Why the Hostility towards Me - We've Not Met Before?
(page 2)

“Governments do this. it seemed the Haitian government in this particular case was busy keeping itself in a job. Making absolutely no decisions in case it turned out unpopular. Only just helping the American military forces support USAID, the International lenders and the U.S. Embassy, who were all busy with the larger issues of divvying up jobs: consulting contracts to mega consulting firms connected to former Boss USAID Mission Directors and current Boss USAID and State Department cronies and experts.

i was too stunned.

Perhaps i had just joined the sophisticated ranks of adulthood. But for the life of me i couldn't see the purpose of a government or any multi-lateral international force, for that matter, that didn't protect the civilian population from crime and bodily injury. When i asked, ‘Why aren't we protecting the civilians?’ i was told outright, ‘That is not part of the U.S./U.N. Mission.’

i was told the multinational forces weren't there to get into domestic issues!!! No lie.

imagine that. The U.S. and the European conglomerates NOT getting into Haiti's domestic issues!

i told you i was raised by peasants. What do i know?

The ‘Internationals’ hadn't come to ‘Restore Democracy.’ They'd come to destroy it completely. Want my headache…? Here, take it. i can live better with your version of things.

it's not working. My head is exploding. Mr. Langston Hughes, who invited you in there? i hear you. i can't stop it. What happens to a dream deferred? Well, you're right. See me explode. New birth trampling male distance and emotional absence, mammoth lies, fresh putrid hatreds.

Mount on y'all. Touch the many disheveled Black mothers with my secret 'tween their thighs. Suffering bodies of one human race. One ultimate national origin.

(On Video Screen: In her mind's eye Topaz sees injured, miserable and bedraggled Haitian, Black and Latino women with children, laden down with wash and fruit baskets, passing by and quietly says:)

But unlike the U.S. Bearers-of-Glitter, they wait without hate."

(The Warden's needle enters Topaz's arm. Knocks her out cold. Time shifts. Her spirit rises, addresses the audience with Silences Crap.)

***

Silence's Crap

i hold the Silence in my cupped hands.
i never asked for this Witnessing stand.
i'm branded with an understanding
i never knew.
i want you to get it so that it's forever gotten.

i can't quit wanting that.
i wash and wash the Silence in these hands,
but i can't scrub or even grit it out.

Just once, to mount myself with my own naked touch again.
Just once, to see the world's oasis’ sprout free of the shadows
in these hands.

i'm going insane, from straining to pull you within
without the Silence's heedless spin;
its imperial gaze's sins.

Ambushed within, encircled in the circles of commercialism
and...genderpecked to death too. i'm trapped into pushing at cracks within ideological prisms trying to see me, define me, color me.

i'm collared and mapped in Silence's crap.

***