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Parades of Life | Here They Come Again | Poem 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
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
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
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 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
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
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 +