#charles simon

The Saint: The Fellow Traveller (2.1, ITC, 1963)

"Do that again."

"Do what?"

"Flutter your eyelashes - it's standard procedure when you're lying."

"Simon, darling, I never tell you a lie!"

Charles Simon’s Bonaventure Rolling luggage,

Rolling luggage in maple wood, young bull leather and anodized black aluminum, Alcantara® interior lining, equipped with retractable wheels and top handle, and an automatic deploying handle,

“Adding their voices to the chorus of Black Lives, Albuquerque Poets Hakim Bellamy, Charles Simon and Marilyn Pettes Hill hope to awaken America to the racism it has slept on for far too long.”

Another New Mexico PBS Production…thank you to my fellow poets Marilyn and Charles, as well as Tara Walch.

For the culture. For the people. For the love. Check it out on Facebook here.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire (later Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects, 1995)

I.

Like Keyser Söze, systemic racism’s greatest trick was convincing the world it didn’t exist.

Call you crazy for hearing things, slurs and threats.

For seeing things that go fire in the night,

right on your front lawn.

A Boogeyman that knows where you do and do not live, an unsolved church bombing underneath the bed.

A package with no return address.

Used to disguise, only ever occasionally flirt with celebrity. Might show a little leg when kicking the shit out of you,

But completely disrobing, coming out from beneath the face covering used to be sacrilegious.

There was a time when white power had a belief system too.

2.

Nowadays, racism is no longer a “medical condition”, is no longer color

blind.

Once invisible it is all the way out the closet. A minstrel show of itself.

It is popular. It is broad daylight.

It is a choke hold instead of a noose.

Close enough to whisper sweet lynchings in your ear.

Nowadays, racism is intimate. Nowadays, racism is insolent. Nowadays, racism is infamous.

Nowadays, you can see it coming… in your rear view.

No mask.

3.

Like Keyser Söze, systemic racism

is criminal.

The one who got away with it. A devil

jealous of our existence.