POETIC JUSTICE: June 2009

THE LIMBAUGH PRINCIPLE

Rush Limbaugh Compares Al Franken's Win to the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Vote Recount

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

O! From the foul wind blowing over America
Comes this; a most colossal whore’s voice
Screeching another miserably worn-out minute!

The irony of his deception belies an ignoble aim
Leaving fools ready to lop off someone’s head
As the mythic shit-stain spews forth tired claims.

He is no one’s god but his sheep. No precision
Within his words, just fuel for agitation
For a weak-willed herd of unconscious ovine.

Let us not mistake his voice, his words for courage or fact;
Let us bend his insensitive language into the brave light
And watch the drip, drip, drip of uncontrolled lies retract.

O he is most foul and undoubtedly in need of an outfit;
A tall hat, bow tie, long shoes, red nose and a wig;
So, what he says is seen for what it is- a load of shit!

© 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

FATHER AND TIME

It is a wise father that knows his child.
__William Shakespeare

All the clocks that surround us mark off moments as they dissolve;
Steady drum of the second hand tick tocks like a time bomb,
Vanished down beneath the rising rush
Cast outside of reach of all that’s here
Or that frantic hands can seize or bear.

Like time, we will travel forward as moments become lean and swift,
Instances slipped within pale snapshots; smiles of odd, uneasy faces.
Tick tock goes the gesture, the nod.
Plunging seconds speed by exhausted
Below the pitch-black lather of time.

As summers own swimming and winter’s trudging speed through
Second hands rush on, prying the next season to scuttle forth.
Does it matter more what time it was
Or more that a moment’s remembered;
Vanished, frantic, outside of my reach?

All of the clocks shrug at this; my yearning to paint my father true,
To prevent time’s rolling course upon scatty legs made of seconds.
Cease your lean and speedy march.
If I’m to know him, you've got to stop,
Time, before you run out of clock.

© 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

CIA chief believes Cheney almost wants U.S. attacked

O! Love at first sight in bleak day.
You’ve life’s gallant sun.
The arid tempest swoons;
Love. Hope. Joy. Doubt. Lust. Slaughter.
Blood’s staining authority.
The silver gorge croons to her,
Breathing deep, conjuring worship;
The grubby toothed grin of casualty.

“My love, may I have this dance?”
“Tis my honor most valiant knight!”
“Take my hand, my dear, and we shall.”
“Yes, my love.”

O! Life’s embittered perfection,
Love’s wish filled stain,
Let go this; your dreadful date
And curl your arms `round eternity
Heeding the smothered breath of thy god;
Hatred. Contempt. Red. White. Blue.
Blood’s staining authority;
The solvent spirit’s bloody weight!

© 2006 mrp/thepoetryman

THE CLEAN SKIN...

More than some ashen membrane
Are the clean skin.
Tell me what they are?
Oh! How beautiful are these alien creatures!

They move with the wind
Under cover of night and sun.
Glowing and graceful they progress
Nearer my tenuous fear.

Seen and unseen,
Like I’ve just exited some dark room;
Under the sun everyone’s a ghost.

Phantoms, whose faces are washed away,
And whose hands are sickly white,
Blanched from unredeemed horrors,
Stand now, drumming rigid fingers
Across the consciousness
Under my clean skin.

© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman

WHAT IF...

...2009...
Imagine life under these conditions: Living in limbo under a foreign occupier. Having no self-determination, no right of return, and no power over your daily life. Being in constant fear, economically strangled, and collectively punished.

Having your free movement denied by enclosed population centers, closed borders, regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, and separation walls. Having your homes regularly demolished and land systematically stolen to build settlements for encroachers in violation of international law prohibiting an occupier from settling its population on conquered land.

Having your right to essential services denied - to emergency health care, education, employment, and enough food and clean water.

Being forced into extreme poverty, having your crops destroyed, and being victimized by punitive taxes. Having no right for redress in the occupier's courts under laws only protecting the occupier. Being regularly targeted by incursions and attacks on the ground and from the air.

Being willfully harassed, ethnically cleansed, arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and slaughtered on any pretext, including for your right of self-defense. Having no rights on your own land in your own country for over six decades and counting. Vilified for being Muslims and called terrorists, Jihadists, crazed Arabs, and fundamentalist extremists. Victimized by a slow-motion genocide to destroy you.

According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Israel has conducted state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians for decades and intensively in Gaza. In a September 2006 Electronic Intifada article titled "Genocide in Gaza" he wrote: "A genocide is taking place in Gaza....An average of eight Palestinians die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed. (It's become) a daily business, now reported (only) in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts. The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day," like shooting fish in a barrel. Why not, they're only Muslims, so who'll notice or care.

What if war were just a chaotic dress rehearsal in a school play
and torture were long philosophical conversations with idiots,
bullets, tiny bits of lint culled from laughing soldier's uniforms,
fighter jets, kites dropping from the shoulders of the sun,
warships, marshmallows floating in a sea of hot chocolate,
and tanks, funny little cars full of tumbling clowns?

O! If only it were so then all of the world's hideous warmongers might be
paper dolls in rooms full of beautiful children, each with a pair of scissors...

PLAY FROM YOUR HEART

-Zoe Keating @ La Boule Noire Paris Oct 23, 2008/Amanda Palmer cabaret show.

Play from your heart

What's the point of anything if you don't?
What’s to stop us from staying in the middle
While hate’s tangled up in a half-baked peace
And love’s tapping out some half-hearted beat?

Love’s not a liquid flowing between worlds-
It’s now!
It’s the curve of her neck as she turns to gaze at her children.
It’s the teetering laughter heard over the howl of thankless men.

Love’s useless if it only moan’s like a lamb-
It’s loud!
It’s the whispered roar of goodnight as he watches them sleep.
It’s the fearless torrent of immeasurable expressions of grief.

It’s not war… It’s peace.

WHO AM I AND WHERE ARE WE GOING?

I was visiting an old friend, Graeme, on the net yesterday (Facebook) and he introduced me to the singer, Chocolate Genius and his song, "My Mom". I was very moved by the song and my muse began to scream, as she's in the habit of doing. Hours later, the next day, I was driving into town and listening to my Bright Eyes disc "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" track #1- "At the Bottom of Everything" and my muse began screaming in my ear that this was the song I was to use in combination with "My Mom" as inspiration to write a poem for Alzheimers and peace. Enjoy...

(Video thanks to Graeme of Left in East Dakota)

We’re free and brave and we act as if we’re going to a party on the sun,
An all night party with the moon, the clouds, the planets and our guns…

We act like we’re going to a ball with all the amenities of wealth.
We act as if we’ve got it made- Got our money and our health.
We act as if we’re not suffering and not causing anybody harm
When, truth be told, we’ve got it all so completely, sadly wrong.

We are spoiled rotten and we’re set, so deeply set within our ways,
And we’ll not change a thing until we've killed all the Arabs and the gays…

We mustn’t look down our noses while snorting oil and hurling down abuse
The planet will look as if it’s square and that there’s nothing here to lose.
We think so much of ourselves and we still pat one another on the back,
“We’re number one” runs through our heads but that train is off its tracks.

Make amends while we can and we’ve a chance to save our multi-colored skins.
I say we make it right while we can still recall the names of family and friends…

It’s fleeting, life and all it holds, and can be taken one stem cell at a time;
One transitory instant we exist and in the next we unexpectedly decline.
I say we make the most of what we’ve got riding on this, our grateful life,
Let’s break down the walls of freedom and have the world over for a night.

Let’s bring our laughter and affection and leave all weapons locked away
And just move and laugh and breathe as one and never break away…

We must take hold of this moment and let it swell, let it open deep inside.
We must liberate all the innocents now before one more’s allowed to die.
We must settle our past dues with people we’ve hurt and we’ve wronged.
We must live, we must live, we must live, we must live like we belong…

© 2009 mrp/thepoetryman

(The poem's rhythm could somewhat follow the tune below if it were to be sung...)

LONG AND BROKEN TEETH

Name That Racist Tune With Daniel Carver
-Caution: Disturbing racist slurs and language throughout video-

Hat Tip to We are Respectable Negroes-

“Now he knows what the “n” word means.”
She bellowed through discolored teeth,
Her vinegar lips pursing upon the dank breath of morning
As foul old men slurred about guns and their prideful obligation,
“To use `em when times call or when we damn well please!”

“Around here we looks out for our own, if you know what I mean?”
Her words slapped against the men’s droll bones;
They all got a healthy chuckle from her chattering slabs and
Pretended they weren’t scared, tiny, frightened men snorting fear.
“They ain’t supposed to come o’ lootin’ when water’s a risin.”

Everywhere the same; old white men selling out for dread,
Spitting demise through long and broken teeth, faded of affection
Or familiar threads of explanation for tongue-tied unkindness.
“Hell! Ya gotta protect yourself. They’s in the wrong neighborhood.”
Fusty gangs of bitter men hell-bent on bleeding out the world!

This is the time for hoping, for loving,
The time for reaching one another, believing
While the water’s drowning all belief!
Yes! Now’s the time for considering another
Even if all it ever proves is that we’re worth saving!

“We ain’t afraid to shoot em when they comes `round here!”
She splattered through her yellowed flapping maw.
The foul-smelling men sniggered away another minute;
It never occurred to them that the weight of fear and hatred
Was sure to sink them when next the waters come o’ lootin’...

Levees.Org

BROKEN

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

U.S. contractors held in Green Zone killing
Iraq suicide attack kills man, hurts police chief

War concludes, piercing the proof of silence;
Influence spent, the station of splendor set,
Undressed in stillness; an ambush on our union.

But let’s not paint the words; let us just say it-
War, for the warrior, never ends.
War, for the dead, lives on without them.
War outlives our marriage to grief.

Grief, then, outlasts the lover’s ceremony.
It beats it back,
Rupturing it with devoted impatience,
Drowning it under earth’s damp ground,
Like a monstrous wave unleashed by frail levee.

We sense the dark curve of evermore run screaming
Along the edge.

Not many could keep on in this perilous wave,
No love, no devotion, no vigor, no union,
None, save for war…

Effects of Iraq War on American Citizens

Progressive.org - Broken by This War

MAKESHIFT PYRE

Daniel James Murray Charged With Making Threats Against Obama In Utah
Federal prosecutors have charged a man with making threats against President Barack Obama after he allegedly told a bank employee in Utah he was on a mission to kill the president.

Johnny Bounds at 11:00pm May 31 Facebook
“THE LAST MAN NAMED HUSSEIN THAT MESSED WITH THIS COUNTRY WAS HUNG IN PUBLIC, I SAY WE KEEP THE STREAK ALIVE"

Slithering under the boards that are used to construct the coffins
you move with the coldness of such loathing; your countenance,
that of confusion, a beast without an alternative to its actions,
plans that hold no magic or beauty or love. You cannot rest. Your
rage finds its way over the cold floor, which is little comfort for
a mind as destructive as it is empty. You’re trapped under the heap
of your making; a makeshift pyre waiting on you to sleep, pausing
on the hatred to consume every pore until you destroy something.

You could have risen to change, to the worlds open arms, yet you chose
To accentuate the thing you knew would be your undoing; brutality.
There are many reasons to be angry; there are old men rotting in churches,
Turning the spoils of a god into riches, men and women waiting for the chance
To neglect a child, liars and thieves waiting for the dispossessed to fall to
Steal mere pennies that would better serve a wishing well than they, and
Then, there you are, slithering under the boards stacked for making coffins;
Living is a bitter pill lodged in your throat, death, a glass of water.