three redwhiteandgreen Palestinian flags
a British woman speaks of Israeli atrocities
a black snubnosed wolverinish dog snuffs about
a mother with a canary yellow bow toppling in her hair
cute Radical Cheerleaders, pierced and pigtailed
the final speaker is very agitated
in the center is a civil war statue of a generic statue man
"cute" a woman breathes as a gray bigeared dog with an orange scarf dawdles past
"how do we build a strategy?"
on the frieze above the cold gray steps
There is no science fiction future, no
"(A discussion of how the workers in the imperialist countries are losing the spirit of working-class internationalism due to a certain degree of complicity in the exploitation of the dependent countreis, and how this weakens the combativity of the masses in the imperialist countries, would be appropriate here; but that is a theme which goes beyond the aim of these notes.)"--Che Guevara, Man and Socialism
over-the-counter quartet
one redwhiteandblue American flag with stars
one redwhiteandblue American flag with corporate logos
one blackonlyblack flag
on the open steps of the colorado state capitol building
fresh saturday in october.
a boy wearing a leering george bush mask does a rollicking jig
the raging grannies, with flowers on their floppy hats, sing a song of peace
a poet brimming with intensity
"i want to tell those nineteen year olds about the Tet offensive"
lifts his leg to the green grass
"i don't want my son to die for corporate wealth"
"Greed!" someone in the crowd shouts
"Corporate Greed" she corrects
sunglassed cops peering into the cold wind
the sun gleams off the policeman's belt, gun, glasses
creased trousers
a hollow lone drum rhythm in the distance
with black and red striped stockings and glittering pompoms
attempt to rouse the quiet crowd
"you are my community, but i don't know most of your names"
"i want to know you people
what you're afraid of, what you believe in"
pointing his rifle at the blue sky
around it, red and white geraniums, one by one dying
a little blonde boy sits beneath the statue
gazing at his red white and blue soccer medal, turning it about
in his small white hands
"the rallies are only the beginning"
"we are not sheeple!"
overseeing the crowd
is a cowboy on his steed, an openarmed woman draped in robes of stone,
a kneeling figure with a caduceus.
there is no dialogue to be had.
They have no bodies. They are ephermeral, gathering
their being up and transplanting it
wherever they choose.
Their instinct to live
the imperative, the will to survive at all odds
is lifelike
though they have no body to maintain
legally they are “ficticious persons”
theoretically they are immortal:
they are slated for no natural death.
They can spread
their design is to spread
they are forced to spread, are judged on their ability to spread
tentacles across the planet, limitlessly
with nothing to stop them
except each other
aggressively, fiercely
battling for survival...
instinct to live.
A disease multiplies itself, spreading without morals
mutating, mobile / but at least a disease
is subject to ecological balance, to physical reality.
in the psychosphere, in the world of ideas, in marks upon a page, in the wires
subject to nothing besides their profit imperative;
their instinct to live motivating
quantification, linearity, hierarchy,
a pecking order and structure that we take for natural
but is not.
Dividing
exploiting
we live and die at their bequest (who thinks a bloody corpse in iraq
lies wretched because we wanted to spread democracy)
and if we live and die at their bequest then
the structure
already controls us.
technological domination by clunky mechanical robots: it
happens each day, as the contents of our thoughts are informed
by their media, as we live in the houses they
built and eat the food they
produce and work the jobs
they tell us to; there is no human face
behind the wheel.
“I'll still always do drugs but from now on i'm sticking to the illegal ones.” – from a 16-year-old’s account of the Dramamine experience
brightly lit aisles of the safe way
cleanly polished floors & candy store anticipation from ago
a little girl forces herself to stroll,
rolling the word
diphenhydramine
around in her mouth
diphenhydramine: twelve tablets later she
cannot talk the words
caught cotton in her throat and thirtyfour tablets later
a sterile room of emergence
with bright lights and cleanly polished floors
waits for her, an end
to ennui.
“DXM is fascinating, but the medium makes me absolutely nauseous…” – a 17-year old girl reflects on robotripping
o cherry slave
spinning in your dextromethorphan dream,
the cerise disorienting joy of it all coating
your mouth, lulling
your thickened tongue, the flanging
lights plunging
you into the wailing confusion of self annihilation and
shamanic rebirth.
ego death in an eight ounce bottle,
available over the counter at a drug
store near you.
disassociate from this:
your monochromatic, flavorless
idle pink-colour clouded
cul-de-sac existence.
"The body asks you to do it. I need it. I always have pain. My kidneys always hurt. The glue helps stop the pain in my stomach." – a 14-year-old glue sniffer on the streets of San Salvador
5 gallon pails and 55 gallon drums
shipped to the cobbler;
who bottles it up in baby food jars and sells it
to the dying class.
Resistoleros: when you live under
an oxcart and you swallow
diesel fuel for a living,
shooting flames from your mouth for a few lempiras a night
in a thirdworld theater of survival…
then the
glue eases
the scathing sores in your stomach, keeps
the whole mess sticking
together for another painful night
of toxicity,
formulas conceived in corporate america,
ready to null the pain of
the dying class.
“We survived because of caribou. There was no such thing as stores... We never had bad medicine because there was no bad medicine in the country… We don't know how to live like you.” – Innu woman
NATO jets sweep across the ground
training for some theoretical war, below lie the
lands
where the Innu once hunted
tracking the caribou
through the Newfoundland wild.
red eyes brimming with pus and bloody
noses haunted with mucus, the boys and girls
of the lost Innu tribe
walk the cold roads with their
heads in plastic bags,
soaking numbness from our fuel.
the caribou are dead.
their tribe knows not what to do,
caught in some grey Canadian ennui
they inhale our toxicity.
In their language,
“Innu” simply means “human being”.
(concerned parents of America it is not your fault
that your children are alienated and bored in your suburban homes it is not your fault
that the companies you work for export their poisons across the globe it is not your fault
that your ancestors displaced living human beings it is not your fault
that you consume the planet’s resources and leave toxins in your wake it is not your fault.)