Saturday, January 23, 2021

Don't Live Like This (There's Nothing There)

 

Human beings, Don't live like this
I'm something else
Less and less
Day by night
Night by month -
I'm -
I'm crumpled clothes
Never slipped off
Just collapsed
Onto the floor
Got turned around
Where's the door
I should go
There's just no more -
For me to do
I just read and weap
Learn all the ways
To say we're lost
To understand
Why you're gone -
I'm rusting pots
Season worn, lost
A missing place
An empty chair
Got caught up
Sad and scared
I found myself -
There's nothing there

Saturday, October 15, 2016

If It Seems To You (I've Soured On The Vine)

If it seems to you,
Since those days when we stood
Side by side,
That we've moved apart -
Know I haven't taken a step,
My foulweather friend.
I still stand stubborn, rigid,
Beaten body bent into the wind.
My compass is broken,
Its direction is fixed.
When the meridian is passed
My needle does not shift.
If it seems to you,
That I grow bitter in your mouth
Year by year,
I've soured on the vine -
Know juice do not sweeten,
As it becomes wine.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Law and order, tea party couture -
Flu season in the summer swelter;
Suburban anti-vaxxers spread
The organic affluenza epidemic.
Car bombs in Baghdad, welcome back -
Sing and dance, do the patriot shuffle.
Lotus eaters squat the senate,
Sleeping between the fasces
While nintendo kids fly drones.
The bald eagle is a buzzard,
Picking at Roman bones.

Leave the doors red, paint the flags black. 

Thursday, May 1, 2014

In the spirit of May Day: Or, how I became an Anarchist.
When I was young, very young; seven or eight, my parents got divorced. It was one of those epic, the world just blew up divorces. I remember a lot of fights (words and fists), venom and malice for years. It was not merciful in quickness either. The kind of experience that inevitably corrupts a child and makes the world seem a very dark, traitorous place.
My extended family were bad people (and continue to be, I'm sure, though I broke contact with them over a decade ago). Racists, backstabbing, obsessed with jockeying for status among each other and endlessly cruel. Looking back, it seemed like I was probably doomed.
I was forced into counseling by the Friend of the Court, and, thinking back - I'm sure it was bad. I remember many of the things I told them, and it kind of makes me sick now how "kid me" thought. But, I had this one counselor - his office was in Detroit. Now, this isn't today's Detroit. This was late 80's/early 90's Detroit. the Detroit that burned its self down every October in a ritual of self hate and anger.
He seemed rather par for the course, as I remember through kid's eyes. The one cool thing he would do was to take me on rides on the people mover (our sad little monorail) while we did our sessions. One day, we hopped off, walking through greektown talking and he said we were going to dip into a store to grab something (sodas I think). Nothing atypical.
In the doorway to the closed down shop next door was a woman, old and wrinkled and covered in dirt. She was wrapped in a stained old grey jacket against the northern autumn and even from a distance I could smell her. I stared, I'm sure. He smiled at her and crouched down, greeting her by name and asked how she was doing - said something about needing to get her a new coat. They talked for a few seconds, mostly her nodding insisting she was fine, even though even as a kid it was obvious she wasn't. On the way out of the store he handed her a coffee and slipped a $50 into her palm. A 50! That was, for the time, an insane amount of money; moreover, it seemed like a regular interaction. I doubt it was near the first or last time he slipped her a $50.
I stood back, trying to figure out what exactly I was seeing. To young me, nothing about this made sense. She was a bum, and as I'd learned from my uncle's constant diatribes against them - a lazy fucking piece of shit. Scum. Not only did this man talk to her, he knew her by name! They seemed almost like friends, and he gave her money! To me, then, this was almost sinful in it's wrongness. It was completely backwards.
When we walked back to the People Mover he asked me what I thought about her, obviously seeing confusion and probably disgust on my face. I told him it didn't make sense. It was wrong. I still remember the exact moment today, crystalline:
"Of course she deserves it. She's a person just like you and me".
I told him, weekly, she didn't deserve it. She hadn't done anything for it.
He crouched down and looked me in the eye, "She deserves everything she needs. She's hasn't done anything wrong, the world has done her wrong. She deserved that money because she needed it, and I was obligated to give it to her because the world had given him more than I need. She's fallen through the cracks. The world has cracks because it's broken; this is how we fix it"
I remember crying, a lot, afterwards - while he tried to calm me down, he seemed worried, maybe. That day was like a seed planted in me. Over the years, through all the chaos I navigated as the broken child of two incredibly broken people - even within all of the mistakes, the cycles of abuse and cruelty I worked my way through over the years that seed took root. It became my moral center, which, when the storms of youth eventually broke became the tree which holds up the sky of my world.
I don't know what the ideology of the counselor was (or sadly his name, I've always wanted to find him and thank him). Maybe he was an Anarchist, a Christian, a Communist or a Jew or Muslim. Maybe he had no ideology, or religion, and just knew right from wrong. But I didn't, and I'm not sure I ever would have if not for him, or the woman in the gray coat.
Later in life, my late teens, I found my way to Emma Goldman, Marx and Proudhon - people who, likewise, knew right from wrong in a world full of people and philosophers who never had that day in Detroit. It not only gave the nurture and care to grow that tree into a forest, a true ideology, but gave it a name. A name few people understand, and many think is foolish - but one I wear proudly.
That was the day I became an Anarchist.
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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Hip Hop Won't Save You (But anarchism might)

Everybody told me I was free. 

But how can that be
When every blade of grass
Every single tree
Is locked down
By the Leylines
We call property
Which separate the trailer parks
And the projects
From the suburban prosperity.
Which divide the malls and McMansions
From the broken down gas stations
that line every Detroit street.

But still, everybody told me I was free.

Far as I can see
I've got the freedom of a patch of grass
Growin in a concrete sea -
But I can live in any state I choose
And can elect any man to be my president
As long as he is one of two
And maybe what freedom means to me
Just isn't what freedom means to you?

Because when I think of being free

I think of sheltered valleys
Lined by deciduous trees
In which every man can shape
His fate with his own two hands
Free from government eyes
And corporate lies -
The economic nooses
And police state abuses
Of an Empire in decline.

Why can't I see I'm free?

Once they said that all roads lead to Rome
But what about the Romans who knew
No road leads to home
They used to say
"Beware the Ides of March"
But now they know
It's a war of minds and hearts
Every CEO should remember
Tell their senators in the Ivory Tower
That when the Coliseum closed
It wasn't just the Vandals
Dragging the nobles out their homes.

And I'm sure, everyone told them they were free,
But I guess we'll have to disagree to agree -
Because as far as I can see
If you don't have bread, but still need to eat
Poverty is just a prettier word for slavery.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Seasons (Of love and loss)

The heavy thoughts
Weighted limbs,
Like Christmas trees
Bending below the burden
Of gaudy baubles -
The things we bought
For a season
Packed away and
Quickly forgot.

Well, where does the
Winter go, and all the snow
When the sun shines
And springs winds
Blow in on thunderheads?
Once it melts, while fields
Grow dandelion pelts, it
Trickles down into graves,
Winter past is water for the
Things we let die away.

Beltane fires burn like
Funeral pyres, in the eyes
Of young men slipping down
Sunset streets - the girls cruising
In crappy cars, lip balm bright
Shimmer on the asphalt as
Day dies steadily into night.
Youth, these days, has
Nowhere to be; and the
Suburban bloom bleeds
Into childhood's tomb.

And when the shroud is gold,
Men begin to wrap themselves
In light coats, half dreading
The turning of time, half anxious
To plunge into the slower seasons.
They think of lovers lost like leaves
Which fall down anonymous paths,
Shed by their bored trees,
Amorous and ready for new outfit -
Downy white dresses and crystal
Coats,  the garb of seasons much
Like hearts goes from warm to cold.