Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Ablution of Rodney King...

Photo Credit: Law Enforcement Today
© 19 June 2012, Juneteenth collaboration: Robert Gibbons, the Griot Poet (response)


Someone said
They cleaned the pool

After Dorothy Dandridge
They changed the rule

So he could get in office

They found Emmett Till
With his face down
Chained to the bottom
Of the river

Found four little girls
After the bombs drop
After the hymns stop

How many ancestors’ cross
The river in this
Ultimate “stop-and-frisk”

Beat-down-beat
In Watts
In New Lots Avenue
On H Street
In the meat packing district
Of Columbia
In Liberty City
In Philly

Beat me down
Bust up
Beat down beat

On the mean street
On the Peachtree
In Biloxi
In Nashville

Beat up
Bust up
Shut up

A riot in the ghetto
Fire in Soweto

Bleed
Baby bleed
Baby bleed

King
Was beaten
Read all about it
Read all about it

Brutality
Brutality
Solidarity
With the KINGs

Clean out the pool
Halls and schoolyard

It’s a bleed
It’s a bleed

It’s OJ
And pimp
It’s a Simpson

Its violation
Its probation
It’s a traffic fine
It’s a life line
It’s a bleed baby:
Bleed!

*****

Brother King
Had made peace
With the Riot Within [Him]

Writing a record
Of the legacy
He wanted to be remembered for

The memory of him he
Wanted us to keep
That he was the voice
Of reason
As LA riot fires
Rose to highest pyres:

“Please…please: can we just all get along?”

We still ask that question
When the only black man elected has his
Citizenship questioned
Chimpanzee emails, watermelon patches, Al Jolson Step-n-Fetch cartoons
A faux bullet-ridden
“Outhouse”-as-bigoted-presidential-library
With faux birth certificates stamped “fake”

From birth (errs) who won’t give the myth a rest
(And fail the test questioning IF Hawaii is truly our 50th state)

With the
Equally faux graffiti:
For a good time, call Michelle; Hilary; Pelosi.

NOI did a study
That the yellow corporate journalist puppets avoid:
This president disrespected at a record pace
That probably makes “W” say: whew!

Pontius Pilate washes before the crucifixion
And I am in conundrum
Of the faces that look like mine
That would vote for a candidate
Whose religion ascribed the “Curse of Ham” to an entire ethnicity?
For a faux neutral stance in preexistence imagined

I can imagine as the android candidate
Obfuscates reality at light speed
Like his etch-a-sketch,
Secret "money is free speech"
Citizen's United-Funded campaign management
Might be hitting an eternal “reset”
Thus what he says (not what he said-said-said): is now TRUE!

Saturday, June 09, 2012

Re: BLUE SKIES, BIG SCIENCE, POETIC TECHNOLOGIES



© 7 June 2012, Thom the World Poet, © 9 June 2012, the Griot Poet (response)

I have a friend who is paid by IBM
Just to sit around and solve conundrums
He is a poet-as several other IBM ex-poets
Whose lateral emotional bases allowed flexibility?
Yet whose individuality clashed with corporate groupthink
(You cannot make soup out of ice cream-
Ideas often threaten power structures focused upon control)
Investment post September 11 is in military, police, surveillance mega-industry
All of which constitute inertial economic drags upon productive creative processes
As schools now focus more on learning to the test
Movies and music become retro /recycled clichés eating off past visions
Toffler was right/De Bono was right-to sell thought processing to Corporations
Every cliché is true. Dick Tracy wristwatches exist/as do jetpacks
They have yet to be commercially marketed. Space travel exists (privatized)
Patents for new inventions compound Jetsons/2001/Star Trek previews of the possible
Venture capital supported enterprises seek solutions/even when most investment is military
Eccentric individualism has been replaced by robotic anime-
Programmed drones kill civilians with no responsibility
Technology has no morality. Science is value free.
Economics only one factor when it comes to innovative technology
What philosophy Armageddon? Sarin, anthrax attacks? Deliberate assassinations…
STUXNET cyber-warfare, universal surveillance, secrecy and censorship-
All limit both individual freedom and initiative. New ideas required
But first we need to replace those robots and drones
With poets, artists, philosophers-free thinkers all!

*****

We forget the lesson of "Ender's Game,"
As Mazer Rackham, of bugger-kill fame
And the faux military-industrial-complex declares fair game
A sentient race we make "other" with epithet
No science used to program
- A Google translator
- Or Star Trek "universal communicator"
To see what a hive-complex species thinks,
To know how an entire entity of beings
Lived in harmony,
Before Ender advertently: made them extinct!

Seeking only to live
Beyond its planetary borders

We were attacked in the story: what for?
Because: "they hated our freedoms"?

Orson Scott Card does not explore
The myriad possible reasons Earth was assaulted
In his treatise...as a species, we’ve got a history of pissing people off!

OBL of 9/11 fame made it quite plain: it was for the children
WE bombed in Iraq between false wars
And his twisted devotion
To eye-for-eye killings of more innocents
as if that would implore
Blood to flow that had once been poured,
Sinews and skin to assemble
Upon dry bones

"La vengeance se mange très-bien froide,"

Or,

"Revenge is very good eaten cold," (Novel: Matilde, 1841)
As I compose verse to the coming sun,

I bear witness:
IT [revenge] makes a poor spark,
Or kick start
To a resurrection!