8.3.13

How We Lost the Drug War




"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth."
~ Will Rogers


Tennis shoes tied together,
pink as sin, high on a wire,
a signal for the Tricky Dick boys
building prisons for prophets,
profits for polarities,
warehouses for secret cocaine
futures, hemp rope for hangings,
skull stems hammered on,
amped up for echoes
on the dark side of our
personal moons, rigid codes,
cancer loads, injustices on loan,
cowboys as cash cows for the state,
sharks driving spaceships on wheels,
for long thin men in red beanies
surfing the parking lots
in the pre-dawn shadows
with silver flashlights
poking their hungry noses
into snow-cold super trucks and cars,
breaking into the momentary
silence of your homes,
your minds, your memories,
your anguish and your regrets,
robbing the cold, bringing the heat,
the cops needing capital who will never leave
you alone, tapping your computers and phones,
crashing through the triple-bolted door
without even a false premise
to excuse unconstitutional thrones
of mislabelled power, big pharma towers,
out of pocket by the hour, side effects
diminishing mere disease, minutes of unease,
seconds for wishing, cell phones and dirty dishes,
inquisitional questions, shouting for answers,
stun-gunning you, with photo radar gone fishing, 
fast as bad acid to put you on the floor: 
Mi Madonna, mi amore ... Master lock and more:
Saint Peter, Saint Jesus, Saint Brahma,
Saint Paul, here are your chains
when you've done nothing at all



The Librarians of Chiron

Running the place
like the see-yi-aye
she fills the Void
with restrictions,
a curious intradiction
and curio cards
of information
for my memory decay

My new library card, plastic and eternal,
is withheld, kidnapped by civilization,
held back from the fool, the child, the saint,
due to the sanctity of property over people,
information over sanity, the know-nothings
of gardens long gone, restrictions and restraint,
of the fool and the child and the saint

Sitting flat on her
officious frame
time ticking off
as the taxpayers
run on by seeking
out ruinous rumors
kept in a data-bank urn

Unlearn! Logic is a sequence
for digits on her personal
fussy budget spool
as she teaches me
her golden rule
running unevenly
for gasoline-mad marines
and payday loan Paulines
seeking out academic assignments
about banks and bombers,
bombs and U.S. Treasury robbers,
about skirts that sway, tweets
of high flying interest,
planets gone sad, asteroids
in full bloom, octopus arms,
The New York Times, O, woe,
there is a suckerfish upon the People!

Upon picture books, bar-coded,
featuring western Iowa churches
rebuilt every decade or so
by mountain-built storms
thrown east, wrecking their steeples,
by tornadoes feeding upon the People!

O, cookbook of comfort foods,
converted into kitchen-witch actions ...
O, four-year-old compact disks
emotions emo autodidactions!

Hear me. Hear Me!
The sun will come, each day ...

Hear me! Burning the shadow off
the mountain as I boil, too hot,
just too damn hot overdue
her library card denial transactions ...

And this is why the library lady
is so damn mean to me:
For if I am flesh she is bone
in a world that's all on loan



The Sniper

He lived fierce
but not long enough
to clear out
the elegance
hidden beneath
his cloud, red
as the liver,
silent as a sniper
in Laos

He used all of his hearing
on Deep Purple,
the Allman Brothers
and trains rolling
both ways along
Route 66
moving nightly, daily,
always east and west
for the resupply ...

Semper Fi! Semper Fi!
That was his religion
after the Catholic
do and die ...
His duty was his
faith and he loved
defended even his wife
in death

He lived his life,
left nothing to spare
didn't waste a thing
for the resupply

II


We made this place up. You were used,
brought here to recite Faulkner,
to champion great beasts from the sea,
thwarting the diamond-hearted vistas
of America, sold, bought, traded ...
No, another scene: Closer, a yard
of broken concrete, cowards,
laughing, chasing some old lady,
down the road ... No, closer, closer!

You called the police car. You!
Now my nerves are jangled
and the ambulance is gone
and the TV news crew
never arrived like it does
in the movies and the
music is the reason
why I cannot live
without you.

Closer? Can't be. Just can't.
I mean, it's too close, too soon.
The curtains, full of holes,
like a planetarium at mid-day
of endless siestas: My god,
you stayed here with me?
You endured this tormented
corner of trains going in both
directions and audible
rattlesnakes ripping
through the night
and automobile drivers
who just don't get it
and never will?

Don't you see who I am?
I am a man who cannot
even think about leaving
because if I do, it will be
the end of music for me
and I will have to walk down
the straight without your
sweet warm palm
inside my hand and man,
that's just to close, woman

You got no right, just no right
to shed such salty tears
on my brow as we hide,
trembling, behind walls
stained by forgotten
details, jagged angry
mad loafers who once
made these roadside
spaces home

III

In the stillness
only gamblers
light their fires

In the forests
of time, money
where no choppers go
and Captain Napalm
can't command,
the likes of me
always in demand

One-eyed fire bird arts
at the secret command
you'll feel no detection
when your dark heaven
is my cross-hair selection

Semper Fi! Semper Fi!
Nixon called
and I denied
never knew a camera crew
I fought, you died,
that's all we knew

IV

Covert, overt, bread crumbs for crows,
with vows on the dangers of falling in love
over roses and medical records,
building enemies golden bridges to escape from,
burning down the lines of supplies leading into Vietnam,
sucking in the agent orange, dirty in black and green face paint:
All of these things he did for you, or so he thought ... well, anyway,
did what he was taught, which was the honor onto itself

When rising blood bruises arose along the arm, he kept covert,
secret in the protections of you, again!
And when I took out the trash and got in the scuffle
with another of your walking wounded,
he urged on the fight like Johnny Rebel
and later we all apologized and hugged and tried to move on,
but we never did, never do, because of the ripples
now running in tsunamis across the seas

When he came home he was told to stand down
when the Hari Krishna spat on him at LAX:
Must have been like, relax, soldier, stand down, man,
just stand down, keep it quiet, to yourselves,
because it never ends ...
Never will


The'Sun King'

Should We De-Fund Congressional Health Care and Other Perks?: Most assuredly, it would even the playing field ... By Douglas McDaniel ...  http://mythvinformation.blogspot.com/2011/02/lessons-in-social-dysfunctions-101.html

Memory Echoes Ink: And now for the latest from Nickson Bluffs, Iowa, where the hum hummers at the diner are reading their latest "Chuck Grassley is Always Greener" tweets to the low-register, piped-in tune "Sweet Home Alabama" ... By Jaimie Ondrea Dunn ... 

Interview with the Mr. Nothing is Sacred Architect: "Mr. MaGoomeister, just groaned. It had been a slow starting day, due to complications due to the way one shower head lined up with the tile, considerations well beyond Mr. Nobody's talents or interest ..." By Douglas McDaniel ...

Many Days in the Life of the 'Real-Time Poet' and Other Notices ... http://www.examiner.com/places-and-faces-in-scottsdale/douglas-mcdaniel


 Other Publishing around the Realm, with a Very Nice Portrait Done on an Old French King ... This Week Under the Sun ... http://thisweekunderthesun.blogspot.com




Plowshares

Eat, breathe, sleep, dream,
so when we wake 
we can face the cold wind
burning of death,
brave and bold; 
Let those who find
the merchants of fear
behind their backs turn
to face the paranoid fringe
down to fire off memos
for one-thousand-year laws
to assuage disbelief
in the disinformation
 that we are separate, not One: 
Let the dawn rise
for the information farmers,
the witch doctors, the divine women,
the primal poets, the horsemen
melting their brands into plow shares,
the cosmic truckers and spinning ballerinas;
Lead these bright sons and daughters
to contentment beneath
the new Sun of Creation
and then, let them eat, breathe,
sleep and dream again beneath
the Old Moons of the imagination




Resolution Revolution

Nobody is going to rob me of my joy,
not even here in this deepest and coldest
of winters, this dark place of toothless
tormentors, of mouthpieces spitting teeth
of fights you lost, howling mad, decades ago,
not your droning, green or black helicopter
sad, money grabbing, cash registers of pain,
clinking in metallic perfect motormouth
mullahs of intense, sugar-free MSG,
sputtering a doormat out for me,
as if spirit were a mere rumor
created by the machine-heart
doctors on the twin days
of my Capricorn birth,
somnambulatin' an echo
of my perfect ear
for the loving
beat of your heart,
true art, not the furies
of hell-bent masters
of enclosures
cast in the bitter
pounding of hammers
intended to wound
me, not the ever-growing
radars of fear, nor
the trenchant statistic,
nor the static
clinging to your
clanking chains
of the dissenting
voice that believes
it can keep me
from speaking
love's name ...
Nope.