truth what truth

do you really want to know the truth
really really really
the brutal truth of a killing
at the 11th hour
far from the madding crowd
or where the madding crowd was found
with fisticuffs and daggers and guns
who descended like crazed crow to carrion
who drug a mad king out of his tunnel
then pummeled his head so hard
his blood fed the desert floor
all the while laughing and shouting
allah akbar allah akbar 
and who knows what else since
most of us don't understand the language
yes sodomized punched and stabbed him
in some kind of righteous victory
psychopathic glee
then decided to shoot him
this chieftain clown king
this magnate of 40 despotic years
snuffing out the lies and the truth
boasting about it on video
how i shot him in the head and chest
when they came to bring him to justice
justice shall be mine sayeth the lord
and believing himself to be righteous
even as the clown king did before
he shot him dead but not until
the rebellion boys had had their fill
all they had raped killed and died for
to prove beyond a shadow of doubt
to record and distribute
their manhood oh yes
and the war's triumpant end
are you ready to watch it
are you ready to ask questions
to be caught in a sandtrap
to see it all through the eye of a camera
to hold back your nausea
and withhold your humanity
and afterward to ask
why men are such barbarians
why the rule of law has no more merit
and how far away from truth
we will have to get before 
it's you you you you you and you
sliced up on the hood of a truck
or thunderstruck by an aerial drone
or put in solitary for years unknown
because you are vanished
stripped bare and humiliated
tortured until you'll say anything
to stop these crazed headhunters
these masters of video war
and its main stream press surrogates
and its agent provocateurs
who have stoked your anger until
they put in your hands a gun 
in the name of your father
in the name of jesus or allah
and tell you you can't fail
they've got your back
it's the perfect plan hallelujah
are you ready really really really ready
to plunge into this illusory world
or shall you have a cigarette first
change the channel and exclaim
that they all had it coming
the truth so veiled that if you heard it
you'd declare all nations insane
i won't go there angel
i'll just leave you with these images
and believing that you are freer now
than before we killed them
as these same mocking madmen
sell you and me further down the river
all of us the 99%
like herds of cattle to slaughter
but none the wiser

Song for an Occupation

Marcos Santos for NY Daily News, Rainy Day at the Occupy Wall Street protest

I'm shuffling through a street

filled with brown fallen leaves

I'm whistling Dylan songs

and slugging eau de vie

I've got nothing but goodwill

for myself and others

And then a crowd gathers

like birds of many feathers

each with a song and then

a chorus and then

a harmonic consensus

It's late October and

the night air is chill

We will fly in spite of it

My sisters, brothers, cousins

unfurl flags like wings

to honor the birth of another

Occupy Wall Street

our little hope and change corner

where justice and peace

confront terror and greed

and every bird shall be free

"Rise up oh ye phoenix hallelujah

Our hope has never died"

Cohen - First We Take Manhattan...

...Then We Take Berlin! My vote for occupy theme song!

Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone (Welcome to the 99%...

no matter where you've fallen from...)

a woman song

Laura Nyro

time, i've almost forgotten thee

as if you or i never existed

the listless hours spent

scanning row after row

of movie covers on the roku

while my limbs are ricocheting

off the couch cushions

kicking away the blankets

then lying very still so as

not to awaken more demons

it's a time of teacups and pain meds

and i find that i'm addicted

to coffee again

just to have something warm and

flowing to fill the deep hole

the steam swirling about me now

a white fog that reminds me

that my brain is dying

and how time dies away

when the dignity of unique thought

and my passion for words has fled

as readily as i was born with it

grief knows no time

it ridicules all escape clauses

like trying to read a book

when i can't remember

the last paragraph i just read

or picking up the book

only to realize i'm reading the

same chapter for the fourth time

and i don't realize it

until i'm halfway done

and then i can't remember

what will happen next

i'm watching gods and monsters

as passionately as a child

watches her favorite movie

over and over learning

and relearning the songs

do adults do this too i wonder

as i slip into a wormhole

i'll wake up like arthur c. clarke

on a strange new planet

or rip van winkle with 20 years gone

knowing no one

time is forgetting all about me

and everything i accomplished

i think about laura nyro

and that "one child born in a

world to carry on to carry on"

like her, i only wanted freedom

i too drove away demons

and hit refresh but it's never any use

i'm left with my own woman song

and a little bit of time to forget

the treason of chronic illness

even as i will be forgotten

Deathwatch (from 1977)

C. R. W. Nevinson. A Taube. (1916-17)

Silence, amigo, men are dying.

Once a fiery cannonball, blazing missile,

now the perfect arrangement of strewn youth.

Who's today's hero?

Lenin is dead

and so are the children of this dark place.

This impermance suffices to say,

well, maybe in the next loophole,

that we all gotta go.

Saturated in the emotional counterplay, wait!

Who's dying? Not I.

Who's arguing the cause of existence?

Or its annihilation? Or its subterfuge?

The rights of these generals and undergraduate

innocents, the rights of the children and

what was once playtime...

Once a lovely view through Chicago,

now ghetto mania, ripped apart by city planners

and big rats.

Look, when you live this far out into space,

the whole scenario unfolds slowly

quietly violently until the entire population is

blinded by syphilis or controlled by

machine gun or worse:

When is the final Judgment?

Overwhelmed by hostility and a protective instinct,

the war could be won by pregnant flies.

Does God mind? Is he sinking into an old skin

or rummaging through letters we've sent him?

Does he save our prayers like birthday cars?

Mi amigo, I look at the stars

blasted in my imagination and they break apart

as real as I am sitting here,

letting the tape type and erase all this

deathwatching.

Tired, tired, tired of your slender view,

I swim to the backroom, open the window,

call your name, "Omega!"

and then reform.

Audience is not necessary for my anger,

eating leaves is natural.

Friend, friend, at best

we can move to the suburbs

or buy a condominium in Miami and

learn to speak Spanish.

I march from living room to

kitchen in search of Russian refugees, I want to

feed them and breed with them and

perhaps hear their stories.

Is anger hereditary?

If so, we'd have a wild race of

democrats.

You and me, amigo,

standing over these deceased,

we've got a long way to go.

The feeling is living in the skin, dormant

and yet,

at best we can heat ourselves on the death

fires escaping from the bloody nostrils,

and I won't cry through

the gates anymore or open my view any

wider than theirs and we may be safe

a few more years if the rats

don't find us first or God

decides to make a kind of emergency landing.

As long as he sleeps and the flag

keeps on flying, we'll be fine.

(May 30, 1977)

prophesyin'

a pinch of this
a pinch of that
and we'll all die happy
lulled to sleep with
valerian and poppy
unoxygenated
crushed between rock
and joblessness
outfoxed by a media giant
who told us
once and for all
that there was a magic bullet
called demogoguery
yet all along
it was a siren call
for sleeping pulpits
and upraised goblets
from which we drank the blood
of christiandom's nipples
but were never satisfied
no, not good to the last drop
no, not nourishing but
a sexed up huffa
huffa huffa doll
going down faster
than it ever went up

they call me the c team
curmudgeon, corpuscle
join me on the mattress
and let's get it over with
and when it's done, brother
sister, when it's done
we'll wrap ourselves up
in our magic dragon
and fall asleep
listening for a starship:
there ain't nothing
that matters here no more
nothing another puff won't cure
or riding that huffa doll
into maximum vinyl
ain't nothing nothing
NOTHING more important than
how i love you
now get on over here
to the c-side, baby
we'll put on our
crash helmets
and ride into the sunset
just nickle 'n dimin'
huffin' 'n puffin' 'til
the big one comes

♭♫ and we won't give a damn
no more ♩♪♩

Tu mourras moins bête

mais tu mourras quand même! (You'll die less stupid, but you'll die all the same!)

Part bd, part science, the book is out Sept 22, 2011. But there is also a delicious science blog by Marion Montaigne (click her name to visit!)

Two Sonnets

                          I.

I spied a girl in deep concentration
Whose very heart the stone she sat upon
Kept 'til daybreak her own fascination
And followed where a mirror could be drawn.
Her life was hidden in a bloody vessel
The rim of which its contents could not hold
And which the age of leisure could not lessen
Entrance of death in the night of her soul.
Her body fades away of clear distinction,
And sight and sound and light they all converge:
For light's sake the memory extinction;
For light's sake the power and the purge.
     Her body and her heritage have flown;
     She sailed over the valley on a stone.

                         II.

When all is said and done we sit
Like stoic pictures on the wall,
When every line is carefully writ
Lest we lose our course and fall,
Digest we fragments of the truth,
We, the dark-encountering clan
Spew our matters toward the sooth,
The celebrated birth of man.
We do not fear the awful cost,
(Like fools we hold a beggar's cup)
And covet thus the minor loss
Of time and words and death's triumph.
      Of darker poets still ye see
      They do infect the air we breathe!

                      (1980)

Paintings by Edvard Munch: A Nude and Moonlight on the Shore

New Bashung! L'homme à tête de chou

Nobody's positive that this is the cover of the new cd that finally (finally!) is coming out from Barclay/Universal but it's making the rounds. // Rien n'est certain sur la pochette mais cette image vogue sur les sites... Nov 7, 2011!
 
Oh ça me coûte le goutte-goutte/ Goûte goûte!

rain song

Crow in the Rain by Rea N. Radifer

in the rain crows go quiet

they rest on wires

ruffling first one wing

wringing the next

then sit as still as statues

until a sudden urge to float

throws them down to

eek out worms

rain has much the same

effect upon this poet

who sits non compos mentis

on her little couch-throne

eyes barely open

in a rain-soaked dumbness

the will to live gone

yet eeking out poems

postscript.

after i wrote this, i watched a little tribe of soaking wet

sparrows pecking at seeds on my patio. it was such a 

pathetic sight. it seems the heavy oregon rains are back,

along with the struggles of all us birds and bird lovers.

~lt              

winter song

Melancoly Laura by Edvard Munch (1899)

a winter song is springing

to my alerted ears

the soft roar of rain

that replenishes my tears

soaks open my heart

and takes in the winter songs

of dead and the dying poets

i wash and dress their bodies

gather the last autumn roses

then lay them on a boat
for the long journey home
standing on the shore as rain
falls down upon my head
i hope someone will care for me
as i have cared for them