Ghetto Farm Kid

Possibly the first of my poems intended in a spoken word vein. 

I'm a ghetto farm kid, trapped amid the bustle and noise of an urbanity, the hard press of humanity

here I have no choice but to breathe gasoline fumes, or the odor that looms around concrete fast food tombs.

so different than the smell of ripening wheat, or the sweet scent of clover and sage... or the hard honest sweat that you get when your sweeping a bin, or pitching the hay in on a hot heavy day

I was never meant to be a farmer, to my parents dismay my course lay instead, in literature, fantasy, the books I had read

They inspired me, widened me, and taught my mind to ignore the simplicity what lay around sowing the ground, the beautiful haunting sound of a chinook wind, or the sight of hawks hunting in the fields where the harvest is coming in

With the row of combines marching in the lines of swath on a land like quilted cloth

Swatches of green and gold, a pageantry as old as Cain, who was the first to put hand to the plough look up at the sky and curse it for its lack of rain

I wanted something more than the duties of the farm chore, I swore, I would travel, experience more than the vista of a plain Albertan plain.

I wanted to imbibe the foreign sights and sounds of something other than my tribe

Learn the tongue from the young of another place, chase down and face the desire to flee my own space, hearth and home

My feet were itchy, you see?

I scratched that itch, and set them free on a plane trip to Germany

I lived in Berlin, away from my kin, in an city so new and fresh to my eyes, there was no disguise-ing my newfound love and care for this city of the Bear

It had an atmosphere, you veritably sense it in the air, in the clothes that my peers would wear, the mohawk hair

Or the red handkerchief slung round the neck hung like a flag ready at the beck and call of a protest at the Berlin Wall which had its fall not too long ago at all

You could feel the history in this city, sketched underneath the skin of the graffiti tag

Feel it as you touched bullet holes in the Reichstag

From a World War where they exchanged one dictator for years of cold slow conflict that raged in this city divided between East and West

You can see it echoed in eyes, hear it in the chest of a people who are charged with:

Lest WE forget Auschwitz, Treblinka, Arbeit Macht Frei,

You can see it echoed in the eyes, the memories of a people who let the Jews die

But there was a willingness to engage, from the people my age in questions political, rhetorical, and cultural,

There was a thirst for debate, a desire to create a dialogue of mind and thought, a language fraught with the willingness to encompass more than the limits of theology, nationality, and blind ideology

They taught me that it was ok to open my mind from the culture I lived in - I had to make the point though, No... I'm not an American –

I found I could relate in conversations late at night in a coffee shop open far past the hour of closing and well on the way to first light

So you see, it was trip whose taste left me thirsty for really good coffee and a company that delights in the verbal spar, the conversation that ranges wide and far – far from the plebeian woes of this city that has no personality as far as personality goes

It was a good trip for this ghetto farm kid

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