Tag Archives: propaganda

BABEL

BABEL

everybody talking
nobody hearing
nobody listening

not the poets
even the poets
especially
    not the poets

for where
   are the old guys, what
happened those brigades
who came to
Spain, who streamed
in to Catalonia?

those old universalists,
absurd internationalists,
comic characters in
every historical
                       drama

so beautiful their
pipe dream of comradeship,
a lovely insanity
that could not hold
yet
   might have
saved us

not that I am here to knock
the appeal of all those
Caesars and Francos
rewriting the law
from the vaunted
point of advantage
of their
    glorious, golden,
divinely ordained thrones

telling it
      like it is, like it
has to be

polishing a set of shared words
until
    their speech being
all light
and fire

burn like suns
bright beyond question

BLOTTED

BLOTTED

the lie spreads
seeps into, flows
across the page

as soon
as pen hits the page
commiting such
magnificent untruth
to screen
and paper

you need
air-tight law
to protect the lie
from truth’s
unholy power

make sure it
feels safe

has the space
required
to enact its alchemy

turning blotted
copybook

ink spilled across
so many fronts
to rivers
     oceans

of blood
      (enough
to paint the world
twice over)


WHAT THEY DO BELIEVE

WHAT THEY DO BELIEVE

your flagrant lunacy
what it led to

must, I admit,
took me by surprise

left me
speaking to the wind
trying to
survive
the freezing night

reciting
   teaching poetry
to the stones

which firmly,
politely refused
my tutelage

asking what my
Ispecies of death
might
    teach the relics, remnants
of a shrouded sky,
a destroyed world

authors of this and other
litanies of atrocity

tank shells aimed
at a
    six year
old girl

story that tells
it all
      what the rocks
and stones say

what
they do believe

YOUR TRUTH

YOUR TRUTH

for so long
I swore by your truth

you must
have laughed

saw
me coming

led me
by the nose

and as totally
misleading narratives go
yours was a
beauty

reality, truth,
totally flipped
on its head

and what power
you now marshal
what wicked schemes
imaginations
     you do recruit

to save
that lie (fountain
of ever fabrication
that flowed their after)

your
    divine line

and here, frankly, I must
confess I am
        terminally disappointed
            

WE TOO

WE TOO

we love to
play the language
game
     we two do
come at greasing
the signifier
not
from different
poles  entirely

my games with sound
and sense
more about
      foregroundimg other,
difference, perhaps
a touch
     of deviance

yours
      (if I might
proffer
this distinction) about
what is established, believed,
holy ordinary,
  sacred same

how we can get
          the narrative to
go full
python
    swallow the facts
(crush in its coils any
                truth inconvenient)

and of course, after my little
pointless spiel
       boredom, dismissal
the worst I get

the guilt that comes
              with bad poetry

not, as in your case, if I
dare suggest

         every kind of sick and
unconscionable paid-for
complicity

that
     shades us into dystopia
thence living Hell