Parades of Life | Here They Come Again | Poem by Ron Olsen

Parades of Life
Here They Come Again by Ron Olsen

Here they come again

As before

Always in the rear

Armed with pushcart, shovel and positive disposition

Picking up what’s left

From the horses

The elephants

A circus of joy

And the children all cheer as they pass by

The inevitable result of the parade of life

All well paid for their contribution

Considering what they do

Here they come again

As before

Not far from the rear

Armed with bullets, grenades and knives

Bringing carnage

And death

And fear

And sadness

And the children all cheer as they pass by

The inevitable result of the parade of life

All well paid for their contribution

Considering what they do

Here they come again

As before

Somewhere near the rear

Armed with verbal deflection, a clever turn of the word

The fixers

The promisers

The tellers of half-truths

The leaders

And the children all cheer as they pass by

The inevitable result of the parade of life

All well paid for their contribution

Considering what they do

Here they come again

As before

Always in the rear

Sidestepping what the pushcarts missed

Undeterred by their position

Armed with truth, curiosity and hope

The thinkers

The knowers

The bringers of light

The solution

And the children all slumber as they pass by

The inevitable result of the parade of life

The Modern Shanty Shack

shanty shack

When the U.S. decides to get tough on crime, when the U.S. decides in a right wing fervor to fight a war on drugs, the black man can’t hide. The war on drugs is a war on race and our marijuana laws have put another generation of young black men aside. The war has been waged by the political right who holds the young black man in total disrespect.
Too easy is it for the white man to drive his shiny car beside a young black man who is walking and wave this dreadlock generation off with the back of a hand as lazy and unwilling to work. Too easy is it for the police to find the easy drug on the easy suspect. Too easy is it for the white man to buy his guns at his white only gun show and too easy is it for the black man to have a felony for the same gun.
More prisons than colleges has created an easy industry around imprisoning minorities and poor whites because of a relatively harmless weed. This industry now extends it’s tendrils to the new “Probation Industry” as municipalities learn to profit from outsourced probation and sale of seized property. When police profit from arrests it creates an atmosphere based on profit, not service.
Easy police profiteering from the poor increases the probability that a young black man will have a record. In black communities it is common for black men to “be away on vacation”. The targeting of blacks has insured that many young black men can’t get that job that the white man in the shiny car thinks he’s too lazy for.
This leaves another generation of young black men disenfranchised and basically left out. The national shame is that good intentions led to sad and racist results which are denied by those with the good intentions.
The poor white is a Joe Clark also. The one thing the poor white has been given by the political right is the notion of superiority over minorities. This “gift” has caused the poor white folks to vote against their interest.

The modern shanty shack is a prison cell.

I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know | Poem by Ron Olsen

garner1

I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know
By Ron Olsen

I’ll bet you didn’t know
Heard the buzz?
It’s real life
Not just Hollywood

James Garner
One of the many
Hand in hand with Diahann Carroll
Newman, Brando, Charlton Heston
And so many more

Hand in hand
Neither cold nor dead
In the march on Washington
Three hundred thousand listening to Martin explain his dream
To move beyond the suffering, pain and indifference
And the hate
The damnable hate
Born out of the coarse repugnancy of small minds

Dear God, will it never stop?

And so they marched
All the way back in 1963
Not so long ago, really
For those who were there
For those who still care
For those who can still feel their way through the fog

Heard the buzz?
It’s real life
Not Hollywood

I’ll bet you didn’t know
Robin Williams wouldn’t deal
Unless the studio agreed to also deal with the real
To hire the homeless
Giving a new start to those with no direction
Hope to the hopeless
Home to the homeless

Saint Robin and
Sir James of the mighty heart
Real life and Hollywood too
Sometimes an unexpected confluence of decency
Reminding us of how far we have yet to go

I’ll bet you didn’t know

 

Robin Williams interviewed by Ron Olsen
Robin Williams interviewed by Ron Olsen

Solstice Neolithic by Mike Glover

Solstice Neolithic by Mike Glover
Solstice Neolithic by Mike Glover

 


fire glows, orange embers
  fixed points in sturdy earthen ice and clay,
  All cattle slaughtered, seeds in storage, an inventory
taken, registered…
  in the psychic web of genetic memory
  weighing time against itself. Absent,
the paltry fickle gods of future races, distraction
  born of comfort and idleness
  the many faces of death are stripped away, there is
  only lack, and the fear thereof
  measured mercilessly by the creep of freeze and
thaw. On pre
Galilean oracle the spectral procession
  moves predictably across the pigment and scratches in
stone
  angled light, odd precision signals
  a fixed point in the cycle of celestial synchronicity
  where hope returns.
                                                                  —Mike Glover

 To Mike’s Menu

Klondike Kate Won’t You Dance With Me

Klondike kate will you dance with me
Klondike Kate

Klondike Kate Won’t You Dance With Me

Lyrics by Simon Tween and David Michael Jackson

Melody and performance by Norman Tween (Road Dog 1)

 

Klondike Kate won’t you dance with me

prettiest legs I ever did see

We’ll get married ‘neath the Yukon sky

And we’ll strike gold, gal,  you and I

Oh don’t wait

’till it’s too late

My pretty little

pretty little Klondike Kate

I’ll sell my house

and close my store

and I’ll cross Alaska to your door

I’ll make you a star of stage and screen

Klondike Kate my beauty queen

Oh don’t wait

’till it’s too late

My pretty little

pretty little Klondike Kate

 

 

Relaxing Water Flowing and Rushing Water Videos

Relaxing Water Flowing and Rushing Videos

 

Water is a symbol of life.

We are 60-70 % water.

The water that flows was in dinosaurs, and our ancestors.

We should keep the water pure because

our fathers and mothers are flowing by.

We should have gotten off the boat on that rock and said

we have the wood, but teach us about the water.

 

 

Both videos were shot on the Stones River in Tennessee.


 

Videos courtesy of Artvilla.com

 

Wishing to Un-See | Planted | In a Theater | Audible Patience | Tightwire | Poems Valentina Cano

tightwire Poems Valentina Cano

 

 

Wishing to Un-See

The worst image in the world

seared into flesh.

It spreads like boiling oil down my skull,

to my eyes,

to my nose,

filling it with the stink

of old water drowning me

in a pool’s depth of sea.

For R

Your voice is like the cracking of glass,

like a silver key,

like sun on a patch of ice.

It is a knife,

all edges and light,

and I could let the roughest part

of my skin become a wetting stone.

Planted

It is smiling on a wooden floor,

slipping into it like warm water,

feet bucking and splintering,

mixing with the glue.

Rooting me down

into an upright, silent scream.

In a Theater

Her hand is pressed to your cheek

and the light dims around it.

A black hole in reverse.

Your skin prickles,

each follicle rising up to meet her.

And then it is just you,

rising out of the darkness

like a fog.

Audible Patience

She hums,

patient as an oyster forming her pearl.

A sibilant breath,

a sound carried and rolled

by her hands.

She waits for him

to wade by and pick her out.

Tight Wire

The balancing act between

a thought and its burning action

happens on a blade of grass.

I stand on it,

toes ragged like a skirt’s hem,

and try to ease a result out of you

without losing my panting center of gravity.

The Good Word

I am a peddler of doubt.

Spreading its word like seeds,

hanging its glittering ifs like ornaments

on days of the most neutral colors.

Him

He is drenched in light

from nowhere I can see.

The room flickers on and off

like a warped television

until all I see

is his imprint lodged

like a splinter in my eye.

 

 

 

 

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading. Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, A Narrow Fellow, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, Spark Anthology, Awaken Consciousness Magazine, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, Avalon Literary Review, Caduceus,White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I’m Wrong About the World. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Web and the Pushcart Prize.You can find her here: http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com  Google +
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