Parody of capture

You may think I'm crazy, but the founder of the Smithsonian Institute told me last night that I should quit writing. He said he'd "go over" what I had, help knock it into shape..."but it's not really going anywhere" Sure I said, "it's all acorns and beechnuts to me"
Against good sense and nature he set to work. I sat on the porch biting my nails. His criticisms would amount to nothing I was sure, no more than quibbles. It would all rest on his understanding
of the fragment. Maybe I should except the fact he will educate and enlighten me about myself, then I will take what he's given me and use it against him. I will be like the father who walks in the bride's path stepping softly on the train. I will be the reckoner who settles the accounts, who strips
away the military pose, who is neither left or right. I will whiten the pages of literature with my theft, my violent de-signs.

Soul work

The aim of soul work, therefore is not adjustment to accepted norms or to an image of the statistically healthy individual. Rather the goal is a richly elaborated life connected to society and nature, woven into the culture of family, nation and globe. The idea is not to be superficially adjusted, but to be profoundly connected in the heart to ancestors and to living brothers and sisters in all the many communities that claim our hearts.

The track down

Sitting here with a tea-ball full of anti-toxins and a skater punk from Barcelona, who is as thin as a hair; stirring the congealed milk into my cup, watching the grey mole on his ear move up and down as he chews. The java hugging geniuses in the corner chain smoking their way to fame. My lack of style is stylish. I look out the window, it makes me sad, the skater shows me his pierced leg joint, it's infected, he pokes at it with his finger. When the sky gets heavy like this, when you are without language or a fantasy, without any hope of expression, you do things that you know will hurt you.
I get ready to leave, refuse more tea, the skater punk is going to a friends house to watch a Polanski film, asks me if I want to come along, I say no.
A car pulls up as I walk out into the street.

THE STRUGGLE

Struggling to squeeze out a shit in the morning without bursting a hemorrhoid. Struggling to remember how many favors I owe, how many couches I've slept on. Struggling to make the words "THANK YOU" sound bigger than they are. Struggling to recognize love in familiar faces. Struggling to match a child's energy....one more push on the swing.....one more horsey ride....one more glass of water....one more withered flower in my pocket. "Yes, yes it is beautiful"... No really look at it this time. Oh christ when did I stop noticing the simple beauty?
Struggling to remember the facts. How many people were massacred in Colombia, Mexico, Zimbabwe, and what was that guys name who was killed by the cops? Struggling to reach out to a grieving family... I have a knotted fist inside my chest that wants to open up and take you by the hand. Struggling with the white trash, soup kitchen, free food white pastry coffee bagel dumpster diet. For every 20lb of food you consume you get an 1 ounce of nutrition. Struggling with self diagnosed depression and self administered narcotic drug therapies. Struggling with the knowledge that my father lost his eye because of Thatchrism. Struggling not to laugh at inappropriate moments. Struggling to tolerate another middle-class activist talking shit......

Alone in the snow

Our movement has been crushed, a defeat so emphatic it hurts to write of it. Yet we still live on, we still lift our faces to the sun, birth and raise children. The last 15 years I look back on with the calculated interest of an antiquarian scholar. Shifting indentities come in and out of focus, sometimes appearing as separate lives (If you are not at odds with yourself then you are in denial)
We have been out maneuvered on every front so many lost, co-opted, sold out, drifted away, victimized by their own narcotic therapies, taken by disease and time; others have become the antithesis of all they once stood for. What of those who are left, clinging to fossilized ideologies to stop themselves from going under.-We shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheep-
Singing hymns at the anti-christs funeral. Spasmodically fanning the dying embers of revolution, running out from shadows cloaked in ambiguity, finding human dignity in the hand thrown missile.
Tracing the fault lines in the hope they will lead to some center, some pulsing brain in a huge fish tank, a flashing computer matrix, seething nest of masons plotting day and night at giant mahogany tables. One withered and senile old white man sitting alone waiting for his potty to be emptied, just someone or something to hold accountable, some physical presence to articulate our hatred at. If such a center does exist, might we find ourselves in a hall of mirrors much the same as Bruce Lee in 'Enter the Dragon' but with no adversary except our own reflection. Smashing them one by one with impotent rage and sense of our own powerlessness, standing waiting for our pseudo mystical enlightenment.

Europe will return to it's senses only when the word 'revolution' evokes shame and not pride. A country that boasts of it's glorious revolution is as vain and absurd as a man boasting of his glorious appendicitis. - Salvador de Madariaga

A scrap of paper

I prefer committed men to literatures of commitment. It seems that to write a poem about spring today would be to serve capitalism. I am not a poet, but I should delight in such a work without mental reservation, if it were beautiful. One serves mankind all together or not at all. And if man needs bread and justice, and if we must do the necessary to satisfy that need, he also needs pure beauty, which is the bread of his heart. The rest is not serious. Yes, I should like to see them less committed in their work and a little more so in their daily life. - Camus

The candidate has an inert populace

There are no angels with castanets who are going to fly out of the tea-chest and save us from coming into contact with ourselves.

There is a hole in this wall
dents that match my fist
I put this poem on the wall
because I'm proud of my creation
and if poetry can teach me to feel
then I'll have no need for this wall

I see fresh cement drying
at the place where I thought I'd broken through
We have covered this wall with expression
ways of channeling emotion

Pete's choice of organic art
the carved roots of storm flattened trees
and the skillfully shaped dome of the yert
The pictures of Jon's bus: a fusion
between the mechanical and the organic

The bad egg has hatched out and is killing it's parents

Alice swang in the hammock
Trotter ran across the lawn
carrying a dead partridge
Everybody laughed

I put aside my Heine
to ask if you would
help pick Dog- Violets
down in Cable Woods

From inside your hankichef
you brought out a Nectarine

Alice broke the fruit in two fleshy halves
and offered one to Christopher
(can I arrange this so she is an instinctive nihilist and he has hair that smells of wild thyme?)

Bent on being straight

He pushed her to the floor
the cutlery fell beside them.
Identity is a vicious trap
to be caught in.
Lives are lived
as if they were screenings
of a movie.
The planetary chaos
rejects your sex.
Your idea of a man is a robot.

He calls her "an inane bitch"
because she wants to be a playwright.
He is the tamed Tiger
who swipes his paw
at the memories
of a freer time.

She is blood and birth
the giver of more death.
She mirrors his loss.
Her saffron dress has long sleeves,
his hands leave bruises.

My constant temptation, the one against which I have never ceased fighting to the point of exhaustion: cynicism. - Camus

The fall

The splinter in my hand, which I got from gripping the chair at the onset of my dizzy spell, was painful and annoying. It kept catching on things, my clothes, the towel mainly. I felt marginally better this morning, when I'd pulled the curtains back to let in the brightest sun that had been seen in a couple of weeks. I told people that I preferred bleaker, more overcast weather, because it matched my predominant mood. This wasn't completely true, for today I was aware of an ancient significance, the pulse of a new emotion. The sun was out and I had 5 grand in a shoe box under my bed; if there was ever a time to break my own mythic creations, it had to be this day.
The sweet smell of pine wafted into my room. Anneth would collect the semi-crystallized sap from the trees in the park at the back of the house, she spent a lot of time there. I had seen her once with her small wooden altar decorated with stones, feathers, shells, jewelry and other tokens. I'd gone the long way round. "Don't want to make her feel embarrassed" I'd thought to myself. Now as I stood in my room, my mind somewhere in the pure beauty of the forest, I wondered if it hadn't been my own embarrassment that I'd wanted to avoid; the fact that I didn't have a spiritual aspect in my life, hadn't even investigated the possibilities.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from it's neat Morocco case. With long white nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston and sank back into the velvet lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.