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    Letters to Osama: Old and New Musings on Foreign and Domestic Terrorism...And Other Matters
    Letters to Osama: Old and New Musings on Foreign and Domestic Terrorism...And Other Matters
    Letters to Osama: Old and New Musings on Foreign and Domestic Terrorism...And Other Matters
    Ebook240 pages2 hours

    Letters to Osama: Old and New Musings on Foreign and Domestic Terrorism...And Other Matters

    By D. Alexander Holiday

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    In I Use To Fall Down, his first major compi-lation of his poems, which was favorably received, Mr. Holiday took the reader on a whirlwind of emotional topics, from nuclear proliferation(Washerwoman Blues) to starving children in Somalia (Il Walad), from police bru-tality (Rest In Peace, Cop Killers, and When the Cops Drive By) to reflections on his twenty-one years under the New York City foster care system(Somehow, Mama Knew, Stop Laughing At Me, and What Dad Might Have Said). He has attempted to be honest, some have said too brutally honest, about abuse, the very abuse he has experienced at the hands of care-takers and that abuse which he sees perpetrated by man against man.

    With Letters to Osama..., Mr. Holiday runs the gambit, again, of topics as current as the war over Iraq, the ugliness of 9-ll, and he continues to be brutally honest in his criticisms and observations of the Bush Administration, the UN, and other world leaders and the roles they play in the worlds conflicts(foreign and domestic).

    D. Alexander Holiday is a native New Yorker, raised in foster care and was stricken with Gillian Barre Syndrome (also called Ascending Paralysis) at the age of ten. He holds a Master of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Albany. He is currently working on his autobiography, In the Care of Strangers: The Autobiography of A Foster Child. His work can be found on the web at: www.feelingandform.com, www.albanypoets.com, and www.poetix.net/columbia.htm

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateDec 22, 2003
    ISBN9781462801893
    Letters to Osama: Old and New Musings on Foreign and Domestic Terrorism...And Other Matters

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      Book preview

      Letters to Osama - D. Alexander Holiday

      FORWARD

      I first met D. Alexander Holiday at Open Mic night at the QE2 in Albany. I was just 21 then, and the QE2 was a former White Castle hamburger stand on Central Avenue that had been transformed into a bar. God, the freaks who came into that place! (Actually, most of them weren’t freaks at all, it’s just that I’d never been around artists, and many of them were, well, freaky. But not actually freaks.)

      I had just discovered rap, and decided it was my role in life to educate the ignorant masses through rhyme. So you could find me at the QE2 every last Monday of the month, informing black and gay and lesbian art types that racism, homophobia, forcible kitten sex, etc., were bad, in a series of rap poems whose lack of anything resembling a flow would have gotten me bumrushed at Manhattan’s Nuyorican Café.

      One night, after rapping about the evils of alcohol for the three or four people sober enough to hear me, one of those people came up to me. He was a medium-build, good-looking, light-skinned black man. I can’t remember a thing about how he was dressed, although he might have been wearing a denim outfit. At any rate, he said something to the effect of, I liked your stuff. Here’s my number. Give me a call, if you want to talk.

      Fortunately, I did call, and we’ve remained friends ever since. (For some reason, I’ve always called him Alex, which is how I’ll refer to him here). He has introduced me to the joys of fried pork chops, Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go, and world music. I may or may not have introduced him to the word misanthrope, which he appears to have proudly appropriated.

      mis*an*thrope n somebody who hates humanity, or who dislikes and distrusts other people and tends to avoid them (from the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary, 2001).

      I highlighted the segment of this definition that, I feel, more accurately applies to D. Alexander. I don’t believe he hates humanity, although I don’t think he approves of much of what humanity has done (slavery, the Holocaust, organized religion, etc.). Then there are the things he’s experienced personally: abandonment by his parents (whom he has never met), abusive foster homes, the little cruelties that adults visit upon each other in the workplace, on the street, in the bedroom.

      What is amazing to me is that a child faced with so many horrors (including two years of paralysis due to Gillian-Barre Syndrome, starting at age ten) was able to survive, work his way through college and graduate school, and become a fully functioning adult. Although he has a very real disability as the result of his bout with Gillian-Barre, he has always managed to work. What is not surprising is that these experiences have informed his writing, which can be quite disturbing at times. In it you will find statements and observations that may offend the Hell out of you. Dread-lock wearing white kids, Colin Powell (the make-believe colored man), cops, Black women living in Albany (a town Alex detests and will hopefully one day escape), Presidents past and present: all get skewered.

      He’s been writing for over fifteen years, and he’s accumulated quite a varied body of work. In I Saw You Smile, Alex reminded us of the days immediately following the O.J. Simpson verdict, when some reacted with glee to O.J.’s acquittal. As hard as Alex has been on white people when we have deserved it (which has been all too often), here he captures the hypocrisy of someone — who seems to be Black — reacting gleefully because they set [O.J.] free for murdering a white woman.

      In Il Walad (for the children of the Sudan and Somalia), Alex creates an epic, harrowing elegy to the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of starving Africans forced to march for food during the Somalian civil war.

      He loves music, and you will find elements of the blues in some of these poems, like Somehow Mama Knew. More often, though, Alex writes as he speaks, or as he has heard others — usually African Americans — speak. The influence of Langston Hughes is evident throughout.

      Some of these poems could make you cry. Stop Laughing at Me (for Red Skelton), pays heart-breaking testimony to laughter’s power to pull you through horror. Several pieces deal with AIDS, and victims Alex has known and lost.

      Others could make you laugh. Jazz Man, in memory of the recently deceased Dizzy Gillespie, is a fun tribute to one of America’s legends. The title alone for I Don’t Wish to Return to Work(both can be found in I Use To Fall Down, his first book) is enough to make me chuckle, but I laughed out loud at the final line.

      Here, he has chosen to write letters to some folks who’ve been in the news a lot lately. Any die-hard patriots who see the title of this book and immediately think, TRAITOR!, should read these letters. Many of them are part fan letter, part protest. (I myself was a bit horrified at the letter to Jimmy Carter, whom Alex apparently doesn’t regard as much of a poet).

      If you’ve never read or heard Alex’s work before, you are in for a fascinating ride. You’re going to hear someone saying things that very few people want to say regarding the war on terror, ideas that are considered anathema nationwide these days. You’re going to read blistering indictments of greed, misplaced priorities, racism, and folks behaving badly (but getting away with it).

      You’re also going to enter into the psyche of someone who’s personally suffered a great deal of that bad behavior, and find out how he feels about it.

      Brace yourselves.

      A FAMILY IN UNION

      for little Michael and Alexander Smith

      South Carolina:

      There was once a family

      here in Union,

      a family with a husband and wife,

      first a son, then another son.

      With all families trouble comes

      for a visit and stays awhile,

      sometimes leaving only after

      someone else leaves first

      and so the husband leaves the family

      taking custody of his possessions

      the wife taking custody of small children and trouble,

      which wears no clothes

      and stands naked to the world,

      making this woman

      unable to solve her troubles,

      trouble with men

      and small children,

      until she is charged to commit

      atrocities of homicide and genocide,

      trying to hold an entire race

      guilty of her actions,

      and patricide or matricide

      since her father or mother

      or his father or mother

      will feel death tugging at their souls

      at this loss and double fratricide for the destruction

      of a brother to a brother

      and mariticide to an innocent spouse

      and infanticide of little Michael and little Alexander

      and some keep watch for her suicide

      while the Times Union

      is angry with the police chief in Union

      for not taking questions from

      three hundred reporters;

      truly these are trying times

      and this is a

      great loss

      felt by

      great-grandmothers

      and

      great-uncles

      and other

      great people.

      D. Alexander Holiday

      AIN’T NEVER LOVED NO MAN

      Mama ain’t never loved no man never let no man stay long enough

      to learn her secrets

      there were never no old worn male

      shoes under mama’s bed or frayed coats

      hanging in her closet

      she flowed through men

      like the Mississippi river

      flows through states, taking

      her Kentucky ways and her Kentucky

      heart north and in New York she

      jitterbugged with male suitors

      Five male suitors called on mama

      but mama ain’t never loved no man

      so she never let them stay long enough

      to learn her secrets or leave their

      old worn shoes under her bed or frayed

      overcoats in her closet

      she never got no diamonds from them,

      no candies or flowers

      there are no boxes of letters

      stored away in trunks in the attic

      five men came to call, taking mama

      and leaving six offspring,

      five being male

      But mama ain’t never loved no man so she sent her five suitors away and gave their male offspring away cause mama would never love no man never let them grow to learn her secrets or give them shoes to get old and worn to be pushed away under her bed

      No, mama ain’t never loved no man pushing men away and giving men away but one of those men she gave away has been able to love other men and can only think about mama

      But your house is without a male also

      because your mama, too, ain’t never loved no man

      she would not let you love no man

      not your daddy

      not your child’s daddy

      and is this to be another unloved child

      growing to never love no man

      and will the circle ever be unbroken

      and how will this circle be broken

      D. Alexander Holiday

      ANOTHER FEBRUARY DEATH

      For Michael Anderson and the others

      That Saturday had begun with me feeling hopeful

      sure that I would pass that civil service test

      and as I showered and dressed

      on that Saturday morning

      I had chose not to listen to morning news

      but play music on the computer

      and just focus on the task at hand.

      I had walked down to the bus stop

      and I ran into no one who could tell me the news

      and on the city bus still no one made mention of this horrible news

      and even at the exam site, my alma mater,

      still no sense of horrors to come

      and I walked this city after the exam,

      on errands here and there

      and still no one said anything

      to indicate that something terrible had occurred

      while I was away from home,

      (were they all already dead themselves?).

      But, it was upon returning from that hopeful day

      that the news was broadcast on my defective television

      and that man from the nightly news was there

      and he was talking of space shuttles

      and how tiles were burned away

      and then the men from NASA were on

      and they were confirming the horribleness of the day

      that indeed something horrific had happened

      and I was only a little numb, Michael,

      hearing of your death

      along with the others

      and I was only numb because

      I am still torn over 9-11

      and the horror that that day had brought

      while I was getting my eye fixed from a cataract

      and I wanted to stall from writing anything about wars

      those fought and those pending

      and there was that other February when I had written so much for

      another February death and I am just worn down from the death

      and the prospect for more death

      and here is this news of yet more tragedy

      and seven more deaths

      and here I am writing this two days later,

      three days into Black History Month

      because you were Black

      and now you are dead and gone from here

      and it might not be nice to

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