1776

The right amount of government —
just enough to protect freedom
without destroying it.
Just government
protects everyone’s freedom
without destroying anyone’s.

But who decides what that line is,
each with our own dispositions?
It may be up to the fate of
social evolution.
Not a satisfactory solution
for we who cannot wait.
Our lives are forfeit now
to silly fields of behavior
deemed acceptable
to the respectable
who rule the day.
While life is so disrespected,
devalued, expect those
learning their behaviors from
the crowd
to coldly laugh and kill.
If that is the will of the people …
Such death is what we freely choose.
Those who would desist
are not allowed to exist.
Instead organized Reality tv fights
define our rights.

Thirteen Wizards Shall Guide You, rotating in 7s,
to be chosen from a wizard test administered at regular intervals
to any who wish to apply.
Each wizard shall serve at his/her pleasure — until they decide to move on.
Any wizard may return by retesting and getting the highest score amongst
those currently in line at the time of a vacancy, like any other candidate.
The test to be devised by a wise pre-council to ascertain qualities of
wisdom, compassion, responsibility, integrity and clarity of communication.
The test may be reviewed and revised at any time that the full council agrees
to do so, based on evidence of better result to be gained.
The wizards do not make the laws.
Laws are made by direct democracy, after a sufficient period of debate when
an overwhelming majority of consensus seems likely.
Wizards do have veto power.
Wizards do not control the economy. That is the province of the market.
The wizards do oversee the use and conservation of common resources.
They do oversee a social infrastructure that assures everyone a comfortable, secure
livelihood. They do oversee disputes to assure that everyone is treated fairly
in the course of commerce, and in the course of community life.
They are not paid an outright salary.
They are given comfortable living conditions that their minds may be free
of personal want.

‘80s legacy

Don’t honor Bush II’s administration with undue blame.
Twas Reagan and his merry crew reset our country’s tenor.
Of course progressive opposition clamored through post-Nixon ‘70s,
hot and sure about every error.
The point is, we had that luxury. Yes, there was poverty,
discrimination,
aggregations and individuals in need; but hunger,
untreated disease, was not perceived as righteous penalty
for lack of decent wage. There was real spirit of community,
especially on the lower rungs, but noblesse oblige philanthropy still
held, built civic structures, cohesion.
Neighbors could meet upon moral foundation that made sense,
incorporated well-wrought reason.
The ‘80s brought in a different paradigm,
more wily and wild. Days of cocaine,
champagne, glamour and celebration for sweet deregulation,
when every schemer
could conjure a neo-capitalist heritage of wealth unbound.
Before it was found that
poisonous as plutonium, in the gleeful hands of elitist true believers,
just what we
were free to become.
Since then it seems proportion and balance speed spinning to demise.
Wisdom demonized in mad shrapnel’s wake of
blast-warped brains.
Games of harassing hatred and spitting disdain. Contemporary
Cassandras warned: his numbers are 666.
A man possessed by
Hollywood fantasies. America construed as big screen portrayed,
folie a deux with a nation.
And here those snowy yesteryears roost
in loyal rafters, lay out
macabre future ruled by disaffected youth.
Who is it, really, that we as a people choose to be?
Distanced from encouraging history,
adumbrated by convenient lies, what are our chances
for recovery?

Under Lying Message

Coma Baby, salivation of ubiquitous tragedy.
Petroleum under the sea
breaks surface.
Fissures exposed, eroded social contract.
Corrosive wealth.
Corrupted Earth.
Tell me a tale of forgiveness.

“Tough choices must be made!”
Congressional random phrases.

The difference between faith and bliss.
Engine of tar-black submarine,
leak of held back tears, grief of millennia.

I feel America crying.
Taste blood salt, polluted brine, dystopia.
The best hope for our regeneration,
for our continuity,
for our survival:
Let GO
Let the race be won,
the trophy given;
the competitors disperse
aglow in glory.
While we who endure
quietly, quaintly, alive to each moment,
slip between the slicks

New American Century

After Shock and Awe,
extreme conflict booms – a
“transitional time of untidiness”.

We bombed in Baghdad.
Cast crusade banner blame
as if to clean up this mess.

Common folk, forced collateral,
pay braggarts’ debts of hubris
compounded and raised.

Drunk on destruction to fell
inclusive truths of good faith,
triumph of the crazed.

Timothy McVeigh Is Still Dead

It’s morning in America
The morning of June 11, 2001
A warm and beautiful Spring day
And in Terre Haute, Indiana — a little after 7:00 am
–Timothy McVeigh is dead.
What more is there to say?
We all know the score:
Murder: 169, Mercy: 0
Antihero “bloody, but unbowed”
Silenced, but ever proud.
Ashes to scattered ashes.
Nihilist descant.

Infocontainment

Valerie Plame, Valerie Plame
The very fact that we all know your name
is a crime.
So, who’s doing time?
American splendor,
a pop carnevale.
The greedy get famous.
The poor rot in jail.
Dazzling glitter of star light
is doing its job:
distract and divide while
they rape, kill and rob.

Is that a pimple on my face?
Oh, I’m such a big disgrace!
I can’t keep it all together as I should.
The only explanation’s I’m no good.
I ask too much. I need too much.
I never learned to mind my p’s and q’s.
I didn’t toe the line and pay my dues.
Inexcusable.
Chance of viable career connection
cut to ooze beyond my puny reach,
bleed out,
annihilate.

What am I even saying?
If upright people hear, surely
despair’s a treasonous crime.
And, unlike those Whitehouse lackeys
I may well end in a cell hapless, maligned.

Live Revolution

Revolution comes when it is ready.
Sparks so many times seem sure to light, embolden change.
Only when the tinder is sufficiently arranged will fire take hold.
Blaze clear fidelity to this erupted moment, charging forward.
After images, ash flakes in settling dark, take flight,
swirl within echoed breeze.
Readiness, relative to chaos, free range of human whim.
Revolution is but a shared anthem, parts of anger and revenge,
parts of reaching toward a new religion.
In the aftermath of violent schism,
what bright vision will sustain?

Late Night Radio

Listen to the grumble like jungle drums.
Beatings of tribal pain.
Bodies bound in confusion, “No solution!
Revolution only changes the chains.
Work for wages, slaves until grave.”
Cry to Heaven; gaze in vain for Justice’s rain,
or the reign of the last of the thieves.
Listen. Those vast conspiracies we the people
choose to believe
give a glance of a chance for a grip, a foothold.
At least we perceive lies prevail, a market of fraud.
What must be sold to buy an award or trophy wife.
What kind of life do these drums applaud?
Listen. Learn to move like music. Lead in daring dance.
Or, listen; then go on dancing alone.
Or, listen, step above late hour trance;
beat true.
Let resonant rousing music call the tune.

culture wars

You lost your faith, Peter Pan.
You lost your wonder
Who told you to sell out to our father’s dream
— Amerikkka?
Where loyalty to the God Success
overrules loyalty to the tribe?
We never believed in you,
the admen laugh.
Do you laugh with them?
At the poor deluded dreamer.
Do you cry inside in anguish over
what you’ve lost?
Is any part of that dreamer still alive?
I cry for you.
I was a child
who wanted to fly.

Prophecy

And He became The One
as we all filed to point together
in His direction
anointing Him our Saviour.
We, so ready to be saved
from evil history
from slavery and hate
looking for a better fate
for our kids
(and, don’t kid yourself, ourselves).
Caught up, trapped, in the trappings
of fashion-conscious
tailored consciousness.
Drugs parade to cure us of our many flaws,
because if you’re not flawless you
haven’t got a chance
in market scored fierce competition.
A youthful escapade can ruin you
for the life
of peers’ and elders’ expectations.
And then where are you?
May as well be burning in eternal
damnation — at last.
At least Satan wants you
for your sins.
In a mythical colony,
far from their petulant King
it is said a people
fought and died, and lived again
for freedom.
It is said such pageant plays
are still performed today.
“Freedom is not Free; but paid
in blood sacrifice.” They say.
Freedom dependent on militia,
on strictly disciplined troops
firing into pregnant crowds.
Ancient sages foretold
potent prophecy.
We will not listen.
We insist on martyrdom
worshipping, as we do,
cults of murder.
This human life leads inexorably
to eternal death,
just as we demand,
when we all come together
anointing yet another One.

Western

Raw, piercing howl
promises places
not here.
Dirt-framed, sore worn tracks demark possibilities,
thankful for the regularity of commerce
allowing travelers meaning.

Caged, kept from indeterminate freedom.
Irony does not escape me.
I find comfort in harsh Revelations
babbled by a shining eyed prophet.
Mad peasants and their Lords,
progress through tribulations,
power games of strategy and fate.
Millennial betrayal. Land sold from under pensioners,
savage beating of broken laborers,
children learning their worth without a home.
Is this Almighty Covenant?
Eras, tools, enemies revise.
The game journeys on.

Rising gold Sun absorbs mist.
A righteous dawn.
The smell of enduring prairie after
the train’s rushed through.
On this side of the bars,
life is slow,
awaiting judgment.

When the national project was stolen before our horrified stares
When it became our duty to kill and destroy for the convenience of profit
When humane policy became anathema, unworthy economic drag
When the will of the gambling elite gamed the rule of law to their pocket
Did you scream so loud that bitter blood poured from your lungs?
Did you set up mourning camps to gather forces,
to train grief and rage into worthy opponents against true freedom’s foes?
Did you gaze into the cold eyes of propagandists and say “No!”?
Or did you march along in the parade, assured: “First they get theirs; then we get ours.”?

social net

Yes, of course we ought be fiscally responsible.
Yet of far more import is that we be rational.
Hyperbolic apoplectic, Apocalyptic rhetoric
reduces us from politic to stagey raving maniacs.
No need for such hysteria; learn from recent history.
The flagrant ways of LBJ, Reagan and GWB
found mitigation in administrations following.
The People, energized, expand instead of wallowing.
Exciting industries take hold, real worth — not hollow gold.

The conversation we as a nation need
is not a war of virtue versus greed
or capturing the rules to win a game
or playing catch with sophistry and shame.
We need to ask and answer in sobriety
Who we best can be as a society