Turning into a street
I am devoured by the labyrinth city,
where everywhere is its center
and nowhere.
There everyone's face
is a mirror- the only thing
remarkable about mine
is its extraordinary remoteness.
Suddenly I grow huge
the size of a mountain,
then all at once
I am the size
of a two legged ant.
The streets and sidewalks are mirrors,
as are the buildings
that tower around me.
Its to bad man is the measure
of all things, otherwise he'd realize
how infinitely large and infinitesimally small everything is.
At last, I'm spewed out the city's other side.
Day is dawning, I am...
DARKNESS DESCENDS
Darkness descends with the weight of a shroud,
silence shouts in my ear, this is their death.
The peace of barren prison, which finds an audience
in today's beautiful sorrow. Those who act out
the law of their being are shoved into the void.
Rain beats down, now like a mysterious monster
in the copse darkly muttering, now like a locomotive
over the roof tops rising to a banshee wail
as it dies away.
Reality, manufactured by the Herr Goebel propaganda machine,
is a broken funeral urn that no longer holds its shape;
and, presently, being rotten, will shatter,
a malevolent and demolished building. What is their fate,
those who, while they breathed taught us
what their similes, onomatopoeia, and metaphors were?
And now with death teach us what?
They who would teach us more. But now have their mouths
stopped with dirt, while I sit and bear witness
helpless in my heart.
Someone said the radical right's murder rate in Oregon was over 90 for the first 1/3 of the year. If they continue at this pace they will murder 270 people here this year alone. They said that these deaths were covered up by being called suicides, drownings and overdoses - they said the radical right imports almost all of the heroin now that they control the drug traffic into the U.S. from N. Mexico ( see issue 14, the poem, BLUE MIST). They said the radical right is supposedly doing this iniquity to execute addicts in pursuant of a policy of partial genocide; and, as a means of distracting public attention from domestic policies that include oppressing the public, to condition them to work for (80% of our labor market) third world wages, while simultaneously robbing us of social security and medicare substituting welfare for their insurance industries and mutual funds instead.
They say that it doesn't make sense for those who deal in the heroin trade to suddenly forgo, out of the goodness of their hearts, 500% in potential profits with their current increased dosages, while simultaneously destroying part of their market? They say that wouldn't make sense to any entrepreneur let alone the radical right. Oh yes, they also say that it was awfully convenient that now, all of a sudden, we are hearing a clamor for privacy in banking laws, which would serve to cover up the illegal sources of income for those involved in this infamous activity.
Further, they say that prisons are the fastest growth industry in the
U.S., with more prisoners per capita than anywhere else in the World. They
say that this might be why (profits from illegal drugs and the cash crop
that the prisoners represent) we look at the phenomenon of drug use as
a criminal problem rather than a health care issue, which would reduce
prison populations by about 50% and eliminate most crimes against people
and property relating to this social phenomenon. How many people
do you know commit crimes for cigarettes or for their perscription drugs?
It also provides a political issue for the right wing who are essentially
bankrupt of ideas on all other significant issues confronting America today.
FROM BEFORE
From before you were born,
Eve's daughter, I've been beaten to my hands and knees.
Ever since that day 16 years ago, I've watched
their evil overcoming almost everyone,
their sins unabated.
Flames incessantly burning; a cross on your roof,
and on my lawn, I saw the overwhelming horror.
In Spring, budding shoot, you sprouted;
and, from under their simulacra,
I witnessed your garland growth.
Now you'd find me, if you could, still on my knees weeping;
the gift you dreamed, not mine but everyone's, is gone
fallen from the freeway bridge: God, separate from them
that drove you to it, from the coagulated blood
on the highest branches, looks on their bitter harvest and waits.
EVIL SPIRITS
Evil spirits excite man's evil deeds
and then accuse and condemn.
Arcana Caelestia
BLACK
Black black black,
when I came and saw
what was transpiring
I knew in an instant:
the day spread over
the hillside and everything
was bathed in light
and the trees
were beating like a sea
with many mouths.
The empty space
was singing dirges
while I, lost and saddened,
gazed at the silence.
Where four blasts had rung out
but why were "the police" there?
And then the retreat
climbing out a window
firing at fear,
which killed him.
The man who died,
we never met,
but, together we passed
through wars, through streets,
and through sorrows.
How his awareness grew,
to late.
And then he descended
into the ground,
unaware, where
everything was dark.
He did not know
that he had ceased to be
or if he was being buried,
or if he were becoming
a bird, a leaf, a butterfly.
He was only one poor man
who deserved respect,
just like anyone,
and a right to die
and to live.
An informant called who could see behind walls, who knew that the suspect
was destablised and armed, and thus would have to go to jail. Now,
if the informant were lucky then the suspect would go to jail and the radical
right would pay them at least $1,000; and, if they were really lucky an
incident would be manufactured that would cause the suspect to go to jail
for 10 years and so they would get $2,000; and, if they were really,
really lucky the suspect would be killed and then they would get much more
depending on the facts and circumstances of the case. That is how, it is
said, these cases work, with the radical right's new era of terror: transforming
lives with their pyramid organization of terror. If your not a productive
enough member destroying people, they drum you out. If you recruit
other members then you get a part of the take. Be productive for
two tours and then you get to pick your next tour's location i.e. the Caribbean.
Now you can understand why they don't get concerned about facts like the
U.S. being the first per capita in prison rate in the world. It only
means, to them, how much money they've made in non declared revenue for
children (just like Al Capone).
And, as for prison costs, with the golden calf of privatization, it
is a money making growth industry for them. One which we have to
pay more to house a prisoner for than it would if we sent them to Harvard.
Which do you think would be the better investment? Isn't it surprizing
how tough on youth crime and mandatory sentencing laws would seem like
terrific ideas to those people who have so much to gain under this scam,
while everyone else has so much to lose.
Re-define the use of drugs as a health care issue instead of
a criminal problem and we can easily reduce our prison populations by 0ne-half
without encouraging the use of anything. Suddenly we would be in the business
of helping people instead of hurting them. But the radical right
doesn't care, they have to much to lose: Drug money, profits from prisons,
cheap labor markets, and a political issue to distract public attention
from their efforts to rob the two biggest plums social security and medicare.
The radical right doesn't care about expanding the U.S. labor market, because
they want 80% of America's labor to work competing for third world wages,
so according to their economic model there will always be cheap labor.
Only problem is getting the American citizens to agree. That is why
the need to condition children and their parent's to be oppressed.
That is why their Herr Goebell propaganda machine has to contrive these
acts of violence to make us feel threatened to make us be willing to give
up our precious civil liberties.
Consider search and seizure laws. If you legalize drugs
you control access and have a program that pays for itself. You can
use the proceeds to help pay for counseling programs. You will not
do away with crime, for it is a product of a natural log rhythm, but you
will do away with using this social phenomenon as an excuse to engage in
social engineering and you will do away with crimes against individuals
and their property associated with these sets of behaviors, for there will
be no need to commit crimes for money. When was the last time you heard
of someone robbing or murdering or assaulting for a cigarette which is
the most addictive drug known to man. If we legalized drugs then
their would be no need to have people randomly strip searched right down
to their privates. The odds of finding anything in stop and search
procedures is only random thus very unlikely therefore what is being accomplished
is something far different. You are conditioning society to having
no rights and being oppressed. This is the same scenario as at schools
with their random locker and bag searches to find a weapons. The
likelihood of finding the weapon, on the rare occasion one is brought to
school for an act of violence, is to remote, the only thing you can succeed
in doing is condition a generation to think that they have no rights and
no control over their lives.
ABOVE THE GRAFFITI
Above the graffiti decorated wall
the rain had cleared,
and, from between the crevices and crags
in the clouds, dusk was descending into dark.
Remember the fiery splendor,
when youth impetuously coursed through our veins:
the disintegrating moment falls from me,
opaque scattered objects, cold as a corpse.
Tomorrow I will drive by the river,
by the wall, and over the same stretch of road, again.
I see the days, imprisoned in straight and narrow lines;
immobilized cars, parked in a row.
LURKING
Lurking among the refuse
by the turbid muddy waters,
waits the rat,
with its serpentine tail,
while the script
pours forth its symbolism
and simile, earnest and sincere,
sharp and penetrating- insomnolent.
Patiently plodding through
rain effaced metaphors
to reproach the people and concrete.
Create. Not even knowing
that they don't know-
no ideas here, nothing
but the concrete. Write!
Irises are the flowers
that split the clay
in my garden.
20/20
They say eyes clear with age
as rain scrubs the air clean
to improve twilight,
as if time discards
the noose of horrible servility,
to show things with a deeper penetration;
but, I wonder
what a watery eyed old age
sees when conditioned
to view life with a shallow superficiality,
the many elongation of trees,
fifteen or fifty what is the difference
the long gentle rippling waves of grass
rhythmically swaying as the golden
breeze bends their heads - all of them,
it is said, come back to focus
with the ripening years:
but, only a few,
who are the pain of this dream,
learn to see clear
down into the roots of things.
REJOICE
Rejoice,
Spring is here.
White cries of jubilation
rise from the flowering meadow.
THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY,
as the last rays of the sun
ignite Mt. Hood like a glowing coal,
is almost an abstraction
seen in a dream.
It is during that hour,
just at twilight,
when the valley seems
on the verge of saying something;
but, it never does,
or perhaps it does,
eternally ephemeral, though
we don't understand it,
or perhaps we do understand
only it becomes lost to us,
in the city's labyrinth of sound.