who wakes you up?

Today the first thing that made me stop to reread was the first line of the poem that came in as the Poem-a-Day: Allegorical Baraka, by Anne Waldman, in memoriam LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka 1934–2014. The poem begins "who wakes you up" and that is the question that I have been asking myself.

Who wakes you up

I don't do cathedrals, I don't do history, I don't do

Who wakes you up?

All the homes on Steelhead Drive are gone. The newspaper

Who wakes you up?

Yesterday was flooded in sunshine so today of course I wore my big bifocal sunglasses. My great gray bumbershoot kept them dry.

Yesterday was flooded in words, rhymes, happy energies, the up half of my cycling self—yesterday born in multiple streaming lines of rhythm, patterns, yesterday woken in dreaming echoes snatched, yesterday a memory of the day before

Input, Input, Input / Everything anyone has ever said or written down / Electricity and newspapers and the humming house and the e-mail prompts and the poems-a, stories-a, pictures-a-day, screaming input

Das Erdbeben in Chile, das Erdbeben, the earth bobbing, the coast on high alert, up north meanwhile the homes on Steelhead Drive all gone

Who wakes you up?