The Allen Chronicles Poem by Romella Kitchens

The Allen Chronicle,1.

I had to watch several Woody Allen movies to understand -
the door of traumatic history never closes, the path beyond

its threshold is ad infinitum, the continuum, the line with
the arrow tip.

I had to watch to understand panic, cataclysmic racism, ethnic hatred,
religious hatred and more.

In his movies, Allen fears 'death'. But, in some he never runs directly into
anti-Semitics. It is an advent not of necessity. His ancestors already
had.

Therefore; as a painful form of 'inheritance' comes nightmares, waking
terror and fear. Anxiety. Trauma delved into one's very core. As a manner
of looking at life from then on no matter how you try to dispel it.

We have a globe filled with differing groups of people with that anxiety.
With like histories of repression and death.



As a Black person, I fear the people who call me racial epithets because
not as some comical form of paranoia but because in factotum,
they form a real, a tangible, brutal threat. I fear them because predecessors
of mine were enslaved, lynched and otherwise hurt by those like them.And,
because even art which Plato wondered at the value of indicates their
hateful actions in varying forms.

They say what they mean and then are more than capable of acting upon it.
What is done to other groups of oppressed people is only further proof of it.
The only hope is the intervention of those who do not share those view points.
Historical trauma, not hysteria. Trauma based on ugly fact, not that long ago.
In his movies, he lightens that terror with humor but, beneath that commercial
epidermis is layer after layer of bloody truth…
Neurosis as a battle scar. A far reaching implication. A scar which sustains.

The Allen Chronicles,2
We sleep in our fear as if it was a pod, a covering, controlled by outside
forces beyond our management…
Beyond our desires, necessities and needs.
We inherit trauma like a facility for math, soft hair, a facile mind, tapering
fingers.
Remember the 'palings are made of iron bars and steel points.'
Remember, 'as a fence, it is a masterpiece.'