AVOIDABLE

We are all walking these streets
Under our own abysmal verdict.
Frequently we hear that we’re faced
by avoidable contamination. We’ve heard it before,
that we must breed our skin apart from those others
until our masks are solid and chaste,
irremovable, useless. Force the skin’s hue down,
imprison our colors on the nomadic streets.

We need be single-minded to form our face
into the perfect color of a perverted truth;
this evolution is ugliest now,
storming its infection across the world.

We’re walking the streets, the roads,
the twisting spheres bending away; humanity
begging we refuse this council, this deception. One
stride on this earth, one long, delightful use of man;
animal, dying now, ready to live. Our fuel’s the blood
Under our skin, our reckless mind, the contagion.

Understand this; our progression has long commenced.
We cannot forgo its breathing revolution.
We cannot, from its rise, ourselves remove.
O! It will thrash our sticks and stones,
and turn its heaven away from our brutality,
away from our bigotry, our war, our contempt of evolution,
until we dissolve our masks and flee our unbending dreams!

O we need make our pulse in the unknown.
We are the pollen that dropped from the same flower,
eyeless and frightened.
Our worthless dread,
motionless souls,
splintered hearts,
cagey minds,
thrashed hopes,
derelict empathy,
throttled voices,
parading our death
over scorched noises.

Maybe we’re not walking the streets and roads...
maybe we’re being carried by the wind?

© 2008 mrp/tpm

Rolling along "J"...
Jade Gate
Jakester Express
Jesus Was Not a Republican
Jonestown - Joshing Politics
Journeys with Jood
June Revolution
Just Ain't Right

BEFORE VALOR

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Before valor fades or a soldier’s honorably lain;
Before shrapnel and horrors stand forward;
Before the screech of missiles, snap of breath;
Before the water chokes, the marine howls;
Before the steady drum and bugle sound;
Before the sidewalks are washed of the event;
Before shivering flesh and darkness ignite;
Before food, clothing and shelter;
Before the whispered birth of wayward night;
Before all else; were we alive?

Did we sense humanity’s plea;
Grasp this; our solemn relationship;
Fortunate to have been born at all,
To breathe where breath is free;
That the world exhales next to us,
Eats, drinks, prays, dies alongside our death…

O is there no truth that lives,
That wrestles deceit to its knees;
Living that scowls at hopeless war
Whose breath stinks beyond our living?

When spirits fade and innocence slain,
Lowered to their private defeat,
With each, a world’s breath, mislaid.

© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman

BAGHDAD BURNING... OUR THROATS

READ THE POEM +/-

This morning while responding to a Crooks and Liars post I found myself swept into a poem… The post was regarding a new play by Riverbend , a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad prior, during and after the invasion. It is dramatised by a cast of five young American actors. ( More of the review…)

My comment-
A play worth watching and remembering sounds like to me... Being a theatrical person I can say that the bit about history is more than just self-obsession...in most cases it is the way it is. Poetry, theatre, film, music, prose...somehow, some way, it all trickles down and into an artist's hands... Pompous sounding on the surface, but of what I have seen in my lifetime, it is the voice that at large would be unspoken, for, in many an instance, the words won't come out due to fear, pain, or intimidation... To hell with "patriotism" and all its foibles!

____________________

BAGHDAD BURNING...OUR THROATS

In the shading of your persistent speechless death
We cannot help be unsettled by your passion.
Now, just as the world boils, increased in suffering
Do we begin to sense brittle-boned-humanity.

A drama worth its ink, recoiled, unfolds inside us,
Leaping in our throats, coursing through our veins,
Diving deep, like a jilted lover’s plea, it swims through.
Wounded and yelping it tosses inside our existence
Telling us things we’d never tell ourselves...

The drama says, bring forth your lies
For they'll not penetrate truth.
Bring forth thy warmongering spirit
For it shall not dance.
It will flounder here... dreadfully.
Treading upon the boards, characterized as horrific,
Slumping; a dreadful creature, writhing, sweating
`neath the canopy of light.

The drama says,
Look! Look!
There you are, lumbering in final breath!
You coward!
You defiled wretch!
Bedraggled death!

Your countenance now but a shadow
As the lights begin to fade.
You may come cloaked in dream
But you’ve been seen
And we’ve felt your sodden breath upon our soul
From a city where no-one knows
If they will see another day.



Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman
________________________

Baghdad Burning On Stage C&L

Riverbend Blogspot

BBC News Review of Play

Tell ABC to Tell the Truth About 9/11

Poetic Justice Theatre

MARCH BANG BOMB

READ THE POEM +/-

march march march
bomb bomb bomb
work work work
bang bang bang
enslave yourself
to mankind’s bane
march march march
onward now
in rhythmic chains
stepping now
forward once
then twice back
bomb bomb bomb
truth now split
hope gone flat
march march march
toward the tower
toward your god
work work work
this; our drum,
it must not stop!
bang bang bang
bomb bomb bomb
march march march
march march march
march march march...

Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

THE ANIMAL WE WANT

READ THE POEM +/-

When the animal we wanted to be
Hasn't come forth,
Couldn't climb into this world
Through spaces vast window,
And we hear a distant hum,
As if it is weeping a million miles away
At not having the courage to even try,
And we feel its loss inside of us
And we conjure what might have been,
Perhaps we should simply rise up
And not sit so far away from life
And stop this, our incessant dreaming
Of new ways to conquer and destroy.

When the animal we wanted to be
Hasn’t reared its beautiful head,
Perhaps it is afraid it might be the uglier
Or fearful it will fail us
And we’d drop our bombs
And blast a hole clean through imagination...
Or, perhaps it has no desire to draw closer;
It hears our weeping a million miles away,
And heeds our mournful whimper
At not having the courage to end
Our warring and wholesale butchery,
And it feels our loss deep inside
And sees what it might have been.


Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

TERROR'S HAND

READ THE POEM +/-

The Real Terrorism Plot
By Ramzy Baroud
Al-Jazeerah, August 24, 2006

And yet another menacing terror plot was thwarted 10 August, with the arrest of 24 suspects, all British Muslims. It was an ominous conspiracy aimed at committing "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, British authorities quickly concluded. US authorities hastily joined the action, too claiming a decisive victory over the plotters, thanks in part to the quick thinking of and awesome coordination between US security and intelligence branches. Britain congratulated the US; the US thanked Britain; both saluted Pakistan and its ever-loyal leadership, itself conducting a brutal war against undefined, shadowy groups that emerge and vanish, all too conveniently, and too neatly.
Moments after the shocking announcement, as security threat levels reached their peak in the US and Britain, the debate commenced and it relentlessly continues: Why would a British Muslim choose such a destructive path while living in a democratic society, where change, at least theoretically, is possible through peaceful means?
The media also sprung into action. Ready-to-serve answers were deftly provided by all the usual experts, instantly infusing more conventional wisdom upon a vulnerable public. Attempts to contextualise terrorism within a political milieu were decidedly torpedoed. Despite years of war that seem to have achieved nothing but "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, no one should dare explain the true roots of terrorism; one may explain why poor neighbourhoods in America yield greater crime rates than others, or why abused children become abusers themselves, or even why US soldiers in Iraq often "snap" and massacre entire families, but terrorism that involves Muslims should not in any way be discussed outside its useful parameters of a misguided generation with a radical interpretation of religion: the Islam that produces "Muslim fascists" as President George W Bush termed it. (More…)


Terror’s immense unbent machine rumbles
From end to end of the blast-crested streets
Of civilized man like a freshly-filed talon to flesh;
And the screeching recoils against the red sky
And the plagued ocean smolders.
Terror’s depth is roused
By lies and the spineless realm
Of authority
Pointing eastward with a westward hand.

We, insensible spectator, stand open-mouthed
To the eagle’s rasp upon our human face;
And the snap of the shudder, too slow,
Find terror rooted shoulder to shoulder,
Glossy eyed, draped in ruin,
Panting to soar heavenward
And spatter the face of God.
.....We can no more this
.....Than return to the womb.



Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

O! ORIGINAL EARTH!

In this land of twenty million years and Ishango Bone;
The root of man in his original life,
In his foremost loss, from the barren drums of home
To the brimming terms of literacy, Egypt, Carthage,
the Nubian Kingdom, the Great Zimbabwe, Sahel,
Hutu and Tutsi now both so scorched in grief!

Malawi, Kenya and of Livingston’s Victoria Falls,
Lake Victoria; the Nile, its soggy trough beseech!

O! Original land, you shall not go!

Stay your spirit’s dancing in splendid hope's refrain!

O! Children come!

Stand upon on the back of eternity and pray for rain!


mrp