Following this short piece is a poem I read at Occupy Boston Poetry.
As I walked into the camping area I was impressed at the organization of the occupation. The people had a logistics tent, a media tent and a staging area where they would hold meetings and entertainment.
It was truly an honor to be part of the entertainment for such a worthy cause. The crowd of occupiers was polite, good listeners and actually made up of all ages.
After I read this poem an older woman in a wheelchair asked where she could get a copy of it. I was so impressed with the fact that a woman her age in a wheel chair and on oxygen was there, I was happy to give her my reading copy of the poem that will follow this short piece.
I find it ironic that as I watch the television network news the biggest piece I heard last night was about a tobacco store that had been robbed 4 times, once before the occupation took place and three times since and the sound bite was wondering if it were the occupiers that were robbing the store. Considering that I hardly saw any smokers in the crowd, I sincerely doubt that.
I encourage everyone who lives in this area to drop in to this gentle peace-loving community. As you exit the South Station near Dewey Square, the tent community is visible and easy to access. I walked in; no one challenged my right to be there and everyone I met was friendly.
During the Depression they called the tent cities Hoovervilles. Maybe the tent cities of the occupiers can be called Bushvilles because George W. Bush sent our economy rocketing into the hole with his corporate support and never-ending wars.
Stop in and occupy for a little while. After all, YOU are one of the 99 percent. Thank you for supporting Spare Change News. We are 99 per-centers also.
What I wanted to say was
6 billion people counting down
While dead zones grow in the oceans
While people wrap Christmas presents
While people plant car bombs
While children learn to be good citizens
While some parents choose which child dies
While Bob Dylan writes ads for Victoria’s Secret
While Madonna adopts a child from Africa
While HIV spreads like an ink stain on a paper towel
While children play video games shooting greyheads
While bees, hummingbirds, and bat populations decline
While bees, hummingbirds, and bats pollinate plants
While the oceans are fished out by factory ships
While Halloween disappears
While some countries train children to kill
While some countries train children to kill
While some countries train children to kill
While my hair turns grey as I heal
While my refrigerator is humming
While someone is hunting for a scrap of food
While I lay warm in my bed
While my friends die in the shelters
While the president of the United States makes decisions
While the death count in Iraq is still growing
While I remember the same thing happened in Viet Nam
While I sit at my computer to write poetry
While my wife is hard at work
While 56% of state prisoners show symptoms of mental illness
While we spend so much money to kill
While we spend so little to heal
While I wonder why China’s Yellow River turned red
While I notice that so many factories are on river banks
While I go to the bank to get money to buy comic books
While 24% of jail inmates are psychotic
While my motorcycle sits in a shed surrounded by dead leaves
I think about all the plans I had when I was young
They were good plans and I had high hopes
Well I am registered to vote and I do that I read quite a bit and write a little more
I love my wife and say my prayers
Sometimes I just sit and think
Sometimes I try to sit and not think
Why do we always have money to kill people
Why is there never enough money to feed everyone
As I read this poem there are machines running all over the world
Once upon a time there was a man who became a poet
Words are powerful things
A bullet or a bomb can only explode one time
It’s true that many will die
But words can be used over and over
Maybe one day we will stop killing each other
Because of something someone said
I would like to be the person who says the magic words
But if it’s you who have the magic words
That will stop all the greed, killing, and cruelty
I hope you say them soon
Words are powerful things
Say them already, say them say them say them
I’ve got my ear to the ground
And the way the ground is humming
It feels like we’re running out of time.
by Marc D. Goldfinger
Marc D. Goldfinger is a formerly homeless vendor who is now housed. He can be reached at junkietroll@yahoo.com Marc also has his books on www.smashwords.net that can be down-loaded for $2.99.
photo by Richard Cambridge
Poem for Occupy: "mea culpable"
This is a poem I wrote about a homeless man dying outside of a store during the Bush Administration. As a 28 year old who tries to balance poetry and social activism with a sometimes too sharp hand, I wanted to contribute this much to the Occupy Movement as I have been nearly crippled with Lyme Disease during this one great movement of our generation.
Mid-day, heat ripples.
cicadas sing a green haze of forest
A city’s heart remains, despite the best
efforts of elected officials, in the dirt
A limp man, hair red, sticking liquor,
a Colt 40, some other canned oblivion
Ladybugs creep on his back.
and cicadas sing passing tires,
a pinhole whistle of cellphones.
Manifest, twitching, burnt
like Prometheus from the sun,
brown smeared Raider’s cap,
nicotine bone dance
a child who waits
on a parent
never to arrive.
He does not breathe
coughing in sputters,
an engine backfiring.
“Don’t touch him“,
a voice rises,
“Don’t touch him,”
for God’s sake,
don’t touch him.
“He’s been here 7 hours”
and the cicadas sing
The reels of a story
not to be seen.
What are our self, selves,
but a desertion of a child,
A betrayal of another,
our own?
“It ain’t my fault”,
his bleary companion said,
blinking a closed eye
It was, of course, all our faults
wriggling in that grass in mid-day
Mine too
John Thomas Allen is a 28 year old poet living in Albany, NY. Having traveled the world’s cities extensively, his work is an attempt to blend the seamier side of life with compassionate vision. His credits to date include publications in Tipton Poetry Journal, Flutter Poetry Journal, Sein Und Werden, Ampersand Journal, Thunder Sandwich, dream virus, Illiterate Hooligan Press, Thick With Conviction ("Best of the Net Award" nomination for a poem entitled "The Mice" contained therein), Arsenic Lobster Journal, Zygote In My Coffee, Forever Underground Magazine, Prism Quarterly, and has worked as an editor for Breath and Shadow Online, a Journal of Disability Culture, Deep Tissue Magazine, and just recently the Adirondack Review.. He currently works at an emergency aid shelter in his hometown. He would like to thank poet David Shapiro and poet Charles Bane Jr. for their indispensable advice and friendship.
Poetry submission
In Respect Of Insurgence
Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate, asks:
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?
I hear your steps nearby in the night, you say to me,
'you are a poet, save people.'
I try to imagine a world without pain,
but poets control so little, it hardly matters.
Certainly, I am only flesh and blood,
part of the incomprehensible mass,
one voice in bitter protest
delivering the world of poetry my rebellion.
I do not come to fanaticise against the ‘great’ and the ‘good’,
though I believe in no rulers, no gods.
Then, to whom shall I pay homage,
and from what maladies am I to save people –
war, torture, occupation?
You are insistent, if not in our lifetime,
then in the lives of our children,
or the lives of their children, ‘something must be done.’
So I write a poem about the history of imperialism,
but not a single soul is saved;
no words will bring back little Zainab Rasif,
or the war dead of Fallujah,
or the innocent executed at Ishaqi –
the killing does not stop or subside a little, even for poets.
My pain is written, but it is not heard
above the unashamed laughter of politicians,
or the rattle of machine gun fire in the eastern desert.
The voice inside my head is loud now,
I speak to all the broken poor
of the last departed century: my home is your home.
We have seen the many faces of cruelty,
the shootings and the torment,
we have even fallen in love along the way.
I lift my voice to you, here, on the edge of the abyss,
one voice against forgetting, against deception,
a lone voice against apathy, which is the final defeat.
Imitation of Catullus
I do not sing of the fall of the Berlin Wall
nor of the New World Order
nor of wars and the rumours of wars
nor yet of Donald Rumsfeld’s Shock and Awe.
I only sing a propos my love for a girl.
Nor was it with 24 karat gold from Murano
nor yet with Perrier-Jouet Champagne
nor with Harry Winston earrings
but only with my poems did I court her.
And I treasured her life more than my own.
Psikhushka
Anyone acquainted with the word freedom
will find nothing unexpected in its return from the dead.
Both Lavrentiy Beria and Nikita Krushchev
are expecting it outside the Kremlin Wall,
while the champions of social justice stare
in disbelief, as if the term, ‘corrective labour camp’
could still re-educate the intelligentsia,
though the Gulag is long gone into history.
So memory fades with each ringing of the clock,
and every uprising and massacre is drowned
in cries of derision from the floor. Who will hear a word
of Vorkuta or Kengir or Novocherassk –
when all the party faithful condemn
the only speaker who dares to tell the truth?
So the war for the past goes on; the struggle of man
against forgetting unravels in the meeting-room,
the lecture theatre, police cell and public bar
where brother turns against brother
in unforgettable disgrace, as once again,
and not for the last time, ‘the enemy of the people’ is named.
Anyone acquainted with the word freedom
will find nothing unexpected in its return from the dead.
In modern Europe, everyone is expecting it,
except, of course, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
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