Dennis Leroy Kangalee

I don’t know why but my heart sank when I read he’d used the term Ad Hominem.

On the bus, in the grave, below a lunchroom doorway or within the scheme of park — a part of me rustled. I watched his face on the screens above the mildew & steam rising from the machines, I missed the rinse cycle but didn’t care & my eyes were hurt and glossed and I couldn’t make out the fuzzy framed picture on the TV.

All I could do
was fold
& smooth
the edges of
my underwear,
smell the fabric of the toothen-caved-towel
& just mumble to myself that it’s all going to pass
cause it always does
But a part of me felt a little like a cheat,
a doused bunny who’d gotten away,
a mouse in a big house,
a tangle cherry-tree
still standing after the storm.

A part of me felt for him in a way I probably shouldn’t and I wondered what I would have done had I really known him, had I been his friend once or his enemy, his neighbor, or his bandmate, his dealer, his girlfriend, his mother, his father.
And I recalled my own self-important blues and irritating holler of my twenties, my unhinged moments of lucidity, my righteous breakdowns, my challenge of truth, my call to arms…But I was certain my shrill-shrill call was no false alarm, my anger not bitter hatred, my contempt not imaginary — but valid.

“He’d read Orwell & Huxley.”
Who hadn’t?
He was just probably the only one who understood it.

He read Mein Kampf.
Not David Lerner’s poem, but the book by the man who came to be known as the face & name of the twentieth century, the man single-handedly credited for inciting the zeitgeist, the man who made pop culture.

“There isn’t one brilliant mind on this planet who hasn’t read that book,” a college professor explained. “No one cared enough to help this lad as he was making his way down the crooked stairwell of sanity…everyone apparently was aware of his psychological demise or his mental sickness – “

Was it because they smelled just as bad?
If you’re both wearing the same cologne, how can you tell who’s sweat is filling the air?

Rhetoric doesn’t kill.
Apathy does.
And if betrayal is a mother fucker,
Denial is an assassin who will work for deferred pay –
But when he collects it is not currency he will want,
It is complicitness.

I have just one idea, let’s play a game:
Lets play the numbers game – I’m getting into that one now, I’m an American after all.
Nine years old? She was just nine years old?

I got you beat by 2 years just some months before: she was 7 years old murdered by police.
Who mourns for Aiyana Jones?

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