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AROUND THE UGLY CAREER TRACK
dummies think me wacko:
what i want is slack,
time and space enough to go
around the ugly career track.
save me from this mundane working world,
i don t belong
processed in some corporate manner,
muffled in a chair,
shut inside a cubicle,
gasping for some air.
dummies think me wacko:
what i want is slack.
time and space enough to go
around the ugly career track.
cheeseballs at the top
treasuring control,
talk about "team players"
devoid of any soul
puppetmasters tangled
in the puppet strings they hold.
dummies think me wacko:
what i want is slack,
time and space enough to go
around the ugly career track.
- Bob Xark
___
this season of bones
the end of october drags on like a slow death
i eat sawdust in this season of bones
eat the flesh
of cancer victims
i burn down
all the indian land
and make
my great-great-grandfathers
proud
i tell you i love you
while my hands tighten
around your throat
i m addicted to my own lies
but this is nothing new
i send death threats to
holy men
and letter bombs to
starving poets
god is for the weak
words for the lost
my finger on
a soft warm trigger is
the only enlightenment
i need
- John Sweet
___
Some Days,
Stay in Bed
Sit arguing with any old
product of war-era Americy
and after listening to all
the gruff,
the "niggers" and "reds,"
the "pinkos" and "fags,"
after hearing him call
the "spades
a spade,"
and declaring shit "wrong
as two boys flicking,"
Well, it gets to be enough,
to make you get up,
believing in war, after all.
- Tony Quiroz
___
Excerpt from WHAT THIS COUNTRY HAS COME TO
how could it happen
that pioneer-do-wells
who picnicked on
the wild cat's leavings
and wore coonskin caps
could become the dumb
clucks led by their noses
like henpecked husbands
to the aroma of a bucket
of Col. Sanders Chicken
the chain of fast food
events imprisoning
their pocketbooks until
past president's faces
green with nausea
throw up to us
the trails of animals . . . .
- Arthur G. Gottlieb
___
pop up psychology
your indifferences are accurate
because you have studied
thinking that you ve learned
but your separation of parameters
is the full dismemberment
of the most vile evil reductionalism
and an absolute ignorance of Nietzsche
who wisely said that all too often
our beliefs are mutually contradictory
and what you forget is the new physics
and the old mysticism --
the anthropic actions of your prejudice
and these make you extremely dangerous
because your books sell so well, better
than the lonely words of poets
and your frank dismissal of the soul
as a bizarre matrix of neurons and environment
leads you to TV stature celebrity, as informative
and as useful as the ads that pay for you
to bring a little slice of life into this America,
this island paradise for voyeurs.
- Giovanni Malito
___
In The City
I saw a boy's frustration;
Punch at nothing, spitting hate
In the city's heat today
And a man mumbled madness
In the middle of the traffic flow.
No one really cared or understood.
They re just statistics, hopeless products
Of this meaningless maze,
Whose only goal is money;
More crumbling cripples of capitalism,
Lost in the mind.
And the homeless and the winos
Were looked on with contempt
By the pampered wearers of rosy specs.
In the loneliness of the night
Another loser soul dies in pain in the city.
- Steve Andrews
___
in the land of teenage welfare mothers
this is the sound
of words on paper
at midnight
of young women being
bled dry
by their lovers
and in california
thirty—nine suicides
are zipped into
body bags
and my job is
dull rusted metal
digging behind my eyes
but i still need
to eat
and this isn't even
an original
complaint
it's a year after
my father's death
and i think maybe i'm
still a disappointment
to him
just one more
bitter voice in
the land of teenage
welfare mothers
all i'm waiting for
is a reason to
explode
- John Sweet
___
Intimations
I hate the soldier, grim and brave
Who marches blindly toward his grave;
The prim and humble parson s wife
Who glories in her ebbing life
Assured her spot before God s throne;
I shun the lover's tender moan
Who, doting on another's heart,
Denies that even Death shall part
His earthen form of dust and bone
From that which he would call his own;
The boys and girls who laugh and play
And while the summer hours away;
The dogs and cats, the butterflies,
The endless flow of sunlit skies,
The evening chill, the morning rain,
The hours that will not come again;
Yet mostly doth my soul revile
The pleasure in the infant's smile
That perched upon his mother's knee
Perceives neither's mortality
- Michael "Pendragon" Scarpa
___
Protest Poems
I've listened to all the guilt poems,
thousands of them,
America at home screwing
its minorities
or overseas,
stomping on foreigners
in the process of
saving them from themselves.
But the guilt doesn't rest
with these screwers and stompers,
rears up in the heart of scribblers,
these sensitive spikes
waving in the wind
of our expectations,
tottering under the weight
of their words,
innocent hearts,
convicted pens,
grinning at the reception
their stuff receives . . . .
- John Grey |
