Every time I think of 9/11
I see burning flesh dripping off the bones of Iraqi children in Fallujah
Now Gaza
I tend to memorialize the forgotten
The collateral damage eclipsing our unpunished crimes

Maybe it’s because I’m a numbers guy
Because if I had a dollar for every time an Iraqi died since 2003
I’d be a millionaire

And don’t get me wrong
Sometimes I don’t know who I hate more
The governments in the West
Or the politicians in the East
Who sell their souls quicker than the oil they export
Straw men who use Palestine as a tool to line their pockets
And don’t give a nickel to their people
Quisling governments
Who stitch mouths shut for a check from Washington and AIPAC
How can you be their prototypical anti-Semite
If you are signing peace accords to oppress your own people?

And then Orientalists and idiots talk about how
We can’t have democracy in the Middle East
Because of what happened in Gaza
A Hamas boogyman wrapped in democratic elections
Rahm Emanuel wants to educate me and my people about democracy gone wrong
Why doesn’t he try implementing one in Israel first?
Instead of bowing down to terrorists like his father and the IDF
Lauding a third rate, racist, European society that’s imploding quicker
Than its moral standing in the world
Enlightened like 1950s Afrikaners and slave traders
Just because the house is beautiful
Doesn’t mean the bones you built it on have fully decomposed

The Israeli left is about as alive as Ariel Sharon
I’m sick and tired of asking for permission to resist
From antiquated leftists and progressives
Who care more about keeping it Kosher than moving things forward
I put down my pen and waving fist to resist with college kids and Palestinians
Boycott and divest!
Because who cares about preserving a living when governments are killing civilians
Complicity by silence and reserve units bombing Gaza
Your academics and scholars, theater groups and practitioners, are part of the problem

And if logic doesn’t fit into your long term plan of rejecting
My right to return, I’m sorry
Maybe one day you’ll return to reality
Where my people have babies quicker
Than Zionists can concoct Jordanian options

I don’t want your sympathy or introspective confessions
Won’t sit on my hands till they lose oxygen
Like the people of Balata and Rafah
Vote for Barack Obama
And pretend that his 22 day silence was golden
While emaciated children starved to death
Surrounded by their parent’s corpses

This can’t be America the Beautiful
A criminal with a few positive attributes
Doesn’t alleviate genocide
Bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq
Into oblivion doesn’t make you historic
It makes you as blind and bloodthirsty
As the white men that came before you
Apathetic hipsters now excited about a president
Who broke history, but not poverty, occupation, or corporate interests

I’d rather proudly walk through the graveyard of peace accords
And failed dialogue sessions
Than see my people just as occupied or third class citizens
We are the gavel that will slam down like a verdict
We are not waiting for Israel or America or the Supreme Court to approve it
We’ll boycott Lev Leviev, Caterpillar and your apartheid companies
We’re taking back the right of return and the keys to a country
Because we never asked you to go back to Europe or sit in open air prisons
I’m not asking for your advice, I’m explaining the decision
You can stay here, with us, but only as equals
It’s not that you’re Israeli, it’s that you’re wrong
That’s why I fight for my people!

The stock market crashed
Just like ‘29,
It took wheelbarrows of bucks
To buy Coca Cola
And the radio nuts
Blamed it all
On Mexican liberals
Crossing our borders.

I’ve been wondering lately
Should I pay off my bills?
But I haven’t decided
Whose side I’m on!
Am I with’em
Or agin’em,
Am I blue state or red,
Am I better off hoping
Or better off dead?

This world’s a delusion,
A junkie’s chimera,
A vampire’s kiss
Hissing in a cavern,
Pissing in the wind.
For the sake of a dollar,
A ribboned medallion,
We die for our country,
Kill for sweet liberty
As defined by,
As circumscribed by,
As constrained by,
Straight-jacketed by
Power and fear,
Glory and cupidity.

Maybe heaven
Is about starting over
With a fresh deck
Where the dice aren’t loaded.
Maybe it’s helping
Where it’s most needed,
With nothing ulterior,
Truth out in the open.

Hail, Mary, full of grace. …
Hail, Caesar,
We who are about to die
Salute you.
Heil! Heil! Heil!

“Why do you hurry and turn away—
You who are warmed by the sun?

“Once a year, on a ‘solemn occasion,’
You come for public mourning.
Officers offer orisons.
Politicians ply for votes.

“And we lie here in the dank cold
In Earth’s forlorn cathedral
Year after year recalling
Gilded words,
Lips we did not kiss and love,
Eyes that did not see our eyes,
And the eyes of enemies we did not know.”

Shush!
Be quiet! Be still!

Under the stones, under the raw sod,
Worry the worms, worry the casket’s
Satin, worry the groaning Earth,
Turning around on its axis,
Five billion years and counting.

This poem, written by a long standing member of the Maoist Cultural Front, states clearly and simply what has happened to the revolution in Nepal. The poet, who must remain nameless for the time being, sent the poem to the Red Star just after the CA elections. It could not be published in the Red Star, but I believe it is worth publishing. The poem stands alone, and there is scarcely any need to mention such details such as the Peoples Liberation Army, in UN monitored cantonments, getting paid by the World Bank, nor the agreement to set up four to six SEZs (Special Economic Zones) etc. etc.

You learn that cars do somersaults
clothes turn red,
friends become statues,
bakers don’t sell bread.

You learn that the night is a gun,
that toys burn
breath can stop,
it could be your turn.

You learn:
if they send you fire
they couldn’t guess:
not just the soldier dies -
it’s you and the rest.

Nowhere to run,
nowhere to go,
nowhere to hide
in the home you know.

You learn that death isn’t life,
the air isn’t bread.

The land is for all – you have the right to be not dead.
The land is for all – you have the right to be not dead.
The land is for all – you have the right to be not dead.
The land is for all – you have the right to be not dead.

In her other hand she held the key to her grandmother’s house
But I couldn’t unlock the cell that caged her older brothers
They said, we slingshot dreams so the other side will feel our father’s presence
A craftsman
Built homes in areas where no one was building
And when he fell, he was silent
A .50 caliber bullet tore through his neck shredding his vocal cords
Too close to the wall
His hammer must have been a weapon
He must have been a weapon
Encroaching on settlement hills and demographics

So his daughter studies mathematics
Seven explosions times eight bodies
Equals four Congressional resolutions
Seven Apache helicopters times eight Palestinian villages
Equals silence and a second Nakba
Our birthrate minus their birthrate
Equals one sea and 400 villages re-erected
One state plus two peoples…and she can’t stop crying
Never knew revolution or the proper equation
Tears at the paper with her fingertips
Searching for answers
But only has teachers
Looks up to the sky and see stars of David demolishing squalor with hellfire missiles

She thinks back words and memories of his last hug before he turned and fell
Now she pumps dirty water from wells, while settlements divide and conquer
And her father’s killer sits beachfront with European vernacular
She thinks back words, while they think backwards
Of obscene notions and indigenous confusion

This our land!, she said
She’s seven years old
This our land!, she said
And she doesn’t need a history book or a schoolroom teacher
She has these walls, this sky, her refugee camp
She doesn’t know the proper equation
But she sees my dry pens
No longer waiting for my answers
Just holding her grandmother’s key…searching for ink

The hedge fund managers and CEOs
Had told their tales of financial woes
Their stories were naughty – not very nice
They told of private jets and gluttonous vice

Meanwhile on Main Street the people were sad
No one could explain why things had gotten so bad
Some said the cause was market speculation
Others said Capitalism was the right explanation

Santa’s elves should create a People’s State
End all war, poverty, and hate
A Single Payer System would keep us healthy
Enough food for all – no need to be wealthy

At the shelter, the children were snuggled in their beds
As nightmares of foreclosure danced through their heads
A holiday miracle is what we need -
On second thought – we just might have to secede

“Military-industrial”; “Humvee”;
“Bombs bursting in air”;
“Predator”; “duty … honor … country. …”

BAM! Ker-pling! Ka-boom! BAM!

Even “pride,” even “love”–
Drafted into service.
Every word has a medal
Stapled on its buttocks.
Every word’s a hero
In an honor-guard casket
With a flag drooling over.

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. …
S p l a t !

Armor-piercing bullets say,
“Accept the world as it is!”
The shock and awe of their logic
Like cancer in children’s dreams.

Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom….
BAM!

Guns talk to guns–
A crimson tete-a-tete.
Nothing succeeds like excess.
Under the din of mourning–
Litigious sirens wail.

Snap! Crackle! Pop!

There is no light except for
Laser-guided missiles … and … possibly

Whoosh!

Enhanced night-vision goggles.

The music ranged from British dance hall ditties to folk tinged ballads with some serious hard rock in between. Then there was the John Cage/Stockhausen mishmash of sound called “Revolution #9”. A counterpart to the other song titled Revolution (known as “Revolution #1”), “Revolution #9” was meant to be the chaotic sounds of revolution as conceived by John Lennon. At times reminiscent of a political protest and other times more like a football game, the entire collage reminds many listeners of a trip on LSD. “Revolution #1″, on the other hand, represented a debate going on between the Beatles, within John Lennon’s mind , and in the larger society over the merits of revolutionary change and the forms any such change should take. Chairman Mao and dogmatic cadres or Fabian-like evolutionary change spurred by a revolutionary change in consciousness. Of course, this latter possibility was also open to interpretation. Would this change in consciousness be towards the “new man” that Che Guevara wrote about or would it be the new consciousness Timothy Leary spoke of and Charles Reich would attempt to denote in his 1970 book The Greening of America?

The Beatles didn’t have the answers. Indeed, they were asking the questions like everyone else. However, in the convulsive year that was 1968, when all the pillars of what already was were being challenged, there were many who did think the Beatles had the answers. One of these was the aforementioned Charles Manson. His conclusions regarding the tunes “Helter Skelter” and “Piggies” combined with a racist and apocalyptic vision fueled an exceptionally gory spate of Hollywood murders and a particularly surreal series of spectacular trials. White Panther John Sinclair, meanwhile, wrote an open letter to John Lennon regarding the latter’s apparent hesitation regarding the political upheaval and dramatic shift to the left among the youth of the world. The letter was responded to by Lennon and was read by millions of readers in underground newspapers across the world. To be more precise, the letters concerned the single release of the song and not the album release. This difference was essential, primarily because the lyrics that read

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out

On the single version, go like this on the album version

But when you talk about destruction
Don’t you know that you can count me out (in).

The latter version obviously showed some ambivalence on the part of the Beatles (or at least John Lennon) regarding an approach that ignored the fact of the violence being used against the protesters. One other aspect of Sinclair’s argument had to do with these lyrics:

You say you’ll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it’s the institution
Well, you know
You better free you mind instead

It was Sinclair’s contention that both the institutions and one’s mind needed to be freed. Lennon eventually came around to a mode of thinking considerably closer to Sinclair’s. In fact, he helped spearhead a campaign to get Sinclair released from prison after he was sentenced to ten years for giving a narc one joint of marijuana.

But the four songs mentioned above were not the album. “Back In the USSR” poked gentle fun at the American rockers who celebrated the United States as the greatest place to be while conveniently ignoring its legacy of racism and war. “Julia” is a beautiful poem to Lennon’s mother, his first son and even Yoko Ono—the “ocean child” of the lyrics. “Blackbird” is a song about Rosa Parks and her refusal to move when ordered to do so by the realities of American apartheid. As we all know, that refusal was a pivotal movement in the struggle to rid the nation of that disgrace. George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” was inspired by an epigram of the I Ching and is one of the most beautiful songs ever composed by a Beatle. Ad infinitum. I’ll let the reader fill in the spaces regarding the rest of the selections on this double disc.

Everyone had (or has) their favorite Beatle. Mine was always John Lennon. Similarly, everyone has their favorite Beatles song(s) and album(s). Without a doubt, mine is the White Album.

I’ve worked throughout my life.
I’ve got kids and a wife
whose fate I’m now so desperately in fear of.
For sometimes factories close,
while that stack of bills just grows,
and there’s nothing you can do for God or dear love.

The mortgage payment’s short,
and my credit card report
discloses that I’ve reached a state of crisis.
We’ve got a little socked away,
but it grows smaller every day,
and I’m haunted by demands of heating prices.

There are beggars on the street
that I never thought I’d meet,
and get to know as brethren in our sorrow.
But the beads of sweat congeal
as I face the facts and feel
that that’s where we may find ourselves tomorrow.

How all this came to pass
is a question we must ask
and find an answer soon, to gain salvation.
Unless we set things right
we’ll just wander through a night
culminating in the doom of our dear nation.

Then … silence. …

You think you’re okay, but you look down and your forearm
lies in the street like a dead snake and you collapse.

You don’t think:

“It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the blasts that went off within minutes of each other, but the region is torn by dozens of militant separatist groups that have long fought the government and one another.”

This will come within minutes from those who were far away–
cool and calm analysis, almost reassuring in its syntactic coherence.

You are suddenly cold from the loss of blood
and you wonder if you will die and you cry out
in someone else’s voice underwater.
But none of the rushing men notice.

You are twenty two and you have/had a good job–
you were earnestly trying to help.
But now you think there was no point to your life,
and you remember your mother and father
whose voices are in the sirens.

You are embarrassed to have
emptied your bowels,
and your white shirt is red and muddy,
your tie is choking you
and the men and women are running wildly but slowly.

You wonder if the gleaming metal in the street
is part of the motorcycle that sheared off your arm.

Somebody squats down, peers at your face, then rushes on.

There are many people screaming now
but you can’t know if one of them is you
because nothing sounds like it used to.

You watch the sun come down into the road
and then there is only
soughing, impregnable blackness
sucking air from your lungs.

There are hard times in the offing
There is hunger on its way
For the greed of moneychangers
Left a high price we must pay.

There’s a desperation spreading
Like the one that used to be
In our God-forsaken heartland
Back in 1933.

There are eyes all blank and hollow
There are dreams that turned to dust
There’s a fear to face tomorrow
And not a thing that we can trust.

There are children in the schoolyards
Where their laughter still rings true
But their lives will soon be altered
By what a selfish few can do.

There’s a righteous anger building
Right across our tortured land
And a raised fist is the answer
For each worker’s empty hand.

We must seek our own salvation
Like they did in Dust Bowl days
One for all, and all together
With our unity to praise.

I’ll be damned if I’ll accept this
And we’ll be damned if you do too
So let’s rise and Fight the Power
And see our victory through!

I’m not selling apples, quite yet, from my door,
nor standing in breadlines–but I do feel a draft
coming on strong from a future secure
only in the sense it will be still more daft.

How did it happen? Who slept at the rudder?
Did fighting two wars fine-hone our stupidity?
Blame Congress or Wall Street or someone Down Under.
We’re caught in this maelstrom, seeking lucidity.

The best we can hope for, the best we can muster
is a Mae West tossed at a sinking Titanic.
What next? What after? More greed and more bluster?
Whatever we do, we’d better not Panic!

We were the first Israelis to come to Cairo, and one of the things we were very curious about was: how did you manage to surprise us at the beginning of the October 1973 war?

The general answered: “Instead of reading the intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.”

I reflected on these words last Wednesday, at the funeral of Mahmoud Darwish.

During the funeral ceremony in Ramallah he was referred to again and again as “the Palestinian National Poet”.

But he was much more than that. He was the embodiment of the Palestinian destiny. His personal fate coincided with the fate of his people.

He was born in al-Birwa, a village on the Acre-Safad road. As early as 900 years ago, a Persian traveler reported that he had visited this village and prostrated himself on the graves of “Esau and Simeon, may they rest in peace”. In 1931, ten years before the birth of Mahmoud, the population of the village numbered 996, of whom 92 were Christians and the rest Sunni Muslims.

On June 11, 1948, the village was captured by the Jewish forces. Its 224 houses were eradicated soon after the war, together with those of 650 other Palestinian villages. Only some cactus plants and a few ruins still testify to their past existence. The Darwish family fled just before the arrival of the troops, taking 7-year old Mahmoud with them.

Somehow, the family made their way back into what was by then Israeli territory. They were accorded the status of “present absentees” — a cunning Israeli invention. It meant that they were legal residents of Israel, but their lands were taken from them under a law that dispossessed every Arab who was not physically present in his village when it was occupied. On their land the kibbutz Yasur (belonging to the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement) and the cooperative village Ahihud were set up.

Mahmoud’s father settled in the next Arab village, Jadeidi, from where he could view his land from afar. That’s where Mahmoud grew up and where his family lives to this day.

During the first 15 years of the State of Israel, Arab citizens were subject to a “military regime” — a system of severe repression that controlled every aspect of their lives, including all their movements. An Arab was forbidden to leave his village without a special permit. Young Mahmoud Darwish violated this order several times, and whenever he was caught he went to prison. When he started to write poems, he was accused of incitement and put in “administrative detention” without trial.

At that time he wrote one of his best known poems, “Identity Card”, a poem expressing the anger of a youngster growing up under these humiliating conditions. It opens with the thunderous words: “Record: I am an Arab!”

It was during this period that I met him for the first time. He came to me with another young village man with a strong national commitment, the poet Rashid Hussein. I remember a sentence of his: “The Germans killed six million Jews, and barely six years later you made peace with them. But with us, the Jews refuse to make peace.”

He joined the Communist party, then the only party where a nationalist Arab could be active. He edited their newspapers. The party sent him to Moscow for studies, but expelled him when he decided not to come back to Israel. Instead he joined the PLO and went to Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Beirut.

It was there that I met him again, in one of the most exciting episodes of my life, when I crossed the lines in July 1982, at the height of the siege of Beirut, and met with Arafat. The Palestinian leader insisted that Mahmoud Darwish be present at this symbolic event, his first ever meeting with an Israeli. He sent somebody to call him.

His description of the siege of Beirut is one of Darwish’s most impressive works. These were the days when he became the national poet. He accompanied the Palestinian struggle, and at the sessions of the Palestinian National Council, the institution that united all parts of the Palestinian people, he electrified the hall with readings of his stirring poems.

During those years, he was very close to Arafat. While Arafat was the political leader of the Palestinian national movement, Darwish was its spiritual leader. It was he who wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the 1988 session of the National Council on the initiative of Arafat. It is very similar to the Israeli Declaration of Independence, which Darwish had learned at school.

He clearly understood its significance: by adopting this document the Palestinian parliament-in-exile accepted in practice the idea of establishing a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel, in only a part of the homeland, as proposed by Arafat.

The alliance between the two broke down when the Oslo agreement was signed. Arafat saw it as “the best agreement in the worst situation”. Darwish believed that Arafat had conceded too much. The national heart confronted the national mind. (That historical debate has still not been concluded today, after both of them have died.)

Since then Darwish lived in Paris, Amman and Ramallah — the Wandering Palestinian, who has replaced the Wandering Jew.

He did not want to be the National Poet. He did not want to be a political poet at all, but a lyrical one, a poet of love. But whenever he turned in this direction, the long arm of Palestinian fate dragged him back.

I am not qualified to judge his poems or to assess his greatness as a poet. Leading experts on the Arabic language are still bitterly quarreling among themselves about the meaning of his poems, their nuances and layers, images and allusions. He was a master of classical Arabic, and equally at home with Western and Israeli poetry. Many believe that he was the greatest Arab poet, and one of the greatest poets of our time.

His poetry enabled him to do what no one had succeeded in doing by other means: to unite all the parts of the fractured and fragmented Palestinian people — in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Israel, in the refugee camps and throughout the Diaspora. He belonged to all of them. The refugees could identify with him because he was a refugee, Israel’s Palestinian citizens could identify with him because he was one of them, and so could the inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian territories, because he was a fighter against the occupation.

This week some people of the Palestinian Authority tried to exploit him for their struggle with Hamas. I don’t think that he would have agreed. In spite of the fact that he was a totally secular Palestinian and very far from the religious world of Hamas, he expressed the feelings of all Palestinians. His poems also resonate with the soul of a member of Hamas in Gaza.

He was the poet of anger, of longing, of hope and of peace. These were the strings of his violin.

Anger about the injustice done to the Palestinian people and every Palestinian individual. Longing for “my mother’s coffee”, for his village’s olive tree, for the land of his forefathers. Hope that the conflict would come to an end. Support for peace between the two peoples, based on justice and mutual respect. In the documentary by the Israeli-French film-maker Simone Bitton, he pointed at the donkey as a symbol of the Palestinian people — a wise, patient animal that manages to survive.

He understood the nature of the conflict better than most Israelis and Palestinians. He called it “a struggle between two memories”. The Palestinian historical memory clashes with the Jewish historical memory. Peace can come about only when each side understands the memories of the other — their myths, their secret longings, their hopes and fears.

That is the meaning of the Egyptian general’s saying: poetry expresses the most profound feelings of a people. And only the understanding of these feelings can open the way for a real peace. A peace between politicians is not worth very much without a peace between the poets and the public they express. That’s why Oslo failed, and why the present so-called negotiation for a “shelf agreement” is so worthless. It has no basis in the feelings of the two peoples.

Eight years ago, then Minister of Education Yossi Sarid tried to include two poems of Darwish in the Israeli school curriculum. This caused a furor, and the Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, decided that “the Israeli public is not ready for this”. This meant, in reality, that “the Israeli public is not ready for peace.”

This may still be true. Real peace, peace between the peoples, peace between the children born this week, on the day of the funeral, in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, will only come about when Arab pupils learn the immortal poem of Chaim Nachman Bialik “The Valley of Death”, about the Kishinev pogrom, and when Israeli pupils learn the poems of Darwish about the Naqba. Yes, also the poems of anger, including the line “Go away, and take your dead with you.”

Without understanding and courageously facing the flaming anger about the Naqba and its consequences, we shall not understand the roots of the conflict and shall not be able to solve it. And as another great Palestinian man of letters, Edward Said, said: without understanding the impact of the Holocaust upon the Israeli soul, the Palestinians will not be able to deal with the Israelis.

The Poets are the marshals of the struggle between the memories, between the myths, between the traumas. We shall need them on the road to peace between the two peoples, between the two states, for building a common future.

I was not present at the state funeral arranged by the Palestinian Authority in the Mukata, so orderly, so orchestrated. I was there, two hours later, when his body was buried on a beautiful hill, overlooking the surroundings.

I was deeply impressed by the public, which gathered under the blazing sun around the wreath-covered grave and listened to the recorded voice of Mahmoud reading his poems. Those present, people of the elite and simple villagers, connected with the man in silence, in a very private communion. Despite the crowding, they opened a way for us, the Israelis, who came to pay our respects at the grave.

We bade our silent farewell to a great Palestinian, a great poet, a great human being.

Deep in the mountain
there is a creek winding back
to a green and fertile canyon
abandoned by the merchants and slavers,
producing nothing worthy of sale
except ancient trees set in glacial silt,
rooted down to middle earth.
In that forgotten place
where the creek runs cold and brilliant
She awaits the lover She lost
when the Earth shifted
and he became dupe to the engines of war.
She knew his once bright fire
and is not fooled by what he has become.
She rests in Her obscurity,
the cedars and firs Her guardians,
the rocks and flowing water
Her touch stone and glimmer
of continuing presence.

She waits the time foretold of his awakening
amidst the bloody remains
of his brutal and ignorant practice.
She knows the greater Light is needed
and She feels that stirring in Her soul,
sending a message to all Her frightened children:
“The Light is returning, the Light!
Now may he awaken and allow his love for Me
to once again fill his heart.”

The human world knows little of this prayer
and less of the sacred place where it is spoken,
yet the magic of incantation has its way;
as the wages of war diminish,
the bankruptcy and dawning light
combine to bring new awareness.
In the quietness of this sacred moment
between what was, what is and what is yet to be
the wholeness of creation takes a first new breath.

– Emily Dickinson

George Carlin’s dead!

He was a funny guy.

He’d take a truth and dance with it.
The truth was like a big rag doll.
It could be bent.
It would fall down.
He’d hold it up and pirouette.

George Carlin was on a rant.
He’d rant about the government.
He’d show the stupid grin behind
Tyranny spying on its drones.
He’d show a people
Stewing in their fear.
It was funny –
The way nightmares are funny.

George Carlin, the murderer, is dead.
He was a dangerous man.
He’d walk around with his machete swinging.
He’d macerate myths and propaganda.
You’d never know where or when he’d strike.

“I have only one life to give for my country.”
Crap!
We keep killing the same fools over and over.
We raise them to kill and be killed.
Whack!
“Government of the people, by the people
And for the people –”
Whack!
“– Shall not perish from the earth.”
Whack! Whack! Whack!
He carved it into a pretty dish.
He served it with a lot of salt.
“This is the war to end all wars!”
Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
He stood it on its big fat head.
All its shiny coins fell out.
Blood skirled over the coins.
“The only thing we have to fear –”
Whack!
“– Is fear itself.”
Whack! Whack! Whack-whack-whack!
There was nothing to fear about fear.
We could figure that out ourselves.
There was everything else to alert ourselves to–
Especially lies from those who said
We had nothing to fear but fear.
“We the People”
Whack!
“–In order to form a more perfect government …”
Whack!
Government’s always imperfect–
It deals with human beings.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
Whack!
Truth is never self-evident.
It wears a thousand transforming masks.

Reverend Carlin’s dead.
He ministered to our wounds.
He applied the balm of love and laughter.
He walked us up to the Kingdom of Light.
He dared we make ourselves free to enter.
He left smiling.

When the Pope came to America,
He met the war-criminal Bush
On a blood-stained red carpet.
He didn’t arrest the war-criminal
In the name of the People.
He didn’t arrest the war-criminal
In the name of Christ.
He gave the war criminal
A private audience
And he blessed him
And he let him kiss his ring.

Then he kissed the war-criminal’s ass
And they sang “Ave, Maria” together.
He said, “I am the Vicar of Christ on Earth
But you are the mightiest some-bitch in the world.
Christ said, ‘Render unto Caesar
The things that are Caesar’s,”
So I render unto you
Allegiance, Obedience, subservience—
So long as you don’t tax what we own.
And when it comes to your various war crimes–
I’ll turn the other cheek.”

Then the Pope went to the National Cathedral
Where he expressly did not
Ask good Catholics not to fight in illegal wars.
And when he went to Yankee Stadium,
The house that Ruth built
(No, not the Bible’s Ruth!),
He expressly did not say:
“Stop paying taxes to an illegal government
That robs from the poor to give to the rich.”
But, in spite of him not saying that,
And a hundred things like that,
60,000 Catholics waved their Bibles
And swore never to have an abortion—
Not even in the event of rape—
Because the life of an embryo
Is more precious than rubies,
And far more precious than
The life of a mother
(Or, the life of a baby
Starving in Africa or wherever).
Because it’s more important to sell corn crops
For American SUV’s than for African babies, etc., to live.

The Pope didn’t talk politics
But he did say he was sorry
For all those horny Catholic priests
Getting it on with boys and girls.
Holy Mother of God!
What a 2-billion-dollar mess
That turned out to be!

The Pope said nothing about women being ordained
And the nuns wept with joy.
He said nothing about cheap toys from China
Painted with lead, nor about workers in China
Having nothing better to do
Than dab lead paint on American toys,
Nor about outsourced jobs, nor about a capitalist system
150 years out of joint; nor did he say anything about
Healthcare, lousy schools, and 7,000 different versions
Of Law & Order propagating themselves on TV
Like so many spirochetes.

The Pope said nothing about Oprah Winfrey being
The world’s biggest bore,
Donald Trump being it’s biggest yokel-egomaniac,
Nor Rupert Murdoch being Rupert Murdoch.
He didn’t say a prayer for dead Iraqis.
He went to Ground Zero of the World Trade Center,
But he didn’t say a word about Ground Zero, Hiroshima.
Every time he didn’t say something—
The crowd went wild.

It was heart-warming to see a shepherd so beloved by his flock.
I thought of Jesus among the lepers,
Mother Theresa in the black hole of Calcutta,
Martin Luther King with the garbage-workers of Memphis,
Oscar Romero with the peasants of El Salvador,
Barefoot St. Francis embracing the moon.
But somehow the similes didn’t fit.

* Gary will be performing his work at the Yippie Museum Cafe in Greenwich Village, New York on May Day, 2008.

On the battlefields so brutal
where no angels dare to tread
where the failure of God’s love
can be measured by the dead
we must plant the seeds of peace
and tolerance instead
and not face a human future
every mortal soul should dread

Hear me now, the weary warrior,
who has always gone along
to the sound of martial music
and some flag-embracing song
It’s time to stop the sacrifice
and right this terrible wrong
Through the art of good relations
there’s a new way to be strong

I will not be filled with hatred
for the ones they demonize
I will seek to see the question
through my adversaries’ eyes
I will take a stand for brotherhood
and learn to compromise
We can build a home for justice
where truth replaces lies

See me now, the one who’s fallen,
in unnecessary war
waged in jungles and in deserts
and on every foreign shore
I am rising from the quagmire
and the bloodstained killing floor
and I vow to all who’ll listen:
I’m not marching anymore!

–Walt Whitman

(to be sung to the tune of “Hello, Dolly”)

I said hello, Dalai,
This is G.C., Dalai,
It’s so nice to have you back where you belong.
In your sarong, Dalai,
Lookin’ swell, Dalai–
You’re still glowin’, you’re still crowin’
That old feudal song.
I hear the monks prayin’
And the horns playin’
One of your anti-commie songs from way back when.
So … pack the yak, fellas,
Forget about Iraq, fellas,
Dalai’ll never go away again.

I said, hello, Dalai,
Holy-gee, Dalai,
Gere’s so nice to have you back where you belong.
Your inner light, Dalai–
Outa sight, Dalai!–
Just be happy, don’t be sappy–
We’ll all sing along.
I hear Iran prayin’
And Petraeus playin’
One of those Oprah-tappin’ tunes from way back when.
So … golly-Jeez, Dems,
Kiss the old man’s knees, Dems,
Bush’ll never go away,
Dalai’ll never go away,
Celebs will never go away again.

Just one more set, Dalai,
“Free Tibet,” Dalai,
Get it back to where it was when you were Lord.
I mean your serfs, Dalai,
On your turfs, Dalai,
When you clapped hands they’d understand
That old feudal song.
I see prayer-wheels spinnin’
And the Pope’s grinnin’
And the Wretched of the Earth can take a hike … yikes!
Golly-gee, Gere,
Mia and Clooney–all hear–
We’re sick of all you sycophants
Kissin’ the ass of hierophants,
Take your ill-earned gilt and go away.

Well, one more show, Dalai,
I can’t go, Dalai,
Till you tell me where the cash went from the C.I.A..
Was it well-spent, Dalai?
Was it leant, Dalai
To cover sub-prime mortgages in the U.S.A.?
We’re hurtin’ bad, Dalai,
It’s so sad, Dalai,
Katrina took its toll and where were you … hey?
Free Tibet–sure,
Palestine and much more,
We’re never gonna go away
We’re never gonna go away
We’re never gonna go away
Again!