The first time I fell in love, really fell in love, it was not with a girl or a woman. It was with a smattering of words here and there on a page. A printed page.

It presaged what love would be like.

It said love is a jigsaw sunset and you are the piece that holds the sun.

It said the best gesture of my brain is less than the flutter of your eyelids which whisper we are made for each other.

It took my breath away and then gave it back, deeper and more meaningful. I wanted to take in as much of it as I could.

While other kids were dreaming about throwing or catching the winning touchdown pass or chasing after the boy who threw or caught the winning touchdown pass, I discovered trunkless legs of stone in a faraway desert, wandered the stately pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan and pondered fears of what would happen if I ceased to be. My eyes widened and the narrows of obviousness rapidly became too confining.

I never idolized Luke Skywalker or Dr. J. I wanted to be Poe. I wanted to be Keats or Shelley or Yeats. I wanted to speak to people in a way that made them conscious of breathing.

Today air intake is just an involuntary reflex. Consciousness of it is something we attempt to force on our kids in school or college, but it doesn’t stick. And perhaps it was always so.

It’s been over two hundred years since Wordsworth noted that devoting our lives to getting and spending lays waste to our spirits. And we’re still mostly just getting and spending.

There’s not a business department in the land that will tell you that breathing is more important than getting and spending. Especially someone else’s breathing.

Society pays no praise or wages for the sullen art I loved because it taught me to love and breathe lovingly. And I know I have become a boring anachronism.

But I feel compelled to resist. I fear the reduction of our culture to raps and tweets and texts. The ironic truth about I-Touches, I-Pads and I-Phones is that more people are communicating, but less is being said. The gadgets truncate our thought processes and abridge cognition. They comprise a strain of expedience that might be useful in an immediate tense, but will likely be detrimental in the longer sense.

This is no time for intellectual slang. Look around.

The ceremony of innocence is being drowned. The best lack conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The mob may be incited or mollified by a text or tweet, but it will not be moved in a meaningful direction. That requires elucidation and crafted cogence.

Shelley may have overshot the mark when he said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but even if it isn’t true, it should be.

The world is so much with us that we fail to grasp the importance of the moment we live in and exist oblivious to the repercussions.

We need to be more conscious of our breathing.

We must become more mindful of our interconnectedness with everything and everyone around us. There’s no hope for us as a single party, cause, country, religion, ethnicity or species. Our only hope lies in collective conscience and broad concert.

Instead of getting and spending we need to do more watching and listening and thinking.

Instead of ceding conviction to brainwashed miscreants and manipulative scoundrels, we need to speak out and rise up, inspired and informed, and therefore indomitable.

We don’t need more pundits or politicians or profiteers. We don’t need unlimited texts or more folks following us on Twitter.

We need more eloquence and profundity.

We need more poets.

Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.
Refrain from saying “professionals,”
and the usual nonsense about “surgical strikes.”
They were never doctors and nurses
in starched, white linens.

The best heroes are dead ones—
mortified and mortared.
They neither complain nor contradict.
They don’t re-live “friendly fire” incidents,
the sonofabitch sargeant-sadist,
nor the rapist in their midst.
They don’t see again
the faces of traumatized children.
Their bones stretch to attention under the sod.

The man and woman who will kill and injure
because some fool tells them to
are just little spin-off fools.
No act born of ignorance is heroic.
Heroes are sensible, not imbeciles.
Heroes dispel myths; they neither create
nor perpetuate them.

The fully manifested hero,
aware of his power and dignity,
is more than human, is humane.

Heroes don’t talk about heroes.
They need no confetti showered in their faces.
They question; they learn; they challenge; they act
according to their own honed principles:
What is truth? for example;
what is honor?

Part 1. The Vision

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (to be chanted until the Spirit is with one)

Where the horses dance like mad on Paha Sapa;
Where the mountains flow like rivers in the sun,
Turning watery golden under the reddening sky;
Where the clouds assume a human, spectral form,
Flowering with faces of the still unborn:
There the Grandfathers of our people called me,
Smiling behind their wild cloud beards.
Their eyes were holes where the sky entered in,
And their hands were the ashes of hands.
Opening their mouths, hawks soared from them,
Fluttering, turning in the glistening air.
A reed they smoked from bade me have no fear.
To each the reed was handed as a friend.

Then the Grandfathers bade me follow.
They grew young before me like boys.
And we hooted and shouted and rode on the wind,
Our hair like black fire behind us.
The hooves of our ponies kissed the sweet prairie grass,
And the air all around us rumbled with storm.
As far as eyes saw, the bison stampeded.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the Grandfathers.
Locusts of arrows rained on the prairie.
“Hoka-hey!” cried the women.
Red meat hung in the cottonwood branches.

Over the Greasy Grass we rode,
Over the tipis of nations:
The fires of the tribes lit up the hills,
The tipis of Minneconjous flapped in the wind.

Oglala and Shyela, Hunkpapa and Lakota,
Santee and Yanktonai camped by the icy stream.
The stars burned bright in the hair of the Great Father.
The blue river ran swiftly past the tribes.

All night the Bear Men dance round the fires,
All night their shadows dance on the tipis
Where the children dream; white smoke drifts in the sky.

Morning, red sun peeks through grey clouds.
Higher and higher, rising in the air,
The horses neigh wildly, the Grandfathers shout,
And the women dance round and round and round, clapping.
Hundreds of bluecoats bloom in their blood
Like hundreds of violets scattered on the hills.

All this I saw before my springs were ten.
And after, many times, flew with the spirits
To the other world, shedding the skin of shadows.
The people showed me honor with their eyes.
Great feasts we had, and battles,
With many victories over our enemies,
The rumbling thunder-beings making the bad ones crazy.

Then we were the first men of the Earth:
The faces of our children shone with morning;
Summer and winter the world was rich with heroes.
But now, all’s past; the hoop of the world lies broken.
Whirlwind and hailstone pummel the prairie.
Hungering dogs howl in the bitter air.
The wandering spirits hide.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

            (let the silence linger)

Part 2. The Hope

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The sacred buffalo wallows in his grave.
Washita maggots swarm on the prairies.
Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Tongueless carcasses rot in the red sun.
Human vermin murder holy land.

Now let us moan, my brothers!
The long-wailing coyotes will not out-grieve us.
The prairie dogs will look at us in pity.
All over the Earth the beasts will tell our story.
Gather now in the long grass, ghosts of my people.
Let your heart-felt cries rend heaven!
The Great Spirit weeps and culls us to His bosom.
We must leave this Earth we loved.
Never shall we walk these hills again.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
The clouds blot out the sun; the morning wanes.
The prairie flowers die while still in bud;
The cries of tortured bison scorch the air.

You saw your children hunted down like dogs,
Your women butchered, whittled into bone.
You could not bear the fire-watered eyes
Of braves who rode against the Long Hair foe.
You walked into the woods and lived alone.

You whom the Spirit loved as His own son,
Whose eyes, they say, held fire in their core,
Who saw the horses dancing in the clouds,
Who danced above the rattling Gatling guns–
Now you are gone; no more will you walk before us,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 3. The Sabers

The bluecoat sabers come! The thunderous drum
Of horses beats the plains!
The wagon guns are coughing at the hills!
Look! It is just meat here which had a name.
The lips that kissed a lover’s kiss the flies.
The innocent die with music,
Cruel music of the Gatling guns,
While snow shuts closed forever mouths that sang to God.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
Great Spirit, spread Your wings above us,
Hover, Falcon, over Your lost children.

The snow falls in the valley of our graves.
Bones stiffen; dumb mouths sing with wind.
The long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
At night, in the disemboweled bodies of horses,
Of bison, you slept in howling caves
While bluecoats fell with the snow.

Never would you be free again.
Never would you walk above the clouds.
Staring at embers with your brittle eyes,
You saw the bison skeletons stampede.
Dancing, you fell; dreaming, you could not rise.
At last, your own tears froze you to the ground.

O, Sun that endures forever, men must die!
O, Earth that endures forever, men must die!
The innocent die with music, cruel music,
And the long night of our land comes on.

Where are you now, Tashtunka Witco?
Cuffed and shackled, a beast with human eyes–
They shoved you to the prison door, they beat you down.
You watched them throw raw beef
To chiefs who ate off floors.

The vision gnawed; you reeled and cried;
You danced and groaned;
The hot steel flashed inside of you;
You fell like empty sackcloth to the ground.

Which of them knew you, warrior, spirit–
Raging with politics, God, greed and guns?
Which of them saw the poet inside you,
Brutal and lusting, with their teeth full of gold?
The old chiefs wept, and sang,
And shook their heads, remembering, when told.
The sky fell down and cracked the shoulders of the young.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

Part 4. The Song

A man who lived beneath the hot sun’s thumb
Said that if we danced the rains would come
And white men would grow small and drown.
In every tribe we heard the throbbing drum
And saw men dance until their feet were numb,
And heard the crackle of the white man’s gun.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
The river is frozen with the blood of our warriors.
Our chiefs are slain, our daughters have the eyes
Of old women, our sons have forgotten who we were.

While the twilight comes, pull down the tipi poles!
Let the ponies step quietly
Over the puddles of the moonlit snow.
Let the infants make no crying in their nested sleep.
Only the prairie wind will be talking.
Let each one linger in his thoughts.

Great Spirit of the Wind and Waters,
Thunder and roses dwell within Your arms!
We have heard the prairie groan beneath the iron rail.
We have seen the engine streak the clear blue sky.
Buffalo is gone, and, now, we, too, must go.

Let the prairie dogs trace our footsteps.
Never again will Earth be young for us,
Never again hold out her warm, green arms.
Never again will Sky throw back his head
And laugh until the stars are shaken down.
Men’s lives are warm breath mingled with the cold.
Men’s lives are footsteps in the snow.

Now let us make the long march home, my brothers.
Never shall we find rest among these mountains.
Our Great Grandmother waits in the Valley of Skulls.
Only she will embrace us hereafter.
Never shall we roam from her again.
With her only shall we find peace.

Now brothers, do not weep;
Your tears will never melt the snow.
Now ponies, step quietly through this dark land.
The branches of the saplings hold the moon
As in a spider’s silvery web.
Our Grandfather’s chant to us beyond this snow.
Listen… listen… listen… listen. …
See where the moon spills from the trees on them?
O, they are white upon the whiteness of the snow.

Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …
Hai-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya,
Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya, Hey-ya ya-ya-ya-ya. …

(“The Song of the Hoop” won the Stephen Vincent Benet Narrative Poem Prize in 1972. It was published in Poet Lore in 1973.)

We, on the other hand, are full of “life!”
We eat pizza and watch television.
Water magically appears at our fingers.
Our skin is bathed in emollients.
Our babies are full-throated and fat.
Our bodies are soft, and shaped like gourds.
We drive everywhere in S.U.V.’s.
We vote for politicians who despise us.
We are proud of our democracy.

The people of Somalia vote with their feet.
They trudge the hot sands, looking for water.
The soles of their feet are hard as tires.
They know nothing of Global Warming,
Population over-shoot, Earth’s carrying capacity.
Their carrying capacity
Is a baby on each raw hip.

The poor among us are deliberately poor.
Anyone with gumption can make a million.
Our hard times will pass and we’ll get back to normal:
Proms and Christmases, first kisses,
Change we can believe in, reality TV.
We’ll die and we’ll kill for inalienable rights:
Happy Meals, water at our fingers;
Our right to be oblivious; our right to
Life, liberty and a perennial mirage.

It’s a nice distinction often adduced
To show a finely-calibrated mind
(He’d taught himself Euclid’s geometry);

Still, one wonders if in those dark moods
The 16^th President was prone to suffer—
If he wondered whether there was any side at all;
If it didn’t boil down to
Fighting over semantic differences—
“Property rights” in a land appropriated
From people who never thought they owned the land.

Wage slaves in the North, Black slaves in the South
And the bulwark of the Idea
Pulsing madly West and South,
After the gold at Sutter’s Mill,
After Caribbean sugar,
Both sides seeking to enforce their will
On “savages,” “redskins,” “heathen,” “darkies.”

This is not to argue
There’s no right or wrong;
Beyond those moral apperceptions
That make us either this or that,
We find a universe of constant flux
Under a palette of exploding stars.

God, then, so far beyond
“Our poor powers to add or detract,”
Even the word “ineffable” won’t do
(Implying we might get there some day!).

Dante evoked the descent into the underworld to intimate the understanding that darkness is an aspect of human nature and that self-awareness arrives only after an exploration of the hidden, self-censored regions of one’s psyche. Only after passing through the inner most circle of the frozen hellscape does it become possible for Dante to look upward and gaze upon Beatrice’s splendor among the spheres of Heaven.
 

His Journey began, lost in a dark woods, with his path blocked by a hungry she-wolf and fierce lion. Then, led there by the pagan poet, Virgil, the adamantine gates of Hell (posting that famous sign regarding hope forever abandoned) slammed shut behind him. But the poet’s descent deep into the unsavory aspects of his nature made possible those glimpses of beatific light.
 

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world, 
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
 
But the darkness pulls in everything — 
shapes and fires, animals and myself, 
how easily it gathers them! — 
powers and people –
 
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me
 
I have faith in night
 
– Rainer Maria Rilke

 
Otherwise, as is the case with the Puritan/Calvinist imagination, an individual risks becoming purity-obsessed and light-intoxicated i.e., lacking in the will and ability to see the dark side of their nature; hence, one is prone to project one’s own motives on the actions of others.
 
Possessed by this state of mind, an individual is capable of inflicting a great amount of damage on his own psyche. Witness: the raging, lower order demons, inhabiting their own personal hellscapes, as channeled by the likes of Bachmann, Palin, and the Reverend Robertson.
 
Yet, rationalistic devices such as reductionist reasoning and humanistic psychology have proven useless in breaching the high walls of delusion bulwarking fundamentalist, free-floating crazy.
 
Why? Reductionism is a bi-product of the western Puritan/Calvinist tradition, and as such is prone to the pathologies inherent in the cosmology…wherein there exists: an habitual winnowing down of perception to controllable, exploitable bits; the dismissing of all things (the veracity of imagination, the emanations of nature and the souls of animals) that do not serve narrowed agendas (which are defining characteristics of its scion — the corporate state — and those within its institutions who have internalized its raison d’être).
 
Both Fundamentalist and reductionist mindsets are cemented in certitude. In fact, each is the shadow side of the other; hence, hyper-rationalists and religious literalists are locked in contemptuous embrace. Both evince, with their obsession with the other, a longing for rapprochement with their missing half, yet their encounters become a courtship dance of animus and antagonism, whereby their mutual yearning for union is expressed as a compulsion to transform the other.
 
Therefore, the rationalist is driven to proffer balms of superstition-purging logic, as, in turn, the religious true believer frets over the doomed-to-eternal-damnation, mortal soul of the salvation-bereft rationalist. Yet both causation-clutching logicians and credulous lambs of the lord share this trait: both have banished from their respective belief system the appropriation of empathetic imagination and a poetic approach to mystery.
 
Accordingly, the ideal use of poetic insight, intellectual rigor, and quicksilver wit is to deploy these tools (at times, weapons) of the mind — in the manner the hubris-hating gods intended — to confront bullies, rednecks, liars, prigs and hypocrites (including our own self-serving casuistry), to disarm (or, at least, annoy) the brutal, conniving and witless, and, in general, paraphrasing Whitman, “to cheer up slaves and to horrify despots.”
 
Yet, today, if a poet were to merge his body with the body of America, instead of discovering a Body Electric, he would find himself endowed with the hulking, putrefying corpse of a shambling zombie. Accordingly, he must tear a rotting arm from the monster and beat his own laughing corpse with it. Creating a movable autopsy, a Book Of The Dead for a dying empire.
 
Worse, in the world beyond U.S. self-reference, the earth’s oceans are dying — as, on a personal level, Fukushima’s isotopes penetrate our bones like parasitic beetles boring into the trunks of dying trees
 
And this is not simply a view of the world. In fact, this is the state of the world.
 
Don’t defend the indefensible — the soul-defying banality of the present system. The neo-liberal superstate is unsustainable and will bring on its own demise.
 
Instead, like a mourner in a New Orleans funeral march, dance with the dread involved. The music of sorrow is more real than the magical thinking required to believe an insane system is salvageable. Don’t stand, back pressed to the wall, frozen in rationalization and equivocation…Exalt in the unfurling mystery of it all.
 
Crackpot realists demand solutions and Christian Fundamentalist pray for finality. I demur. I stand in awe of the ragged glory immanent in sublime futility.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
– Samuel Beckett

I suspect this attitude arrives from the southerner/Native American collision of genes in me. One’s broken places allow the spirit in. No need to fix the problem, for the problem is the solution. No call for satanic caulk to seal the cracks in one’s soul that reveal one’s character.
 
And why is this important, particularly, at a time when our opponents are unflagging in their certitude? Because even when our reason to fight has merit, and nuance is banished, the larger truth that life itself contains paradox and is comprised of ambiguity remains. Thus, fascist fantasies of infallibility are toppled and the misguided trudge toward the mirage of paradise is waylaid…perhaps leveling a measure of humanizing grace.
 
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
– Goethe

The New Critics were right to bemoan the flaccid criticism in newspapers and women’s mags, but, as sometimes happens with rebels, they went overboard: throwing out baby with the bath-water and lopping off too many heads.

I reflected on these ideas as I read Morris Berman’s first book of poems.  Counting Blessings is a volume of 44 pages with some excellent poems.  Try as I might, feasting on heaping dishes of Structuralism and Deconstructionism, I cannot read Berman’s initiatory dance with the Muse… and quite forget his impressive background, his intellectual creds, who the man is and what he has done.

I know Berman principally through his book, Dark Ages America.  Published in 2006, it’s a rueful song about the closing of the American mind and heart.  It hurts because it’s the story of lost love—the lost love of a culture, of what might have been.  Sometimes, it’s even funny—the way George Carlin or Richard Pryor or Lenny Bruce could be funny—making you cry and laugh at life’s beautiful-tragic poignancies.

But Berman’s not just a witty heart-yanker.  He’s an acute observor and astute commentator.  In 2000, Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review.  He has been a Professor of Sociology at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and a Professor in Humanities at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.  Counting Blessings was written after he moved to a small Mexican town a few years back.

His themes are exile, isolation, alienation and reconstitution.  I don’t mean “reconciliation” by the last because there are some things to which we can never quite reconcile: the death of loved ones; getting old—and getting too old; the loss of a culture which nourished even as it destroyed.  So the book is about “reconstituting” oneself, becoming a new person in one’s old skin, acclimating to a very different world in Mexico while remembering—reconstituting—the past:

By what miracle did I shed the old life
the life of autistic hostility
and emerge, reborn, in a new place, a new time?

Thus Berman inquires of himself—and the Universe—in the first poem, “Identity.”

His eye for detail and close observation (and his penchant for irony) are nicely measured in “Last Rites”:

A complicated, delicate insect
crawling along the edge of a pot in my garden
delicate feelers, large green eyes
absorbed in what it was doing.
I can do that, once in a while:
three seconds every month, perhaps.

In “Light,” this hard-headed social historian recalls his mother’s vision of “a burning bush… just like in the bible.”  And, laying his cards on the table, this exemplary rationalist reveals:

I recall a number of incidents like that in my own life,
some more ‘cosmic’ than others.

And,

… around age sixty, perhaps a little before,
I saw a pillar of fire—again, as in the bible
and I began to weep.
This time it stuck:
I see it more or less every day now.
Exodus says it guided the Jews through the desert,
but I’m not looking for the Promised Land.
Oh no—
wandering in the desert is the Promised Land.

That’s a fine last line: a bit of cognitive dissonance serving the lie to the Corporate State that bids us tweet back perfect answers to complex questions at the end of the workday—which, more often these days, never seems to end.  It’s also a line and a poem likely to drive the psychiatrists and the pharmaceuticalists stark mad.  In fact, it turns our whole get-it-do-it-now culture on its noggin.  Acceptance… waiting… wandering. …

At his best, in his conversational style, Berman’s insights can be sharp, startling and true:

Letting go of love
when you have no choice
is a little like dying without morphine.
And then you realize—though you knew it before, of course—
that the closeness was not about sex
but about being able to take care of someone
without a thought for yourself.

Of course, first-book poets, especially one of Berman’s intellectual stature, may be allowed some latitude to stretch their muscles and to fall.  Ultimately, poets are judged by their best; Keats’ revision of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” for example, falls short of his original (and everyone but Keats seems to have agreed on that).  So, in truth, sometimes, Berman’s “conversation” sounds flat:

The pain of knowing what life could be like
and not having it
is a difficult one to endure.

‘Everything in moderation,’ said the ancient Greeks.

Or,

The death instinct hovers over the United States,’
wrote some journalist a few years back.
It was a bad book with one good idea.
and I think: How did this happen?

Poetry wants the “best words in the best order” in Coleridge’s phrase.  Bald statements like this one need some poetic flourish, some juice:

It’s no use, finally;
We simply have to find a different way to live.

All in all, there is wisdom in Berman’s first collection and much that touches us.  I hope to read the poems of this astute sextagenerian expat for decades to come.   Many of us want to put this sad, violent, hyped-up, exploited and exploiting culture behind us.  Berman is one of those who has pointed, and is pointing, a way:

Hard to get up, get ready for the Creation,
when you know what the next few decades are going to be like.
Not any of us have a choice.
Me, I had to be extracted with forceps.
And yet, I’m in no hurry to return…

There’s so much sweetness in a single day
a single woman
a single hummingbird
a single fountain pen
a single poem.

chatter all day, The Mozlems are coming;
they’ve dropped their drivel about fighting

them there. While our troops fought in Iraq
holding the ‘terrorists’ at the gates, back

home, greater troubles were brewing.
Radical Mozlems were actively scheming

to impose an Islamo-fascist theocracy
on the United States. Our great democracy

confronts an existential threat from within.
Let us act fast – good Republicans raise a din –

Moslems inside the US are working openly
to force sharia-law upon us. Act quickly,

harangue the pundits – or lose this great country
to heathens. Now’s not the time for an energy

plan, overhaul Medicare, fix the infrastructure,
or trim the deficit. We face greater dangers

from the enemy within: The Mozlems are coming.
It’s women in burqa, no gambling, no drinking,

nor driving for women. Americans get cracking
‘cause your country is calling. The Mozlems are coming.

They exploit feigned loyalty to recruit supporters
Spreading their poison through corrupt reporters
They excuse hatred as defense for survival
Then brutalize the innocent who may rival

Their basis is an evil which lusts for power
Men’s rights and possessions it must devour
It evolves into forces which imitate good
While fooling the masses, just like Hollywood

Often historically, it’s been exposed and defeated
But, alas! Its villainy is oft repeated
It resurfaces with diverse profile and prism
It now creeps back in the form of Zionism

Zionism – pilfered holy name of the Bible
Founded by those claiming Semitic tribal
Their ethnicity is really Aryan race
They’ve duped true Hebrews into shameful disgrace

Zionism – equipped with agenda and charter
Sustain the false prophet, slay the sainted martyr
Manipulate the infrastructure discreetly
Banks and Law, Schools and Media completely

Zionism – calculating and resolute
Breeding destruction, merciless and absolute
Execute the children along with their mother
Perpetrate the crime and accuse another

Zionism – insane, vain, and sinister
Sly enough to engage the Christian minister
Redefining God’s Word to champion its lies
Wake up, people! Open your hearts and your eyes!

Those who would look inward
To see the archetypes of shadows
Fleeing
In the night

Or who would search the rocky landscape of the mind
To see those whom they have chased away

Where are those who would survey the scrubgrass
And the pale horse
And the winter moon
And the olive trees
Planted a thousand new suns ago
By those who are no longer

But whose sweat lingers in the soil

Are there no Israeli poets?
Are they afraid?
Of looking inward

If only in a dream

On a barren moonlit landscape
While wandering the winding paths
Stepping on the rubble on ancient villages
Which are no longer

But villages whose souls still weep
For the familiar voices
They may sometime hear

In the distance
When the wind is right

I guess he’s now dead
for that just trust US.
But I’m not going to cheer,
or think that it’s justice.

Roar out a big cheer,
and forget the dead babies.
This proves we are right,
no ifs, ands or maybes.

Monstrous he’s called,
and unspeakably bad.
Don’t follow his money,
to our friends in Riyadh.

Belt out a ‘hoo rah’,
now that Osama is gone.
And don’t worry a bit,
the GWOT is still on.

I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of Southern denial.

The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting Southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio.

But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that Southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow Southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.)

I arrived in Georgia by route of the U.S. interstate system.

Traveling U.S. interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression. Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon.

Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all too often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.

“Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?” — Rainer Maria Rilke

Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart.

When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.

The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.

When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy.

These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.

Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.

Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel — we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive.

Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.

Even the landscape itself of the U.S. is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars.

As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks — the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past — the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.

The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay — a death-swoon operatic in scale.

Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land.

Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the U.S. spread before us … are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.

Manifested en masse, as our collective way of existing in the world — the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame … There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to our own names … We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.

Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?

Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, “Private, why are you running?” The soldier replied, “General, I’m running ’cause I can’t fly.”

The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one’s rear.

Depression is what catches us.

I have been accused of being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity — or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces.

Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.

The salesmen of the eternal, big happy … are just that — salesmen … One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart … The commercial come-ons insist that the heart’s grief and a lost soul’s emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, “hope and change.”

By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated — even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude — all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” — Carl Jung.

What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high-fat, low-quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job — until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall … clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one’s jowls.

Aint that the life — or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.

This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life … Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.

Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase … But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett

But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well “spill” (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world’s oceans …

The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me … Ever since, this dream image has lived within me … I carry the fish’s suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home — this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into …

My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage … bottomless … Who will speak for the voiceless — who will make amends for their suffering?

In childhood, I loved this body of water … loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters …
Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf’s living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.

Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world’s oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)

Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can’t wrap our minds around it …

In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.

I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste — the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all.

I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, “Stop it. God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you? Didn’t anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?

This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die-off.

But listening to the pronouncements of Washington’s political class and the mainstream media’s ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.

Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over.

When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn’t mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.

Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.

And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth … singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.

Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.

Frank O’Hara suggests: “In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

Things are going to work out — but not in ways we can predict.

There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.

If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.

“Don’t you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man’s war is a virtue; don’t buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth.”

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: moc.hortskcorlihpnull@lihp. Visit Phil’s Web site And at FaceBook.

Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, “Fahrenheit” and “Sicko.”

I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, at present, among the scent of pine trees and the reek of Southern denial.

The moribund economy has thwarted the city’s manic drive to silence its resentful ghosts by means of constant motion … Below the lilting Southern accents here, one detects rage … Not simply the ubiquitous hate-speak on right-wing talk radio.

But an animus bred by truth-deferred … that Southern pride is a lie of the mind — a blown banner … foisted skyward to distract the minds of my fellow Southerners from the ground level truths of a system rigged to enrich the privileged few and keep the many working for their benefit. (How do you think they filled the ranks of the Confederate Army to kill and die for the rights of rich men to own slaves.)

I arrived in Georgia by route of the U.S. interstate system.

Traveling U.S. interstate highways one suffers a confluence of so much contemporary madness and tragedy extant in the land … so much suppressed fear and aggression. Yet, through it all, the heart still yearns to see what lies over the next horizon.

Although, lamentably, what is revealed, all too often, proves to be as sterile, inhospitable, ugly, and inhuman as what was beheld at the last.

“Who has twisted us around like this, so that no matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone going away?” — Rainer Maria Rilke

Any situation, as is the case with interstate highway travel, in which to momentarily stop or even to slow down, one risks death should be regarded as an affront (if not anathema) to common sense and the longings of the heart.

When the landscape we pass through has been reduced to a meaningless blur, our lives grow indistinct as well.

The apologists of the present system tell us ad nauseam, and have convinced most, that a similar disastrous fate will befall the nation if the engines of global capitalism were to slow down even a bit. Interstate travel is emblematic of the manner a system based on ceaseless production and manic consumption degrades the senses and inflicts a dehumanizing assault upon the psyche.

When stopped at an anonymous interstate service island or some off-the-exit-ramp retail strip — those inhospitable nether regions evincing a paradoxical mix of sterility and toxicity — the permeating odor of exhaust fumes and processed food makes us woozy.

These places, only distinct for their ugliness, reek of how soul-numbing and joyless travel has become . . . now a task nearly devoid of any sense of the mystery, the option of exploration, or the possibility of serendipity travel once offered.

Travel has been reduced to a tedious ordeal, whereby our inchoate longings to escape the quotidian prison of our economically circumscribed existence are mangled and suppressed, only to rise as the hollow appetite of reflexive consumerism and the ineffable sense of unease, so evident in the troubled American psyche.

Enclosed in our vehicles, we hurdle from one sterile, impersonal location to the next sterile, impersonal location, and then on to the next. As forbiddingly huge trucks, loaded with the cargo of extinction, bear down on us, we grip the steering wheel — we know to stop is to risk death therefore we continue onward, believing we must drive and consume and drive and consume in order to survive.

Yet the knowledge nettles, just below the surface of our harried minds, that to continue down this road will, in turn, cause the world to die.

Even the landscape itself of the U.S. is stretched to the breaking point: Cluttered upon it are gigantic islands of garish light that torment the night …scouring away the stars.

As, all the while, SUVs and oversized pickup trucks — the overgrown clown cars of the demented circus of decaying empire trundle past — the extravagant size of the vehicles vainly compensating for how diminished and powerless those within feel in relationship to the course of their fates.

The corporate empire is imprinted in us. If one listens one can hear arias of decay — a death-swoon operatic in scale.

Manifested before us, it is as visible as the noxious vapors of pollutants veiling the horizon line at sunset; it shimmers like heat spires above traffic-stalled interstates; it reeks like the endless archipelagos of overflowing landfills spanning the length of the land.

Yet, as mortifying as it is, the vales and vistas of the U.S. spread before us … are as horrible and beautiful as a great cry of grief.

Manifested en masse, as our collective way of existing in the world — the flickering of our tiny desires have set the vast world aflame … There is needless suffering and death that history will affix to our own names … We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as, our own sanity.

Feeling the full implications of this, how does one make it through the day and sleep throughout the night?

Following their defeat at the Battle of Shiloh, the shattered Confederate ranks fled for their lives. General A.S. Johnston, desperate to restore order and rally his men to return to battle, commanded a fleeing soldier to stop, demanding, “Private, why are you running?” The soldier replied, “General, I’m running ’cause I can’t fly.”

The act of being in perpetual flight (even the somnambulant variety) from consequences requires a great amount of energy; one must have the endurance of a marathoner sleepwalker to keep ahead of the sound of the fast approaching footfalls of reality at one’s rear.

Depression is what catches us.

I have been accused of being a poet … I know I am a wanderer through the landscape of the heart. I navigate by narrative, by words and feelings: It occurs to me: the term depression is a misnomer for feelings of despair brought on by powerlessness i.e., disconsolation over the death of an internal verity — or having our will thwarted by inexorable, outer forces.

Grief is a living prayer of our vulnerable hearts.

The salesmen of the eternal, big happy … are just that — salesmen … One is required to respond to the intoxication of the sales pitch and is not to question the condition of their heart … The commercial come-ons insist that the heart’s grief and a lost soul’s emptiness and panic can be fixed by some new bright and shiny: a new appliance, therapy, “hope and change.”

By the incessant promotion of the gospels of the hyper-capitalist sects of Happiness Uber Alles, the implicit message imparted is … suffering is a character flaw that can be mitigated, elevated — even redeemed by consumerism, antidepressants, acquiring a positive attitude — all the uttered homilies and donned vestments of the consumer state.

“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.” — Carl Jung.

What kind of miserable malcontent would resist changing this social milieu and personal mode of being: Sitting stuck in commuter traffic; eating high-fat, low-quality food from a drive-thru window; languishing in a cubical … stranded in a low benefits, little chance of advancement job — until, of course, the job is outsourced; waddling around the mall … clad in off-the-rack, sweatshop sown clothing; dozing off in front of the TEEVEE with Cheetos crumbs stippled in the folds of one’s jowls.

Aint that the life — or what? By any means possible, we preserve the death-styles of empire.

This mode of being is far removed from the norms of nature and the revelries and attendant sublimations necessary to engage in civic life … Here, ruthlessness and rationalization banish reason; ambition trumps merit; expediency pushes aside wisdom; and empty sensation masquerades as experience.

Like interstate travel, the collective mind of the consumer state propels us forward to the next empty agenda, the next perfunctory task, the next meaningless purchase … But depression slows us down, inducing us to feel the grief inherent in our alienation … to cease the incessant, habitual hurdling forward and striving upward … to stop and investigate the mysteries of our hearts … to feel the sadness of the suffering earth …

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett

But we must slow down: We are destroying our planet and her exquisite, irreplaceable creatures, as well as our own sanity.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon, Macondo Well “spill” (what a dishonest word for that noxious, bleeding gash) into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, I dreamed of a badly injured fish who had had half his face torn off by some brutal method employed by the practitioners of industrial scale fishing operations to exploit the world’s oceans …

The fish had worked himself upon a rock on a craggy shoreline; holding an eternity of suffering in his one remaining eye, the fish turned to face me … Ever since, this dream image has lived within me … I carry the fish’s suffering and I bear his dark rage regarding what our species has done to his/our home — this complex, mysterious, beguiling, dangerous, sublime, monstrous, and magnificent world we were cast into …

My sense of sorrow, at times, seems unbearable; my rage … bottomless … Who will speak for the voiceless — who will make amends for their suffering?

In childhood, I loved this body of water … loved it as one can love any living thing (which it is). I swam in it, collected jewel-like shells on its beaches of bleached sand, and went deep sea fishing with my father in its azure waters … Wherein, I was in awe of its (seemingly endless) bounty and abundance. Its winds and waves intimated to me the nature of eternity and the Gulf’s living things drew me into the beauty and terrors of the living moment.

Approximately, ninety percent of the large fish (Tuna, Mackerel) in the world’s oceans are gone due to overfishing. Oceanographers predict in 50 years time the oceans and seas the earth over will be dead. (And these are conservative estimates.)

Much like the denizens of late Cretaceous looking dumbly at the sky and barely giving a second thought to that bright, shining thingy that appeared above, this is a calamity so large in scale and so all-encompassing in its implications that we human beings just can’t wrap our minds around it …

In fact, by our elevation of willful ignorance and mindless consumerism to a cultural imperative, we human beings, acting collectively, are the equivalent the planet-decimating Cretaceous comet.

I try to resist losing myself to misanthropic rage when I read statistics such as this one. Yet I am enraged at the waste — the sheer stupidity, mendacity, and hubris of it all.

I want to grab the human race by the lapels and shout, “Stop it. God damn it. Just stop it. How could you destroy something so beautiful and then just continue to go through your sub-cretinous day? What the hell is wrong with you? Didn’t anyone ever teach you the meaning of decency?

This is not a political debate. This is a choice between sanity and mass suffering; perhaps, even the survival of our species and a mass die-off.

But listening to the pronouncements of Washington’s political class and the mainstream media’s ceaselessly shallow, miss-the-point narratives is like eavesdropping on the palaver from a petri dish.

Excuse my sense of fatalism: At this point, the system is too far-gone to be redeemed; it is in the process of systemic breakdown. Although, this is not as awful as it sounds, for one must let the old go and let a natural process of decay take over.

When the rot is this advanced, at best, what you have is culture as a compost heap. Yet that doesn’t mean in times of decay, there cannot be meaning and beauty, because life itself becomes vivid and alive in contrast to the extant ugliness.

Without decay, there is no change. The world would be as pointless as paradise. If you wish to find the future forest, look to the humus upon its floor. The future is decay; and decay is the future. The old ego must sing, even within the compost heap of its own putrefied concepts.

And, as it does, it must sing of its suffering and the sorrows of the earth … singing like the severed head of Orpheus floating to Lesbos.

Arias of compost sing of new understandings but you cannot skip the singing school of grief.

Frank O’Hara suggests: “In times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

Things are going to work out — but not in ways we can predict.

There is a mournful beauty, even a providential utility, attendant to living through at time of putrefaction: Compost (the anti-Astroturf) nourishes fledgling life and novel forms. A new paradigm will morph from the remnants of the old, putrefied system.

If Confederate ghosts could shout through the prison of their enshrinement — they would call out to us, “Don’t believe it. Having seen the meaningless waste of war, we know now that we would have chosen to live out our lives, breathing in the humid, Georgia air, having our troubles softened by the sight of dappled light filtered through pine needles, and being lulled to sleep at night by the song of crickets and cicada.

“Don’t you believe the lie, as we did, that dying in a rich man’s war is a virtue; don’t buy into the fraud that working all your life for a greedy few is a sound way to proceed through the fleeting and finite years of your time upon this earth.”

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: moc.hortskcorlihpnull@lihp. Visit Phil’s Web site And at FaceBook. Angela Tyler-Rockstroh is a Broadcast Designer/Animator who has worked with major Networks such as Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, HBO Family, PBS, as well as, with Michael Moore on his documentaries, “Fahrenheit” and “Sicko.”

Water, first element, symbolizes purity and fertility. It’s supposed to clean and bring forth, but our water, befouled now, conveys sickness and kills.

George Monbiot has just opened a sushi takeout. House specialty: Radiated Cesium Roll. UN and International Atomic Energy Agency approved. Come meet radiant chef Naoto Kan. All you can’t eat lunch, dinner and wake. Free goggles, mask and industrial galoshes upon entry.

The Vietnamese word for country is water. Which water are you from? Though I was born in that water, I will die in this water. To be together is to be in the same water, in the same womb, comprende? Come closer, mare mere, let’s spend this longest night together. Do we have a choice?

Neruda thought the sea should be tamed and dominated. I translate a chunk from his “Oda al Mare“:

we’ll enter you,
we’ll chop the waves
with a knife made of fire,
on an electric horse
leaping over foam,
singing
we’ll sink
until we touch the bottom
of your guts,
an atomic thread
will guard your shank,
we’ll plant
in your deep garden
trees
of cement and steel,
we’ll tie
your hands and feet,
on your skin man will walk,
spitting,
yanking in bunches,
building armatures,
mounting and taming you
to dominate your spirit.

Wow, man, pretty kinky stuff! Way cool, the atomic thread…

As Japan dumps, South Korea squawks, China squints while the Philippines shrugs, “No biggie, we’ll eat it.” Obama, “What? Me worry? Scuse me while I bomb, literally and figuratively. It’s all good. I’ll get mine. Vote for me in 2012!”

To light up everything and go nowhere fast, all the time, we’ve been willing to mass murder and sometimes even die, oh shit. So what if you bleed from the ass, long as I get my unleaded, hip hop beats here, gas?

In Virgin Oceanic, billionaire will disappear from sight, earthlings, as he probes the deepest parts of your mama, regions she herself doesn’t even know exist, it being so dark down there.

Way, way down there, steel prick punctures exhausted womb to bring back slick tidings and a greasy snapshot of Fonzie, thumbs down since out of work for a while now. You can bet it will explode!

Another billionaire dreams of a better commode. He thinks we should flush less, maybe not at all. Gates wants a water closet without water.

I too have a dream. I see Goldman Sachs collapsing into its own footprint, just like World Trade Center 1, 2 and 7. Sticker, “OUR GOVERNMENT IS BEING RUN BY CRIMINALS. Sticker, “WAR IS TERRORISM WITH A BIGGER BUDGET.” Sticker, “WAR IS ALWAYS A PART OF THE SOLUTION.”

Top one percent control 40% of national wealth, so the flushest flush nearly half of our flush fund while the unwashed bottom are flushed.

Who would you flush?

“I’m sorry,” he said,
“The missile. It missed;
“I’ll certainly understand it if you feel pissed.

“That damn missile went
left
when it should have gone
right–
“–You see, it’s hard to see straight
in the middle
of the night.
“Please know that America didn’t want your kin dead;
“That missile was meant for your neighbors instead.”

In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. … When my sons grow up…, O my friends…, I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing. …

– Socrates (from Plato’s Apologia)

For speaking truth to power… a cold cell.
Naked now…, and yet, they fear you!
You watch a spider weave, perhaps recall
The crime scene, viewed on a monitor:

Men like puppets dancing in the dust, fired
On by U.S. drones; and the button-pushers
Laughing, ten thousand miles away—life reduced
To video porn, sordid and crazily robotic.

The robots shop, vote, fuck, kill, do business,
Take meetings, squawk endlessly democracy,
Free markets; get replaced—interchangeable—
In the Machine… until a voice says “No.”

And the house of cards collapses; the dream
Recedes; the dark, stark landscape, revealed:
A people bought for bread and circuses—
Mostly circuses—more silhouettes than people.

But the voice remains: Socrates in the agora;
Christ among the Pharisees;
Galileo Galilei; Paine and Thoreau;
Gandhi and King—questioning, exposing.

Now in the shackled world, a moan goes up
From the well of our debasement: Cease
And desist: the depredations; soul-murdering;
Earth-murdering. … The implacable voice arising.

Out of the chrysalis of what has been,
A global being struggles to be free:
To extricate its wings from the wax of retributions;
To save the dying planet; to balance and revere.

Shia, Sunni; Christian, Jew; Buddhist, Hindu, pagan;
Male and female—fledging to resurge anew:
Out of the yearning cauldron of suffering
And endurance—diamond-cut humanity.

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?

— William Butler Yeats

I was pushed without my permission
into a tangle of birthdays.
listen, eavesdroppers, there is no such thing
as a bed without affliction…

— Lucille Clifton

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

— Alexander Pope

Five thousand years pointing at the sun;
Five thousand years at moon and stars;
Rising out of sand, each building block
A Mac Truck of solidity, sheer weight
Defying reason, begging the question,
How?

Five thousand years of pharaohs and invaders—
Semites…, Hyksos…, Hittites…, Nubians…,
Romans…, Turks…, Frenchmen…, Anglos…, Yanks…
And the Nile flooding, the Nile receding,
And all along its banks:
Life and commerce; birth, love, suffering, death.

Akhnaton sleeps with the first dream of God;
Boyish Tut and long-lived Ramses; Cheops
And asp-kissed Cleopatra. … Bored French troops
Take pot-shots at the Sphinx; Nelson slaps
The Little Emperor’s fleet; the world winds on;
Gamal Abdel Nasser sleeps—all entombed
In the embracing sands of the enchanting dream.

And then, in an instant, the sun dial of the pyramids
Moves a degree, shudders between
Shadowy and luminous… and the awakened behold
In the mirrors of compatriot eyes
Themselves!—singing, dancing in streets and bazaars,
With the old world scratching, gawking, How?

And…, Why now? What next?
But it is as though
Those apexes of stone, those points of light
Have punched like awls through leathery Time
To the enveloping atmosphere
Of what has been,
Notched the belt of our perceptions,
Knocking from our human solar plexus
The breath of wonder… seeing emerging
From beneath the Sphinx’s haunches
A blood-swaddled babe, wailing
Possibilities.

#8

Sometimes
the best things
in life
are broken.

Rihn’s no Ivory Tower purist or coffee house boor. Sure, he’s  got the English degree from Kent State and six chapbooks to his name but as he told me, “My politics are reflected in my writing. Much of my writing deals with working class issues.” Putting his values into practice, Rihn has run creative writing workshops in a domestic violence shelter and currently volunteers reading manuscripts for a non-profit (Reentry Bridge Network) that connects prisoners with the performing arts. (Reentry Bridge Network publishes four books per year of prisoner’s writing.)

#33

Tests
are more meaningful
without answers.

“The concept of ‘responding’ is a central one in my writing and activism,” explains Rihn and the 50 poems in America Plops and Fizzes, to me, read not only as “response” but also as a provocation to respond. Described as deviating to the “edge of formlessness,” Rihn’s latest collection (and the excellent, complementary artwork by David Munson) seems to build a momentum as you read through it—the poems sneaking up on you, gaining steam, daring you to stop and contemplate…and perhaps even take action?

#41

What is
the poet’s
equivalent
to the sparring
partner?

“Being a writer is such a privilege,” says Rihn, “and the ability to respond is just one of the ways to fulfill the responsibility that comes along with it.”

Our conversation went a little something like this:

Mickey Z.: America Plops and Fizzes kinda reminds of the story about when an art writer declared that Jackson Pollock’s paintings lacked a beginning or an end and Pollock replied, “He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” Did you embrace of “no form” by design or by natural process?

Andrew Rihn: By both, actually. America Plops and Fizzes was written while I was an undergraduate at Kent State, and one of the important tasks for writing instructors is to expose their students to a diversity of forms. Good students are able to learn these forms, but good writers must also I think experience a sense of un-learning, that is, embracing these forms in different ways. I was very conscious of forms like haiku and haibun, as well as less formal styles like aphorisms and contemporary advertising slogans, but the decision to blur and blend was a very natural one.

Having “no form” implies the existence of form, and vice versa. I find that tension fundamental to language, and it is made especially visible in creative writing. Humans seem to have an innate impulse towards language, but the languages we create are of course human systems, and imperfect. They’re terrific because they make our thoughts visible; at the same time, structuring our thoughts imposes limits on them as well. So there’s a regulatory function to any formal structure.

But as David Munson’s artwork in the book illustrates, sometimes that regulation can be a good thing.

MZ: Patti Smith once said the role of the poet was that of a Paul Revere of sorts; e.g., not necessarily about solutions but all about waking up the populace. Any thoughts on that appraisal?

AR: I think that’s a wonderful description! Poetry is a rhetoric: a way of writing and speaking that shapes the way we interact with the world. It’s a way of thinking. In that regard, it’s the opposite of advertising. Good poetry, like good food, is a slow process. It takes time to digest; it gives you strength. But we’re inundated with junk food – empty calories, empty words. Fast food, Twitter updates, celebrity marriages. We’re left, individually and culturally, bloated, weak, and constipated.

MZ: But do you see any chance of us moving to a more nutritious, poetry-based diet? Perhaps one day, long after industrial civilization has imploded, humans will live a modern version of the clan or village-based life and this would be more conducive to storytelling?

AR: I think a balanced diet should include a bit of poetry, but also some fiction. And non-fiction: histories, biographies, academics, manifestos. I’m not a nutritionist, but I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to limit our diets to just one thing. We need painting, and music, and theatre, too. I don’t know how exactly an arts-based civilization would function, but it would be a welcome change from ours based on property, militarization, and surveillance.

Poems will never be as flippant as the “Twinkie defense,” or pad the profit margins like a marketing campaign. A poem will never have the same impact as a bomb, but I’m pretty comfortable with that.

MZ: If not the impact of a bomb, what then did you have in mind as you compiled America Plops and Fizzes in terms of both choosing poems and the order they appear in and potential reader response?

AR: At his sexiest, and most subversive, the poet Pablo Neruda said “I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees.” That’s the kind of explosion I am interested in. Of course, Neruda said it in Spanish so most of us in the US need a translator to read his poems. But that’s something I wanted to capture in this book as well: translation, negotiation, reconstruction.

Our memories are always selective – just ask a racist about the cause of the Civil War – but in critically reflecting upon our experiences we can begin to see the spaces where real, potentially radical options existed. What I hope these poems will do is reconstruct, little by little, the reader’s own experience, the way bricks from a torn down wall can be used to build something new.

It is one thing to know where you have been and where you’re heading, and that’s vital, but is something altogether different to look at where you could have been, where you could be going. So it’s that moment of stepping forward, after the book has been read and put down, that I’m most interested in. I want to encourage people to disrupt the paths of least resistance – the political, the social, the personal – and to do so creatively, emphatically, and with love.

MZ: One last thing – since you suggest it in your new book – what is the poet’s equivalent to a sparring partner?

AR: A boxer’s sonnet, maybe. A martial artist in blank verse.

Truth is a bandit, Truth is a screech-owl
And the polar winds are howling.

Solar flares and the weather vane cuckoo,
We click out a mordant Morse Code
About Liberty, and God, and our free will.

2.
Baby boomers are booming out;
We’ll peter away with a whimper.

With money to burn, we burned it all
While California-dreaming.
Now we’re beggars in our children’s houses.

(Except for the rapists selected to lead us,
Grinning from ear to ear,
Serrating our warbling throats.)

3.
70 million in two world wars
Went to their graves mis-believing.

They died for rumors of rumors of war,
Allegations of allegations,
Cloth banners in the charnel house of hate,
While the power and glory mongers
Pulled the grenade pins, raked in the dough,
Built bone temples of severed limbs
In which we continue to worship.

4.
A savage race, a servile kind,
Shaken by hysterias.

The barn is on fire.
The horses are screaming.

If you would ask these water-bearers to stop
If you would make them stop
If you would give aid to those who would stop them
If you are the kind of person who would force these precious water-guardians
to disown their adopted cousins of the South,
and let them die,
grasping at cacti thorns in the skeleton desert
Then I say it’s you
Who must be stopped.

Perhaps it is you who should be cast out
Into the desert.
Perhaps it is You who are the Alien
In our human midst.

What human being can feel secure
with the likes of you around?