Aldo, my friend, speaks strongly like a strong rumbling volcano passion creating a continuous flame purifying the metal of social vision:  A fusion of surrealistic bitter wit and tenderness bounded by love.  Aldo, the master artist who lives poetically, in the shrine of his soul-mate eternally resurrected in dreams of a just and beautiful life.  O art, the ultimate anarchist bide with us, the poor, the wounded lamb of bourgeois slaughterhouse seeking paradigms for the just.  O art, song of the spirit ride with us, these desperate daze, ranting among the remnants of a continuous disasters; O life inconsolable these hordes of dispossessed:  The children, tattered waifs with demons leaping from their tongues bizarre landscapes fracturing their frantic lives.  Where the cornucopias?  Where the promised of paradise?  All of us immigrants of imagination captives of the beautiful lie.  American dreams lost junkies of common nod, the random God merciless among idiot supermarkets, pimps of idiot plenty, with its infinite game show wheel game show wheel eternally spinning lies for the suckers-salesmen and small town rubes;  loveless husbands forever philandering: one last fuck among the display manikins blond Barbies weeping in dust.  Aldo, old magician among your poems and mementos of a grander age, when we had black hair, passion to explode myriad volcanoes raining revolutionary lava among skyscrapers leaning like Pisa in the quicksand of age.  Art and Anarchy, Art and Socialism, Art and free spirits unbounded emerged releasing Prometheus from his eternal rock.  Poets then paraded through suburban mind-sets releasing doomed sycophants from monsters bloody claws.  American dreams in drag, Draculas masquerading as lost merchants, hucksters used car salesmen with Nixon profiles sporting Reagan haircuts in the winds of history; in the winds and miseries among bowling alley owners conjugating ruin.  What can we say to the robots to the sycophants, Aldo?  We, tattered men in baggy pants, rheumy eyed old guerillas jazzmen, fanatic lovers among the dispossessed aging hippies saboteurs of the American nightmare released like a killer virus upon an unsuspecting world?  Fight, sing, fight, dream; question endlessly, discover lost beauty in the wounded single mothers desperate housewives in tenements lost fathers tattered dreamers, baby-faced desperados holding subways hostage in the dynamo of the American night…..And somewhere in an unrecorded womb a new infant age is coming into birth old comrade; and our multitudinous wounds and sacrifices will each bear fruit in that new day when the lonely crowd discovers art and visionary joy in the solace of mutual embrace.

Askia Touré

Dear Grandfather Poet,
our dear great one
Eternally be the shining
star that you are
in the heart of darkness.

BE that arms-wide-wide huge
sumi-inked circle of light in infinite
Blackness

Circle of blackness inked
on newsprint on canvas
of light shining: YOUness.

You above all !
For who else will let themselves face this madness,
stand and *know* the Blackness
that speaks truth to the Madness
of our green world, all dust and fire.

The people of Africa, Haiti, Cambridge, Boston need your voice.
You have always been friend of the Black people
– either the white skinned darkness loving art people
– or the black skinned shining light children of ghetto dirt.

You are our friend,
and we love you.

amatul hannan

Askia Touré with Aldo at the South End Tech Center

Aldo Tambellini
dirty footed saint
sacred elder of imagio magic
perfect in all imperfections
you are needed in this world.
LIVE!

peace
Amatul

The boy,
the bombs,
the guns,
the hate that fills the air,
the fear pervading life,
the death,
the terror,
injustice,
oppression ...
Where is hope?
Where is hope?
In him.
in him,
in him,
surviving by hope,
by strength of mind,
by grace of God ...
surviving,
surviving to grow ...
to grow,
to speak,
in words,
in art,
in film ...
to cry peace,
decry the cycle of war,
and plow the seeming endless field,
killing field ...
to plow the blood beneath the soil,
and in the killing field to plant
the gentle bright and joyful blooms
of the hope,
the peace,
the fierce and steady love
that saved him.
Can it save us all?
----------------------
ed pacht © 2007

To Aldo

In a generation where people are cursing, fighting and
killing their own
There you stand alone
Pale in a world full of shade
And you understand
Standing alone like a soldier in a battlefield
Fighting in unity against a situation that I, myself,
believe is hopeless
But you persist
Darkness encompasses, things never get better
But you believe
And so that makes me believe
and maybe that one voice
in the midst of all the harsh vocal lyrics
one day will awaken my men, our men, the
children of our seed
So that we will no longer be thought of as “bitches
and whores”
But as heroines
Women of Power

Lafonde R. May ‘94

C.C. Arshagra

In the key of listen

It’s a brutal world
The cold sleep
and the sharp edited-listen
paints with reality black
Harsh word-lights’ shine
into the crevasses
of daily denial
Fathoms of deep innocence
are in a coma
of ignorance bleeding
It’s the blood
of yesterday’s headlines that appear
red and dead-awake
on the hands of today
as conservative
safe-clouds break
and the black of sun comes
as a gift of going blind
to understand seeing one
relatively small planet
clear through the brutal world
of illuminated-lies
using you
like a free-puppet
with painted eyes
glassy and looking
open to believe
that if a rock or rocket
of truth were to strike
the center of your brushed on
and glossed over cornea
Nothing would change
or shatter. Look.
The strings
Nothing could cut
the tethered motivation
attached to your hands
where armed weapons might live
Attached to a smiling
fist up your spine
Ready to bare fangs
at the squeeze of a trigger
Ready to bear down
on shredded information
Shaving of voices
from where no lips are moving
All just as if
you would
still believe to be
the very source
of your own freedom

C.C. Arshagra © 2006