable?” he asked, as a man might plead to a lynch mob.
“Women and children first,” I remind him.

There’s a third knock.
“Ok,” he says resignedly, as he rises, draws on shorts and heads for the door.
“You’re my hero,” I assure him, before I pull the sheet up over my head in case it IS an ax murderer.

Leave me out in the dark
I'm not your playground of destruction
that you run to during your recess.

chiseling the grass,
sharp as sickles.
thrashing your leather whip
on the dusty ground
with an unerasable frown.

Strangling it around
the rusty bridles
of my broken swingset,
ripping it out from root down
at the twitch of your wrist.
Straddling my worn out see-saw
imbalanced by the wreckage of time
prance around until it
shatters into a million steel slivers,
While your hair brushes the clouds
while you have the first taste of rain
and feel the chill of snowflakes against your skin.

But this playground,
this zealous monument,
was built for
a higher purpose.
It's a place where
streams overflow,
wildflowers grow,
solace to the fireflies afterglow
& poetry readings during
seasons of snow.

If it does not stand for it's purpose,
my trembling hands will flick
a matchstick on the the wick of the trial
to arsonate it's submissiveness
and eat it's dispossessed soul.
It's flames will touch the
cradle of the crescent moon.
And from the ashes

I will rise,
*the Undying Light,
the Untouchable Night.

I grew up in the shadow of my mother’s cries,
a symphony of pain echoing through thin walls.
My father’s rage was a storm I could not calm,
locked away in my room, a prisoner of helplessness.

I trained my ears to listen for the silence,
for the absence of that horrible sound meant safety.
In the sweltering heat of summer,
I turned off the fan, closed the window,
sacrificing comfort to keep my vigil.

The stillness was my shield,
my ears scanning, always scanning,
for the sound that shattered peace.

I wondered, if my mother had been different—
empowered, independent, unyielding—
would she have escaped the blows?
Would I have been spared the scars of witnessing?

But no, her submissiveness was not the crime.
The fault lay in the hands that struck,
in the heart that chose cruelty over love.

And yet, I confess, I dream of a submissive wife.
Not to dominate, not to harm,
but to prove, to myself and to the world,
that gentleness deserves tenderness,
that softness is not a weakness to exploit.

I will love her properly, care for her deeply,
respect her fully, treasure her words like a melody,
and hold her thoughts as close as my heartbeat.
I will be kind without condition.

For if I do not, it would be as if I blamed my mother
for the sins of my father.
And that, I cannot bear.

Yes, I celebrate the empowered, the independent,
the women who rise, unbroken, against the tide.
But let us not forget:
a submissive woman is not a flawed woman.

She, too, deserves love, care, and kindness.
She, too, deserves to be safe,
to have her voice respected,
her opinions valued,
and her dignity upheld.

For the fault of abuse lies not in the victim,
but in the hands that wield it.
And in my hands, I vow to hold only gentleness,
to break the cycle,
to honor my mother’s tears
by creating a world where no one has to cry.

Your promises of forever and love
Were not permanent with devotion entwined.
They were empty and fractured.
A freezing reality of my deep seeded submissiveness (a poison).
Believing you was the vicious rumbling of my foundations.
Ferocious rattling amidst the tornado winds tore me to pieces.
A silver lining, though, reveals itself through everything.
Sometimes directly after the fact,
But mine shone through years and months later.

I’m better for it.

Maybe because at the time I wasn’t succeeding at treading flood water.
Maybe my lungs were too full of thick, black water that you polluted and brewed within me.

Either way, the gruelling wait.
The heart breaking, tormenting, torturing wait was so worth it.

I am better for it.

At each second I feel your toxins seep from my veins, my bones, my skin and slowly sink back into the ground.
And the space is replaced with a magnitude of better things.
Freedom… love… myself…

oscillating back and forth
head tilting from leeward and windward
an abstract puzzling my imperial gaze
a Van Gogh in waiting

      perchance a reflection illuminated
      in broad mesmerizing strokes
      some tantalizing insightfulness
      else a superficial escapade

do the color menageries
stray my mindfulness or hold attention
each vivid hue enlightenment
to soothe & provide enrichment

    is my inspiration desperation
    to find meaning in the simpleton
    gravitating and debating
    between beauty and gargoyles

does incredulous creativity scare me
or woo me into submissiveness
the artist plying servitude
into mine cavernous cavities

     Alan Scales’ exhibit of
     Turquoise Abstract Landscape II
     provides fodder for my mind
     to exponentially explode

Andreas Simic©

I live in the bottom of a tea-cup,
the basin of an English town
that is no more remarkable than any other English town.
It has little flair,
too much submissiveness,
many characters but no character.
It is a stencilled town convinced that it is something more
than margins.

Front gardens are filled with bits and pieces
of broken things
that are perpetually leaving.
Cardboard boxes,
disconnected fridges,
unfinished patios,
wellingtons that have paused to collect the clouds.
The crocuses have frostbite
and the lawns are fraying at the edges
like muddy carpet.
As you follow the road the houses get bigger
and their front doors get shabbier.
Paint peels like sunburnt skin
and the road stains yellow.

The old and the new mix obscenely;
two girls, tied at the elbow,
crack their feet on the sound
of their sisters’ high heels slapping paving stones.
Most people have got extensions
that have left their house in two pieces,
the bricks never seeming to meet.
Gingham table cloths hang out to dry,
a red double-decker teeters on a corner,
biked teenagers slip through the net of the Friday sky.

It’s a green-ish evening
and the clouds are strung like DNA blots
around the blurring sun.
The light’s not strong enough to dry your bones but,
when you look at it,
it seems to have exceeded any outline.
A slab of sky is golden.

The allotment is rows upon rows upon rows of bamboo canes,
browned like apple cores.
Chicken wire and faded Wendy houses
slouch upon their soil trenches.
It is a patchwork of mediocrity;
the beige and the brown and the grey
overtake the green.
Tin cans stud the place
like piercings on the body of an ex-punk;
only dead things grow
and the colours have been switched to mute.

There’s a market on Saturdays
where strawberries will cost you the moon
and where egg boxes are recycled
until they drip in the rain.
My grandparents remember my town in its embyonic stages,
my parents remember when it still was framed with local business,
I remember it when Shakeaway was a fruit and vegetable store
that sold palenta on Wednesdays.
My town is locked in a cycle of self-improvement
that it never seems to benefit from.
It is infitely greyed
and nothing more or less than ordinary.
Boys with blackheads pretend that they understand parkour
and the haberdashery closes down.
Each month, the window displays alter to no avail
and the dust sinks a little closer
to the pages we’re constantly trying to turn.

I live in the bottom of a tea-cup
and I never stop trying to read insubstantial fortunes
from the dregs I’ve left behind.

I really don’t want to fall
Towards the asphalt and all
That possibly I may understand
And nevertheless not hold a hand
The meanings regardless
The tone of it alone is senseless
Here we taste our bitterness
In thought of submissiveness
Retracting from this internal argument
I let my hold, lead to recovered moments
To see anew in spirits passing by
Allowing no judgments given by eye
Then it recovers from reason
That the insolence of my attention
Was skewed by heart of this lesson
That once we love, we ponder of that only one
No matter the moral to our background
There are always breaks to get around
To make amends to sincere intentions
For where the day ends we continue on
Walking alongside following the tension
Of our will and moral detention
The irony that we all befall
Is she causes it all
Grief when I hear from you,
Stress when you need me.
So it would be natural to think
You’re the downfall of me.
But yet you tell me and show me always otherwise.
You just don't know that I take you
For who you are, when you’re with me
Because you are yourself

Notice that the male specie is a dictator group.
If it does pleased them.
Or ruled completely by them.
Then its wrong.

Even in faith worshipping.
Notices the roles of the females.
They surrounded by words of submissiveness.
Dictated to follow and not lead.

And if they do,
Then we strong men acts afraid.
That our image of a man will fade.

Our sexuality is dictated by society rules.
And when someone gets abused.
Then we act completely confused.

Women's are the strength of the world.
Remove them and watch the men complain.
While only a few would the other way.

You must be you to feel complete.
And while doing that you will expose the weak.

Those males that feel the need to control.
But comes across struggling to be more than they seem.

Sometimes, you stands up to the bullies in society.
Because they hides in the shadows of fear.
Trying to be stronger than anyone.
Except weak when it comes to love.

in a sense my innocence
has brought about some strange events
your unabashed sinfulness
my cute, careful religiousness
a surprising synthesis

in a sense, was my innocence
a recompense for your bitterness?
i sought your soul with reverence
from your tenderness, my mind undressed
a haunt old as some sacred texts

of a pure and honest impetus
our pride found a submissiveness
my naivete,
your diligence
thanks to our collective dissonance
a love made to be infamous

God said: There shall be light,
Immediately light shone across His creation.

I was made to enter the world of darkness,
The world hath become the den of sins,
And every man born of God hath fallen into Adam’s pit.

The Saviour took the form of submissiveness:
The Light pierced the darkness and showed the Way.
And darkness trembled at the advent of the Light.

I was at the heels of worldliness and tradition.
But on a day a voice stirred my soul to act,
The Light chased me to the door of Eternity.
I could not escape from the Light,
For HE hath HIS Plan to withdraw me from darkness.
I opened the eyes of my soul and saw the Light close to me.
Darkness began to shed its attires and Light hath clothed me with Its glory.

Darkness ceases not to threaten me with its curses of pleasure;
Yet there shines the Light ever to guard my soul from the eternal darkness.
What can darkness do unto me if Light is beside my soul
Which rests in the Loving arms of the Word of God,
WHO is the LIGHT of salvation into Eternity?

God said: There shall be light,
Immediately light shone across His creation.

I was made to enter the world of darkness,
The world hath become the den of sins,
And every man born of God hath fallen into Adam’s pit.

The Saviour took the form of submissiveness:
The Light pierced the darkness and showed the Way.
And darkness trembled at the advent of the Light.

I was at the heels of worldliness and tradition.
But on a day a voice stirred my soul to act,
The Light chased me to the door of Eternity.
I could not escape from the Light,
For HE hath HIS Plan to withdraw me from darkness.
I opened the eyes of my soul and saw the Light close to me.
Darkness began to shed its attires and Light hath clothed me with Its glory.

Darkness ceases not to threaten me with its curses of pleasure;
Yet there shines the Light ever to guard my soul from the eternal darkness.
What can darkness do unto me if Light is beside my soul
Which rests in the Loving arms of the Word of God,
WHO is the LIGHT of salvation into Eternity?

If my soul was a color, it would be a funeral color.

It would be the color of remembrance, and the color of forgetting.

It would be a color that screams to be avenged, respected and mourned.

It would be a proud color.



A color that remembers a glorious past, mostly imagined and embroidered with more victories than defeats.



It would be a color of joy, yet hidden in silence.

A color that boasts of courage, but asks for submissiveness.

A color that speaks of kindness, but greedily hoards.

A color that's been censored.



The color of my soul would be that lack of color, that void that takes away all other colors,

and shoves them down below, under the writhing belly of the thick-scaled beast.

The color that waits to burst out with deep reds, and gold, and blues.



It would be that color that would not stay dead,

would not stay mourned,

would not roll over,

but hammers against the void and brings forth the kaleidoscope of hope.

in fears and trust, dreams so ''busy being free'' she thought 
she could be, it would be possible with him but in the end he did
not bring her to his senses; in the end it was just not viable as since 
the moment they mounted together when he showed her no more 
than the blue flowers in their city park but the moment (1) she
asked 'm to play her music, he laughed her away or when (2) she
travelled she asked 'm to not keep distance, which is not necessarily
impossible, he refused and let her go because of that, that stubbornly
proudness aspect of his fathers character, her mothers submissiveness, 
to busy believing they'd make it without realising it takes two to travel.