A Seasonal Poem:

Tis the season of giving of ye great nog of life flowing from the replenishing egg

The solstice long and spirits bright to remember stories of old

Books of knocked-up mothers covering tracks through the desert

Avoiding the patriarchal blame so that the world could collectively attempt love

In a magical vagina celebrated above all others as a sex-less male-producing engine

For time and space to collide in a boy born not of egg or sperm but heaven-dust

Beyond the stars like His atoms comingling grasping deoxyribonucleic acid

From the surrounding camel farts and vented in sand as the magical substitutes for ejaculate

Faith and subjugation of brown star-gazing royalty to bow at his non-web whitish toes twinkling

Like holy caroms of who owns the land now in the watchful eye of the cow’s anus

Milking mother’s tit with Joe Pa feeding Ma the afterbirth in a stew for a one-day flight

Through the ionosphere like his adopted progeny rocket man

Oh times of joy and herald’s hip hop across the manger’s quake

The sterilized family blade that slit the foreskin slurped by a sheep

Giving the ovine lighting-shot eyeballs and gilded wool of a kingdom made

Celebrating innocence in angelic document of myrrh over dung

For we will always remember the magical lighting sheep of the season

How great thou art bleating us into sustenance, never was there thunder from your thighs

That would fail to inseminate a ewe, lambs burst like turtles from the clutch

Spewing up from sand and finding the sea as if by your will alone

The brood is launched to play in the shark’s reef as the mad red hatter blesses them

Once a year on this night with flippers stuffed with chiseled toys of elven glory

Dreaming of the burglar hatter descending from the sky to pierce the ocean’s surface

The great giving of objects

So it is we wish happy holidays in every available instance,

To vaccinate for the loss of fear into the taboo of noncompliance

Like asking how is it going; how are you at the entry to every phone call or pizza delivery,

As link to ages of two bodies meeting in the wilderness

Will this other attack or not; take what I have or lay neutral, assess the threat

So in we are compelled to utter nonsense to demonstrate agreement to the social norm

I will not gut you for your milkshake; I will not use your purse as a piss pot

I will comply to dance the agreed upon collective to be not a wolf in a land of dogs

As it were folklore is progress failing to progress

So it is at which revolution around the sun do we abandon Odysseus at sea?

When does heaven’s ceiling uncork the bottle of human potential

To realize the difference between mythology and spirituality

That one is not dependent upon the other, while one is

So when one says happy holidays which do you refer? 

As if it is mandated that one believe in one nation or another

Partake the fruitcake for sugar-rushing comfort that the wolf no longer exists

Eyeing the nut-cracked boys and virgin teenagers lavishing the globe with a sexless bundle

Roll lightning roll

On GDP, on Pfizer, on Nixon,

On Nascar, on Sodomy, on Wal mart, on Christians

To the pasture of assertion to the meme that come one, coerce all to build the same team

In a society of faith dwindling double assertion and call it war in the pews

Younglings thinking out and displaying the signs

That this mythology ends with my generation as its time of dying

The insult to the mind is repugnance of volition

At the root one would not choose kindness if not for the decision

Of a sexless child to grow young and happily die, domineered by a book

That never mentions the lighting blasting sheep or the foreskin of power

Lying on the face to rush in followers to egg away chaos at the seams

Interconnection, empathy, love waiting down there by the train

Get on or off the tracks with Springsteen’s whores and gamblers

Tom Waits piano slow with Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilks Booth

Dylan’s Harmonica changing religions with the tune

Systematic structures which mitigate exploitation and instill mutual assurances

To deter the corruptions of human fragilities and selfishness are functions of seeing the divinity in individuals we may never actually meet, not myths or arbitrary calendar marks

happy Thursday 

Rant on North Korea in light of "The Interview"

The story of a potential North Korean hack into Sony Pictures headquartered in California in obstinacy to the movie “The Interview” reminds me of the neurosis of any oligarchy or despots wielding their power through threats or worse the systematic ignorance of the public.  I am drawn to recall quotes from Christopher Hitchens on North Korea including his poignant parallel of his own travels to the lost state to George Orwell’s 1984 in his book “Why Orwell Matters.”

The idea that Americans could feel the grip of a totalitarian state through the simple loss of a motion picture after a traditional advertising campaign to get us hot and bothered echoes the hyperbolic nature of what we consider tyranny in context to American civil liberties.  We most recently read a long-known state of torture of foreign citizens under the arm of quashing terror wherein twenty seven out of twenty seven failed to meet the threshold of preventing terror at the cost of an invaluable bank of compassion our traditional aspirations to foster patriotism once portended as a standard to combat the ilk of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. 

The neurotic state of North Korea’s leadership Hitchens describes bears witness to the nadir of human corruption by power.  It is Tolkien’s ring enlivened.  Orwell’s 1984 describes Newspeak, outlawed sex, snuffed communication, a constant eye of Big Brother, and re-education leaving with the classic scene of a cage of rats placed upon the protagonist’s head to gnaw his face only for him to sacrifice everything to escape. 

The Republican Party often ignites the fervor of the more ignorant portion of its fox den by dubbing the current president a tyrant to sustain the joint-party of obstructionism.  America is many things, but we are nowhere close to 1984.  What we have is complacency to vote against our self-interest at the lure of ungraspable wealth anesthetized by entertainment to be docile to sustain an oligarchy.  I find it ironic the loss of a small serving of that fun-time poses the question of what world we actually live in compared to the brands of lunacy in the two-countries.  There are many things in need of change in America, but we can protest or stay home.  We can not make the art, not sing, not dance, not write, not film.  Poets fight the war of consciousness.  I invite you and applaud your fight.  Make art.  Some days I find it more sad that America does not need near the level of propaganda to keep power in the same hands generation after generation. 

Quotes from Christopher Hitchens on North Korea

Quotes from Christopher Hitchens on North Korea

“I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted and where there is either too much law and order or too little.  (Worst of all, I have found, are those post-Hobbesian places-such as the Congo-where tyranny and anarchy manage a fearful symmetry, and occur simultaneously.)  One of the articles for Graydon Carter that won me the most praise was an essay titled “Visit to a Small Planet,” in which I described acquiring another identity and bribing my way into North Korea.  Every time I got a tribute to the success of this places I felt a slight access of shame, because only I could appreciate what a failure it was.  I had exerted all my slack literary muscles to evoke the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place, which is an absolutist despotism where the slaves are no longer even fed regularly (and is thus its own version of the worst of all possible worlds), but I knew with a sick certainty that I had absolutely not managed to convey to my readers anything of how it might feel to be a North Korean even for a day. Erich Fromm might perhaps have managed it: in a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.” - Christopher Hitchens Hitch-22 a memoir

“North Korea is a famine state. In the fields, you can see people picking up loose grains of rice and kernels of corn, gleaning every scrap. They look pinched and exhausted. In the few, dingy restaurants in the city, and even in the few modern hotels, you can read the Pyongyang Times through the soup, or the tea, or the coffee. Morsels of inexplicable fat or gristle are served as 'duck.' One evening I gave in and tried a bowl of dog stew, which at least tasted hearty and spicy—they wouldn't tell me the breed—but then found my appetite crucially diminished by the realization that I hadn't seen a domestic animal, not even the merest cat, in the whole time I was there.”- Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“In the closing months of the twentieth century, I contrived to get a visa for North Korea.  Often referred to as ‘the world’s last Stalinist state’, it might as easily be described as the world’s prototype Stalinist state.  Founded under the protection of Stalin and Mao, and made even more hermetic and insular by the fact of a partitioned peninsula that so to speak ‘locked it in’, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea still boasted the following features at the end of 2000.  On every public building, a huge picture of ‘The Great Leader’ Kim II Sung, the dead man who still holds the office of President in what one might therefore term a necrocracy or mausolocracy.  (All other senior posts are occupied by his son, ‘The Dear Leader’ Kim Jong Il – ‘Big Brother’ was a perversion of family values as well.) Children marched to school in formation, singing songs in praise of aforesaid Leader, compulsory wear for all citizens.  Loudspeakers and radios blasting continuous propaganda for the Leader and the Party.  A society endlessly mobilized for war, its propaganda both hysterical and in reference to foreigners and foreign powers- intensely chauvinistic and xenophobic.  Complete prohibition of any news from outside or any contact with other countries.  Absolute insistence, in all books and in all publications, on a unanimous view of a grim past, a struggling present, and a radiant future.  Repeated bulletins of absolutely false news of successful missile tests and magnificent production targets.  A pervasive atmosphere of scarcity and hunger, alleviated only by the most abysmal and limited food.  Grandiose and oppressive architecture.  A continuous stress on mass sports and mass exercise.  Apparently total repression of all matters connected to the libido.  Newspapers with no news, shops with no goods, an airport with almost no planes.  A vast nexus of tunnels underneath the capital city, connecting different Party and police and military bunkers.

There was of course, only one word for it, and it was employed by all journalists, all diplomats and all overseas visitors.  It’s the only time in my writing life when I have become tired of the term “Orwellian”.’  - Christopher Hitchens “Why Orwell Matters.”

Quotes from Jack Kornfield

Quotes from The Buddha held in A Lamp in the Darkness by Jack Kornfield

·         There is praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and disrepute.  Did you think this would not happen to you?

·         Make your mind like the earth which receives all things steadily.

·         Hold yourself as a mother holds her beloved child.

·         Who is your enemy?  Mind is your enemy.

Who is your friend?  Mind is your friend.

·         He beat me, he robbed me, he hurt me.  Abandon these thoughts.  Live in love.

·         Aging, sickness, and death are suffering.  To lose what you love is suffering. 

·         Your days pass like rainbows, like a flash of lightening like a star at dawn.  Your life is short.  How can you quarrel?

·         Care, not carelessness, is the way.

·         Live in joy, even among the troubled.

From Jack Kornfield

It’s not about you.  It’s about us.  Life is difficult for everyone.

The warrior in your heart says stand your ground.  Feel the survival of a thousand years of ancestors in your muscles and your blood.  You have all the support you need in your bones.

Loss and betrayal tear open the heart.  Look through this gate for the wisdom that lies there.

As you become intimate with your suffering your heart grows tender.

Neither avoid nor overreact.  Tend what you are given.  Stay centered in yourself. 

Be the potter of your life.  Center yourself on the wheel.  Find your still point.

Even in the ruins some new life waits to be born.  Fix the mast, or build a new ship.

It doesn’t belong to only you.  It’s the dance of conditions.  You can’t choose the music, but you can choose how you will dance.   

Pests, drought, animals, insects, no gardener gives up.  Water fertilize, plant new seeds.  Whatever you plant and tend with care will bear fruit.

Can you see how much suffering affects those around you?  Can you listen deeply with a caring and honest heart?

Imagine you needed this difficulty to learn a most important lesson.  What truth can it teach you?

Like a sandcastle all is temporary.  Build it, tend it, enjoy it, and when the times comes, let it go.

Don’t add to the problem.  Don’t add fear.  Don’t add confusion.  First take a breath.  Then simply see the situation clearly.

When your thoughts are racing and repetitive, remember no one can harm you as much as your untamed mind.  When you are struggling or in pain remember: no one can help you as much as a quiet, clear, composed mind. 

EINSTEIN: THE NEGRO QUESTION (1946)

by Albert Einstein

I am writing as one who has lived among you in America only a little more than ten years. And I am writing seriously and warningly. Many readers may ask:

"What right has he to speak about things which concern us alone, and which no newcomer should touch?"

I do not think such a standpoint is justified. One who has grown up in an environment takes much for granted. On the other hand, one who has come to this country as a mature person may have a keen eye for everything peculiar and characteristic. I believe he should speak out freely on what he sees and feels, for by so doing he may perhaps prove himself useful.

What soon makes the new arrival devoted to this country is the democratic trait among the people. I am not thinking here so much of the democratic political constitution of this country, however highly it must be praised. I am thinking of the relationship between individual people and of the attitude they maintain toward one another.

In the United States everyone feels assured of his worth as an individual. No one humbles himself before another person or class. Even the great difference in wealth, the superior power of a few, cannot undermine this healthy self-confidence and natural respect for the dignity of one's fellow-man.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the "Whites" toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward Negroes. The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.

Many a sincere person will answer: "Our attitude towards Negroes is the result of unfavorable experiences which we have had by living side by side with Negroes in this country. They are not our equals in intelligence, sense of responsibility, reliability."

I am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconception. Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man's quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. The modern prejudice against Negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition.

The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences. And yet Aristotle, one of the great Greek philosophers, declared slaves inferior beings who were justly subdued and deprived of their liberty. It is clear that he was enmeshed in a traditional prejudice from which, despite his extraordinary intellect, he could not free himself.

A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions.

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better. We must try to recognize what in our accepted tradition is damaging to our fate and dignity—and shape our lives accordingly.

I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes.

What, however, can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.

I do not believe there is a way in which this deeply entrenched evil can be quickly healed.
But until this goal is reached there is no greater satisfaction for a just and well-meaning person than the knowledge that he has devoted his best energies to the service of the good cause.

Barrel Dog - Thanksgiving 2014

American Thursday

The hotel never closes

The front doors do not have locks

Used chains during Katrina

Housekeeping, maintenance, front desk

Stay in shifts like another twenty-four of the three-sixty-five

Families banking about minimum wage

Brown skin Betty’s and Joaquin’s rolling carts

In the service elevator as I roll out for from behind my desk for paid vacation day

Vegetables tossed in olive oil and rosemary from a garden

Soil easy to grow the privilege of alkaline and sun

Contemplating how my thighs need a tan

Uncle driving to the hunting camp

Pulled over going 75 in a 50

Officer lets him off with a warning

Pulled over again going 50 in a 35

Got a ticket there, pulled his shirt up from his waistband 

Jokes, “One out of two ain’t bad”

Had one of the guns in the passenger seat

Crucifix hanging from the rearview

Dreaming of whitetails

A week ago

Poet friend says, “Yes sir”

After a strap that started, “What are you doing boy?”

Officer wants in, pulls him out

Arms spread, tucks back

Tulane sweatshirt on the passenger seat

Alumni homecoming Yulman stadium

He was architecture; I was business

Ferguson is on fire and the damn country

Is fixed to stampede Wal-Mart for the wrong reasons

Poultry and football, hands in prayer circles

Barrels and beer chasing a limping doe in the woods

Bleeding sending the Carolina Cur in a faceoff

Growling as the doe bolted because the bullet did not drop her

She ran, the man in an orange hat follows the growl of the dog

Pow! the echo waves the silence through the trees

Meat, he has a license all legal to the butcher

On the land his daddy owned, that his daddy owned

In Mississippi acreage in places where they name Wilson Road

After the family that hunts there

Acorn fed, natural, no GMO’s, no CAFO lot

Balance in the images of what one thing is and another is not

Of where land comes from when you find arrow heads in the creek bed

Of what another man’s daddy’s daddy would hear in the sound of a dog

The benefit of a clear shot

The trees not so thick

The meat so close for the taking

The branches fell at just the right angle for the sunlight

The wind in a man’s face

As the doe becomes dinner

An officer tells an architect to be careful boy

A hotel has the cleanest porcelain toilet in New Orleans

I have the privilege of a rocking chair, a sunset
The legs of the table I am blessed to raise my fork from

A full belly and a space to write
Finding thanks, appreciation, responsibility    

The Moving Debate

Maybe I am supposed to go, just not now

In this rush of motivation to flow a mortgage into a mortgage

To on some level prove to her that I am not worthless

I am daring and vibrant like the city I run towards

I am not this plastic blankness of a suburban cliché

Not wanting to be both or me or that or this

I could find rebirth in the smaller confines as if I was closer

Or would make friends with my neighbors in my hermetic routines

I hear the fires of the onions, bell peppers, and celery

Stirring the roux, timing and color to get to that perfect chocolate brown

Unsinged emulsion ready to absorb the flavors of the dish

Basking in the palette of a classical autonomy dancing in New Orleans

I cannot imagine myself living in this two-story forever

Wanting an outlet with hips and a miracle smile

To make me want to talk to a banker and shift residence

Into her, into this, either way with

This is the volley upon the field, grass testing winter’s grip

Seeded in dormancy for a string of breathing midnights

Yoga mats, dodge balls, and poetry reading in the silences

The animal farm and the Chateau D’If channeling protests and prayers

Is this the direction?  Is this the time?

Are these the words?  Who is the woman at the top of the stairs?

The pictures run like a film strip flapping upon my brow

Pictures of what home is reducing in the meditation in the sound

Of last resorts and first responders of hearing the nations gather

In ancestors calling me home

Where I am supposed to be and the timing to confront fear

Of when is enough and where is the bull waiting to gore a body in the street

Eyes blood shot and nervous that a step left will not be retraced

So that standing still is progress

Faith that in this Thanksgiving

The traveling bones will smell home 

Red Modern Panic

The outrage against Christmas in the media

The war assigned to a distancing in demographics

From the exuberant pageantry of commemorating the Claus

And the absence of cunnilingus or penetration

Is about a fear that the sheep outside the manger

Will quit buying things

That whole Magi insertion spun roulette golden bounty

Never letting out for a first mortgage or a college fund

Laid at the infant’s naked toes blown on the donkey ride home

As if His scrotum was world-leveling reciprocation

The red modern-panic is about the stock tickers

The post-Turkey store stampede video-clip news turnstile

Is to make one remember to buy

The herd is forming

Make a list, check it

The variable of co-participants stuffing receipts for you and yours

Must commiserate with them and theirs

The audacious ignominy of saying all I got you was love

I volunteered the other eleven months

Helping families of you do not know

Individuals in paying attention to emotional needs

When the moments flipped in the running waters of my consciousness

I am here, flowing, being like an open womb

Vulnerable and generous

Empathetic and incomplete

Like Christmas without a return policy

Just what I had on this no-nothing day

Willing to be embarrassed that I am apparently empty handed

To stand in this circle hold limbs and connect with you

And that which is greater than me

These newsreel gasps see the revolutionary in such blasphemy

To say not Happy Holidays but Happy Thursday

For the arbitrary rotation of a planet revolving around a gaseous orb

Celebrating the miracle that any of us are here at all

Loving you in this moment without a receipt

A Poem for Michael Brown Jr. - November 24, 2014

There are looks I know I’ll never know

Sentences I get to hear because of skin

Things elders tell me, that is just how it was

As if a change in years masking a sentiment changes the sentiment

It is the fear of men who know the system is built on bones

Bones decayed of flesh, drained of their blood

But centuries soaked you can still feel the color of the sin

That once housed them

Like when we close our eyes, in that darkness

Instead of infinite possibility, no defined lines

The lineage children of those bones know

That when eyes are closed instead of open, it is hopelessness

Hopelessness that there is a difference in what a system sees

When eyes are open that all that history pops

From the instinct of an officer of the law to how quickly

Gun down an unarmed man

It is the flinch-in like magnesium in a match primed to light

That the eyes of a father are closed to no other way to explain to his son

What can I tell you this is just how it is, will be, some iteration of always

When the colonizers took the Cherokee and the Sioux and wiped the slate

Tilled the soil and the definition of dirty hands

Grabbed into Africa for plows, the taint of that imprints behind closed eyes

Of how it was, of why, like shrapnel in a chain of the universe failing empathy

So that a soul of humanity as one whole through God

Keeps repeating the same lesson

That it is the fear in the flinch, of how one is judged in the personal sanctum

Of person, after human, after child being looked at differently with open eyes

Facing the hopelessness of what can be when they close their own

The mirror of one universal shared soul
Bleeding, calling, not to burn a building or shoot flesh

But to shed the preconceptions and regain the infiniteness 
In the darkness behind our lids

To which we were each born and tested in trials to dare see

Tested for a reason bigger than human