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THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL ~ Jonathan Swift

Today, for an odd reason, I again began to ruminate on how I, first of all, was banned from what at the time was my only social activity, and second, how I opted to remain far outside what I now picture as a spoken word community more like a big brandy snifter full of scorpions than anything else.  

After nearly 11 years of choosing solitude (and a better network of likeminded people), I still feel that pain at times.  And to think all I did "wrong" was endure a serious manic episode.  

Isn't it obvious?  Other people endured smallish fragments of what I endured.  Three telephone calls to people, calls that were more calls for help than anything, resulted in posturing and neglect, and even incriminations.  At the end of the nonsense, I was left at the hands of people who do not really know me, do not care to know anything beyond what they've decided about me, and people who seem to think they had to enforce their worlds against someone they could not control.  

A big brandy snifter of scorpions--all of them stinging one another.  

That's not something I had never seen before.  I've written about a local spoken word clan that is obsessed with climbing some kind of ladder to the position of "number one".  As I began to improve my poetry, and also began to examine my role in the endless competitive atmosphere among many poets who only care for that, and much less for their relationship with the words they deploy, I could not help but note all the social climbing and literary politics involved among a knot of people who, today, have not improved their actual standing in any world whatsoever.  

Many seem to be in a fantasy where "beating others" is the way to "win."  Exactly.  Like Donald J. Trump: "winning".  But winning what?  

After my leukemia experience in 2007, I realized my own mortality.  Because of that realization, I decided to focus on improving my poetry.  In other words, I turned away from my relations with other poets and toward my relationship with the words and skills I use and possess.  That in itself has been deeply rewarding to me.  And yes: It's without all the dumb noise I had to put up with.  Like the time two supposed Beat poets got their noses out of line when I stood on a stage to whimsically inform a smallish crowd (always smallish crowds, leading observers to look at reasons behind lackluster audiences) that I was "THE hippie poet".  

Those two social climbers were already in a snit for me because I suggested that much of Allen Ginsberg's poetry has a political dimension.  After all, when you're a high school graduate purporting to be in the Ginsberg camp, it's angering for someone/anyone to dare suggesting something against your own prejudices and relative ignorance.  

Can anyone imagine the foolishness erupting from a difference of either opinion or a statement of fact?  

Anger among those two, I imagine, was or is the bottom line problem.  When these two, also purported socialists, joined in on a socialistic "Beat" thing that was going to go to the US/Mexico border and read poetry from the shores of the Rio Grande in a display of "total dissent", what I could hear from that was basically what the buzzards around the rim of the canyon might hear: 

Volleys into nowhere.  

As for me, I do know that my dissatisfaction with such displays of ignorant bids for superiority had risen in the months before the manic episode.  It's obvious I had begun acting out.  But it's also obvious that the host of the Mad Swirl monthly reading, Johnny Olson, was not only up in my face but also trying to step me out the door: He'd always place my position on the reading list dead last--when there was no one in the audience to even listen to me.  "I'm saving the best for last," he once quipped.  

Most people who've encountered his negative side see Johnny Olson as your basic dirtbag.  Approaching 50, he's more infatuated with scoring fucks than he is in the pathetic excuses for poetry he recites.  

So yeah.  I may have been acting out.  Within that zone, though, some of my own frustration with those people came from an informed position: I already knew that local acclaim was nowhere, really.  The agora of poetry, not only nationwide, not only international, but also throughout time, is far too big for a city with a low intellectual capacity at present to rightfully acclaim much of anything from a cultural perspective.  Most poets worth their salt in the city are not part of that gig.  

How many times did I sit in on Mad Swirl, clap on cue, complement younger poets, show enthusiasm, and more?  Sometimes, I felt like croaking after hearing another sad attempt at saying something profound from the precincts of a hollow stage. Problem was, because I am so poor, I usually didn't have the money to go out and entertain friends (or even myself). Hence, I used that reading for a sense of community.  And I was always friendly to those attending.  

Then BAM!  Just like that, I'm out. How dare me to have an expression of a serious mental/physical disorder?  All sorts of armchair psychiatrists militated that I should be isolated.  Once, at Mad Swirl, I yelled at a bartender.  Black mark.  Then, in the incident of 2014, I yelled and apparently threatened a director of Writer's Garret.  Black mark.  Did I get any "white marks" for being supportive of the entire spoken word community for nearly 30 years?  Nope.  Not that.  The need to exercise power over perceived interlopers is more important than any reasonable assessment.  

When I think about incidents relating to my apparently inability to get through to many of the more important people in that community, my mind recoils back to around 1997, when out of nowhere, the Writers Garret gave a big program to "most valuable players" in the community.  I was homeless.  I was losing contact with both the community and with the mainstream world in general.  Nevertheless, after three or four years of hard work reviewing poetry chaps, and writing articles about local culture, after really being a sort of yeoman in promoting the spoken word community, I was ignored.  

That hurt.  That hurt at the wrong time in my life.  I needed to be pulled in, not pushed out.  Didn't happen.  To whom should I have fallen to my knees out of supplication?  

In comparison, another man, much less a contributor to the general melee of spoken word in Dallas--he had an incident, a manic episode.  He was out of his mind for long enough to land at the Southern Baptist run shelter known as The Dallas Life Foundation.  In his case, a rescue operation was mounted: "We should not allow a man who has been rendered homeless due to mental illness."  

In contrast, I was long-term homeless when I finally wrote my way out of that.  

I went to the honors ceremony.  Some really divisive individuals were honored.  I appreciated many who received public admiration.  But after the ceremony, I asked one of the judges why I wasn't among those.  Hadn't I done a lot to publicize the smallish poetry community?  

"Your name did come up," he said. "but you didn't get enough votes."  

OK.  I'll buy it.  I wasn't angling for any number one position.  I only wanted to be a part of a community I'd actively sought to improve via public relations.  

Too bad, right?  

Might have helped me.  Nah.  Too much to ask.  

Odder still, after I had literally garnered a slice of fame from my writing for Endless Choices, a local street newspaper, writing that so advanced the cause of my community--the homeless community--that I was interviewed by Dallas Observer, profiled on WFAA television news, and invited to write a Viewpoints piece by The Dallas Morning News.  I'd used my writing quite effectively to gain a little justice for my people.  

Not surprisingly, that feat engendered nothing from the spoken word authorities.  Me?  Using words to achieve some social justice in contrast to spoken word poets who do nothing but complain about injustices?  

Inessential.  

One thing about myself I do understand when seen through the eyes of people who ignored me that moment: I'd been seen as a troublemaker by most people who did not know me.  When I shouted poems--I called them punk poems--from a stage at 500 Cafe in 1985-86--that apparently was horrible to those "grandees" who take themselves so seriously I'm surprised their faces haven't cracked from it.  Add to that my drinking.  Yes.  That was untoward.  But there is a vast difference between boozing it up for no reason and self-medicating, something many Bipolars are "guilty of".  

Don't ask for understanding from those who promote their sensitivities and their big rants about injustice.  

I wrote about how Dallas' most recent poet laureate first "friended" me on Facebook, and then "unfriended" me.  Gossip?  Backroom antics by foolish "intellectuals"?  Whatever.  It's always fun to be rejected by someone you've never even met solely on the basis of gossip from people determined never to understand the underlying circumstances of a person seen as some kind of hassle. 

When I think about hassles, I know I could have been far more outspoken about the people who pose as competent poets when in truth they're not.  I could really have rubbed some dirt into their eyes.  I didn't.  I have compassion.  I know everyone, myself included, has dreams.  

Lesson?  Don't yell at girls.  If so, your entire life will be discounted.  

Or something.  

Don't have a panic attack or you shall be isolated. 

Done.  

Don't acclaim all the poseurs to the skies or you shall be gossiped into a sort of concentration camp.  

And yet here Dallas is, a "city of the arts".  It's all so fake.  Many artists and some literary figures have had to yam-scram out of this place simply to save their careers. 

Beyond that, I've always wondered if my social justice work didn't generate trouble for me after I helped get the City of Dallas' secular homeless shelter, The Bridge, in a place appropriate to the community for which it is intended to serve.  

Real estate developers didn't like the location because they, in all their selfishly self-interested money-led excuses for wisdom, had plans for the area.  You know: get "the bad elements" out of the way so they could build condos for young professionals.  To promote the Dallas Farmers' Market to tourists, it needs to be located in the digs of luxury and suburbanization of the inner city.  Right.  Make an urban center look exactly like the Plano suburbs.  Which is no social contribution to culture.  All it does if fill wallets for people who already have too much power as it is.  

I remember the real estate developer I interviewed.  He wanted Endless Choices to be his voice.  He wanted us to defend his designs for the area in question.  He offered me an extra $200 a month to do that.  My publisher was initially on-board--until I told her, no, I could not because such a transaction would call my journalistic objectivity into question.  

The developer's self interest was such that the developer was willing to attempt to corrupt a journalist.  No surprise there. I bet that happens all the time in U.S.A. 2025.  

I didn't take the money, The Bridge took form in the area many homeless people knew as a familiar and somewhat out of the way spot to simply exist.  

So wrong.  Unsanctioned existence is out-of-line in the myopic eyes of the money men.  Do they invest in eyes?   Or only spectacles?  

Could be some developers developed grudges against me.  I really don't know.  And I don't care.  Just because those bozos have lots of money does not give them excuses to oppress those who might dissent  against their Great Big Plans to do the city the way they want to do the city.  

If my suspicions are on target, what does such a freak fest mean?  

It means that social and political equality doesn't mean crap to those with a sort of $$$ OCD.  

That crap is endemic in the United States, 2025.  

Hence my ruminations.  How important is an independent voice?  Or how much more important is it to be an "independent" voice that is in actuality nothing but a pet for the aggrandizement of powerful people who only want the bragging rights over a culture against which they are constantly in combat?  

A Washington Post article yesterday jogged my thinking to a degree.  The story amounted to worries and complaints over why it seems that culture here in the U.SA. during the Gen Z is decaying.  I asked the question: if a cultural creative is bidden to be nothing but a voice for people who don't care about anything but themselves and their $$$, why create?  There is a difference between authentic creativity's outcomes and outcomes overruled by commercialization's credos.  

Creativity and culture are nothing but "things" people like real estate investors and devleopers covet.  Might as well be a deck of nice playing cards, apropos for Casino Nation Dallas.