Work

The Peace Poets got a workshop. Next Thursday with thirty thirteen year olds at 7:30am about two hours away from where we live. Yes. We are working in collaboration with Asociacion Pablo Nicolas, an organization dedicated to confronting and eradicating violence in schools. Lets get it on.

CASTRO

The day is brilliant and sunny and the students shine too as they enter and leave the Institute of Art. Five blocks away a girl of two years old sleeps face down on the street. Her pillow is a piece of trash. Her mother looks up at me calmly. I kneel down. She asks if I can call those policemen down the block because there is a shelter somewhere, she has papers for it, she is waiting…I ask her name. ‘Castro’… she stares blankly…. Still… ‘Mariana’… ‘hola.’ -Hola Mariana, mi nombre es Lucas. Ya te los llamo. I’ll call the Police for you… her daughter snores a little.

Questions

The city is inside out, turned by social movements and political oppression and misplaced efforts and malicious efforts and human chaos into slogans of liberation on walls and cafés on corners where you can get an empanada that will turn your whole situation around as you ask questions. But the questions are busier than the streets… You cannot ask about how people slept during the dirty war without being in the gridlock traffic of a million stories. But you have to keep asking questions. Questions like how are you today? And what do you remember? And what is your dream for tomorrow? What is my dream?

Tango Night and Flowers of la Señora, Parque Dorego

It has to be surrender. Or confidence. Or luck. Or the brilliance we forget we have within us finally splashing out the surface. One of these things is the essence of Tango.

I’m floating in a mist of cigarette smoke y breath full of vino tinto y a scratchy record’s epic declarations of passionate melodies y about 70 people dancing in a space where only 40 could stand comfortably. It’s a typical Sunday evening in this little plazuela where people come to dance and drink and talk and be.

A little girl of about ten years with a rainbow colored handmade poncho rolls up on me and sticks out her hand with a bright orange flower as if she was delivering the newspaper. I take it. She explains that the flowers belonged to a Senora who passed away, but the flowers are for the people. She is on a mission. I look at Constanza, la Chilena who had just been speaking to me about the necessity of breaking routines and living with passion. She smiles and the little girl gives her a flower too. La Chiquita scurries away through the pairs of dreamers dancing tango into the night sky like they were praying to the Gods of Argentinean Romance and red wind. Constanza and I accept the little girl’s mission and our part in it with curious amusement. My friend from Chile had just explained by example to me the inclusive nature of this social scene by acting as if I was an old friend even though I was just a stranger who just happened to be sitting nearby… “y tu, como estas?” she asked me and thirty seconds later we were agreeing about how miraculous it is to breathe air and look into eyes and create art. Five minutes after that we were gifted plants of a deceased woman. Ten minutes after that the chubby poncho flower delivery girl returns and says ok, la senora needs the flowers back. She grabs the stem and takes one right out of Constanza’s bag and lifts mine right out of my hands (so much for bringing lau una flor) We sit there totally shocked as the tango dancers glide around and watch as the niña walks up to a fifty year old lady in mid conversation and plucks a lily right out of her hair and walk off. We burst out laughing. The flower girl disappears, the tango dancers kick their heals up, the moon nods in approval and we discuss why life is worth living and then say goodnite as the dramatic pause of the tango ends and the plaza exhales.

La Otra

We live in a hood called La Boca. Poetry of paint of spray cans and brushes and hands and anything has been planted on the walls. Huge black letters on a yellow wall facing Calle Defensa read:

“Fuego a todas las Carceles! = Fire to all Prisons”

Word.

I wonder weather the brother or sister who wrote that has been behind bars. It seems extremely likely. I wonder if anyone that hasn’t could ever feel how inhumane prisons are?

I wonder what it takes to become the other?

The Right to go ummmmm.. .

Somebody should add Access to Empanadas to the list of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So good.

Parks full of Possibilities

In the park here in Buenos Aires youth speak. They sit and drink mate and talk. Others skateboard, some read and some play futbol. They are together. It’s peaceful. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to be here, to love here… I wander the streets and wonder about the peaks and valley’s of people’s lives in this costal city farther south than I’ve ever been… I listen to the people, watch the humanness of their expression.

This is a Latin American city, even though it has architecture like Paris’ town halls and Italian names like Avenida Alberdi or Villa Crespo, but its Latino for sure. So it already feels like home. Dogs bark, drums play, three friends sitting next to me are laughing. The whole plaza feels like they are dancing in honor of expression itself, celebrating the perseverance of music, giving thanks for the benevolence of the sun. Actually, they’re just chilling like any people in any park anywhere... But it’s my first day far from home and I’m as open to inspiration as the cloudless sky above my head. Why not?

Futbol as Peace Making Strategy (Translated from Spanish)

And Now we here, eyes and ears open, walking as far as these feet will take us…

(Plaza Houssay, Buenos Aires

Frente la facultad de medicina)

Love of futbol seems to me to be a healthy love. Futbol is prayer, or maybe even more, a form of meditation. There is no war between those who play. There is an active peace. In this peace the human spirit, which is furious and excitable and competitive and hot… is free. And that is how peace has to be. You see everything come out in Futbol- patience and confidence, anger and joy, generosity or selfishness that we have or that we don’t. It’s all there. Free. But yet it’s controlled. We have to take into account the ball, the team, the time, the climate, the moment (not the past or future) and our capacity to play. Do you play? Yes. Why not? Lets play. Lets live. The moment. Free.

HOMES

Brazilian Airlines scoop me right out of my city and toss me to Rio, then drop me in Buenos Aires at 2am. Adrian drives his old little taxi slowly into the sleeping city, he talks about futbol as my mind travels back to this country’s Dirty War when these doors were kicked in and young activists like us were stolen out their beds, tortured, murdered and disappeared. ‘Every player wants to go to Europe’ Adrian explains. ‘Como no, I’m sure they do, I reply. The country has gone through an economic crisis in recent years but my friend says, ‘things are ok.... not good, not bad.’ We pass Parque Lezama and pull up outside Uspallata 489 where I will be calling home for the next few months. I think I’ve gotten good at making homes. I get out the car, step into the middle of the empty street and call up to the third floor: “Princesa!” She puts her head out the window and smiles. Home. The morning comes, the sun rises on a cold and crowded city where the ghosts of 30,000 people disappeared whisper dreams of revolutions, demands of rebellion and the simple human desire to at least be remembered. I can hear them sing.

~*

Leaving the Bronx

I’m gonna take a minute to go back to the exit from NYC. In our crew we always talk about how journeys begin before you leave and end long after you return…

14 - 9 - 10

Another journey has begun…even before the sun announces we’re worthy of another day, the call of brotherhood sounds. Enmanuel, Frank and Flo roll out of bed and out into the sleepless shadows of Valentine Ave. to grab the whip that’ll take me to the airport. Mike stumbles out into the dim light of the hallway to say peace and then insists on taking the traditional foto of me with my bags. Classic. Down in 3B Abe gets up and opens the door to give me a final pound y la bendicion, (we figure the more blessings the better). I walk out onto our block. I’m standing alone for a moment in the yellow haze of the streetlights.

Ahh, the block…I hate it, but I hate to leave it. The violence of crack, the guy stabbed across the street a couple months ago and my boy get put up against the wall and cuffed just last week. And yet right next door is family, where Rosa sells taquitos and tortas and Harris y Tito and the others guys kick it and tell stories and ask us to get the guitar to sing. Home. And then the late night chaos, somebody gotta break a bottle. The midday screaming matches between the lady on the fourth floor and the guys sitting on the hood of a car. Street football games at 2am when a diving catch sets off a symphony of car alarms. And drugs like milk outa the bodega. Home. It got a little quieter after that bust a while back when they found millions of dollars of heroin, guns, etc across the street but it’s getting back to its hostile self. Valentine Ave., you break my heart. I think of the last line in our piece about Manhood: “This War zone of a Home cannot steal our free will… We can still be as beautiful as the Sun…”

My brothers pull up in the car. Frank and Flo holding down the back seat, I get in the front next to E. I look at their tired faces. “Yall already know”. That means I’m grateful. Frank pats my shoulder, E says I owe him big time, Flo sits back and smiles. We turn down 194^th st and roll toward Webster then left on Fordham and out to the airport. Leaving the Bronx always hurts a little. I swallow the pain and regain focus. Its time to get to work and this is a good new beginning.

Flying down the highway through Queens listening to Nas I can’t think of a time when I had such a good sendoff since being in the back of a bread truck with fifteen family members bouncing down out the mountain hood in Quito to take me to the airport also at 5am. I feel strengthened by the solidarity. “Yah” I say, looking at each of them… “this is Brotherhood.” They laugh- “We got you brother” I nod, thinking to myself- yah, yaw do, and that… that is as beautiful as the sun.

It’s September 14^th and the Peace Poets are on the move again. Less than 12 hours ago Frantz and Abe arrived at JFK from Germany where they were representing Brotherhood/Sistersol and The Peace Poets at an international conference. Now I’m back at JFK putting my feet up at gate 3A realizing I’m ready. Here we go again…

Peace from South America

24 – 9 – 10

Its cold up in here. It’s the end of winter in Buenos Aires and the Peace Poets are keeping it positive despite the fact it’s not warm enough to wear chancletas in the streets. Whats up with anyone living in a place where you can't rock flip flops comfortably? … But life moves here… and you can hear people singing at all hours and you can play futbol en los parques and you can see people dance tango in the street and you can write books to rebel against mental slavery and you can be nostalgic and miss your loved ones and find people who sell shoes made out of old jeans and sit in plazas where mothers protested the disappearance of their children by the military junta and you can laugh at yourself and you can question your courage when you see kids in the streets at midnight asking for money for food because they are hungry and you can be sure there is hunger and you can read desperation spray painted on crumbling concrete walls and you can wish the world was better and you can love here and you can be joyful despite the pain here and you can dream of a place where everyone is as honest as the music of the man who plays his guitar with his eyes closed… here. Where we are now. Where we are beginning again. Where we are ready to work. And celebrate work. And inhale the clouds from above the moon, so that we have all the necessary breath to whisper I love you. And mean it with our entire poetic soul. Welcome home.