The Last Poets of the 70’s
Chiding those
Seated at Sylvia’s
With chicken “hanging
Out of their mouths”
Too well-fed
Clothed and
Loved
To care about
Revolution

Not so
In Cairo
Where earth’s wretched
Scramble and claw
The line that
Defines their pain
In relief
Rising out of
Greed
Cloaked in
A Misshapen
Democracy

There are those who have sallied the rope that spans the crevasse between man and the super man.
Super man walks this side of the swampy abyss making it his with every sweep of arm and voice
He strives
Occupied with life’s banquet jockeying for

Position and inventing for convenience –
Determining his closeness to God

So it would come as a surprise when a female, with her patterned wings, rises from the swamp and with nothing more than her sense organs drives man back to the craggy edges of his success
It is she who enacts the inevitable extinction through natural selection.
She worries not
Moving from host to host
Ensuring that
At this banquet
There will be those who will sit
And starve

Today, a second year college student
could not tell me a time in history
when defying authority was a good thing

I remained perplexed on my drive
Home thinking of my freshman year
Standing on a flimsy platform above a crowd
Protesting the burying of a small car
I thought of the money being buried
in this new car and
The free breakfast program on the east side,
The starving children of Africa
(the ones my mother always said would be thankful for my green beans)
My fist in the air over my halo-Afro
screaming about the waste to some middle class
kid who just wanted to make a statement
about big-business.

Seems silly now
But then
it felt so good.

Defiance

On this, the day of the DREAM

Wondering what He would say

About the cities bloodied

By derangement

In the name of…

Politics?

Religion?

Voices in nightmare   (gdf)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It is the sadness that emerges

In the darkest hour;

Life

Versus the sharpness

Of sorrow

The if only(s)

Homemade  blades

Piercing the epidermis

Of memory

Poignant

Thrives under

The façade of

Modernity

Happiness

Habit

Custom

The way life should be

The way it isn’t

I’m thinking of liberation

Setting free

The dogs of decorum

Life’s decoupage;

Fashioned by others

Decorated with

Habit

Expectation.

Liberate,

Decorticate

The chaotic,

soft soul

Of desire

Children manage to have fun in the snow.

Where’s my $8 plastic saucer

trash-can lid

snow shovel

plastic bag

and the clean-conscience declaration of

SNOW DAY!

 

The double-edged sword

of Damocles

cutting both ways

for good or ill

Outside the snow falls as I wonder why I moved to rural western New York  28 years ago

I wonder what life would have held for me if I hadn’t

I wonder where all the promise of humanity has been scattered

I wonder why the skies are no longer endless and why the captive heart no longer trembles

I wonder why I read headlines that make me weep in despair for all of us