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.”