“Still, I Despise: A Moral-Lyric Report with Field Notes from the Tiger Manual”

DETRITUS: MAL’POETICA.

The poetry and lyric column of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Newsletter.

“As peace, love, understanding, and race realism are busting out all over, and as the bonfire of the vanity of diversity rages, I’ve updated Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ to reflect what I see burning in the ruins of moral idealism and cultural masochism. The poem is not a parody—it’s a receipt. I’m turning her poem against itself. Behind its proud cadence is a sneer. Underneath the uplift is the unspoken resentment. The Tiger Manual had more moral clarity than this.”

— Black Cloud, Chief Poetic Justice Warrior, C-of-C-C

STILL, I DESPISE

(After Maya Angelou, by Black Cloud)

You may praise my sordid history

Ignore my faults, my sins, disguise

Praise my shortcomings to the skies

But still, I just, despise.

Does my homeland’s mess upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I can’t drill my own oil wells

Make an economic boom?

Toward the moon and stars

You’d take us for the ride

You’d share it all in disregard

Of taking your own side

Yet we take you for a dope

Your kindness we despise.

We want to see you broken

With bowed head and lowered eyes

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by resentful lies

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh as your gold heart it shines

And supports my ass of lard

You may boost me with your words,

Accept your enemies’ lies

Gotten rid of your old hatefulness,

But we, your care, despise

Does my heaviness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise?

That we prance about your towns

Consuming pounds of chicken thighs

Made my own ruts, my history’s shame

Yet I despise

For my own pain, I am to blame

Yet I despise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling in unearned pride.

Heaving behind nights of terror and fear

I despise

Even in daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I despise

Resenting the freedom your ancestors gave,

Milking their dream of hope for the slave.

I despise

I despise

I despise.

Commentary from Black Cloud:

The Tiger Manual was written for armored men rolling across history’s fire. But it’s also a manual for morale: “A morose attitude won’t reach the goal” was their reminder that bitterness doesn’t conquer terrain. The tankman had to laugh, or go mad in steel.

We’ve since replaced tanks with triggers—emotional, not ballistic. Yet the battleground remains the same: moral clarity versus weaponized grievance. And in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” I didn’t hear healing. I heard hostility. I didn’t hear transcendence—I heard dependence with a smirk.

I rewrote her poem to surface what she buried in cadence: contempt cloaked as courage, entitlement disguised as endurance. She says she rises—but only if you stoop. Her smile is the reward for your surrender.

Leopardi once said:

“He who has the courage to laugh is almost as much a master of the world as he who is ready to die.”

That, my friends, was the ethos of the Tigerman. And it’s the ethos we’ve abandoned. Today, we reward the humorless and punish the brave. We confuse moral theater for moral authority. But the manual warned us:

Even moralists for their preachings

Are sometimes immoral, despite their teachings.

So let the Tigerman learn with humor. Let the Council endure with clarity. And let the rest take heed before all laughter dies, and death itself becomes the only honest reaction left.

Filed under: Detritus: Mal’Poetica, Civilizational Morale Reports, Post-Ethical Topographies