Seeds...

Amy (“Mother Dear”) and Horace Dickerson Sr. (“Paw-Paw”)

© June 6, 2024, the Griot Poet

History kissed me on the forehead,

And told me to call him “Paw-Paw,”

After I reflexively called him Reverend.

“You married my granddaughter. You’re my kid now!”

His wife, Amy, said, “Hello, darling. I’m your grandmother, Mother Dear.”

 

Both moved me because I had no experience with having living grandparents.

Both of mine were deceased before my birth.

 

The history of this reunion started with a story,

Repeated with many African American families,

The patriarch almost lost his life for the audacity of voting.

Assaulted by Klansmen,

Three years before the lynching of Emmitt Till in Mississippi.

The inspiration for the March on Washington, eight years later.

 

The cowardly Klansmen’s ancestors dressed in sheets,

Pretending to be malevolent spirits,

Attempting to frighten newly freed citizens from voting,

Helped by Poll Taxes, Constitutional Quizzes, and guessing the number of soap bubbles.

(They now use repealing parts of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and voter purging.)

Paw-Paw was assaulted,

Eleven years before the assassination of a fellow Traveling Man, Medgar Evers.

 

Both men understood their assignment from Heaven:

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

 

Left for dead by two ravenous wolves,

Saved by two other men, angels sent from Heaven,

 

The Worshipful Master understood his assignment.

Despite the protestations of his wife, Amy,

He went out of his threshold the year after his assault to vote again.

 

Because some things are [just] worth dying for.

Freedom is one of them.

Ask the Buffalo Soldiers.

Ask the Tuskegee Airmen.

Ask the young men who, 80 years ago, stormed the beaches of Normandy, France.

Ask Crispus Attucks!

 

Paw-Paw did not die, thankfully. It was not his time yet.

He entered the pantheon of unsung Civil Rights heroes.

Living long enough to be the history that kissed me on the forehead.

 

And I can today; I can tell his spirit,

I have taken the honorific “Paw-Paw” in his memory.

I’m sure Mother Dear is very happy.

 

“Honoring our heritage,

“Preserving our present,

“While building our future.”

 

We are their seeds.

Honor them accordingly.

Nihilistic Moron...

 

The conservative attorney slammed the former president as a “nihilistic moron" whose undoing could come "for something so stupid and pointless and silly." HuffPost Twitter

© June 9, 2023, the Griot Poet

The first turn of phrase I heard about Donald in front of Trump Tower was, “Oh! Do you mean ‘Dumbo Gambino?’”

 

He’s how poor men think the rich are,

And he thinks he’s a “Teflon Don” mobster.

Trump LLC was so broke,

The Apprentice show runners rented furniture,

Because his office looked like a rat-infested joke.

The Apprentice was a carefully crafted fiction,

For a failed real estate mogul trying to live up to his father’s expectations,

But that was the operative metaphor,

“Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”

Professor William T. Kelley, at Penn State’s Wharton School of Business.

“He came in with an incredible amount of arrogance like he knew everything but didn’t.”

So, a malignant narcissist,

Rejected by his family and professor,

Crafts a world away from the hurt of his bruised ego,

Where he is the hero, and he ALWAYS wins!

Even if he must lie, cheat, and steal to make it happen!

 

“Now people will say, you know, he really, in a just world, [he] would go to jail for what he did on Jan. 6, the weeks approaching Jan. 6,” [George] Conway added. “And I kind of agree with that, but for this man who is [basically] a **nihilistic moron,** for him to go to jail potentially for a long time, these Espionage Act charges bring very heavy sentences to potentially go to jail for something so pointless and silly and useless as keeping these documents is actually kind of fitting.”

 

https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-indictment-2660998395/

 

George Conway with the mic drop.

All you had to do, Sparky, was return the library books!

 

My fifth-grade librarian, Mr. Halsey, rest in peace and would have charged him eighty-five cents for each day past the return date (a bit of a grip for a 10-year-old back then).

 

“Retention of classified government documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House,

“The charges include false statements, conspiracy to obstruct, and willfully retaining documents violating the Espionage Act.”

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/trump-says-hes-been-indicted-summoned-to-federal-court-in-miami-next-week.html

 

The Presidential Records Act of 1978, amended in 2014:

 

“Establishes that Presidential records automatically transfer into the legal custody of the Archivist as soon as the President leaves office.

 

“Establishes a process by which the President may restrict, and the public may obtain access to these records after the President leaves office; specifically, the PRA allows for public access to Presidential records through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) beginning five years after the end of the Administration, but allows the President to invoke as many as six specific restrictions to public access for up to twelve years.”

 

https://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/laws/1978-act.html 

 

Nowhere in the act or the statute is a clause for telepathic declassification!

 

Because telepathy is right up there with mermaids and Bigfoot: neither exists!

 

After his indictment in West Palm Beach, Florida,

He flew back to Bedminster, New Jersey,

And did what many of his previous lawyers quit him for: He opened his fat mouth and started lying and grifting from his gullible followers.

 

His malignant narcissism doesn’t seem to realize,

Everything he says is admissible!

Jack Smith has an office clerk,

Jotting down every insane utterance,

Every “Truth Storm,” especially when he’s nervous!

 

Eighty percent of Americans think he deserves conviction for stealing classified documents,

 

Except, of course, his moronic cult members,

Who, in the height of heresy and hypocrisy,

Published “Son of Man” on Amazon, alluding that HE is the second coming!

 

News flash: He’s not!

 

He will be indicted again in Washington, DC, for inciting January 6.

He will be indicted again in Fulton County, Atlanta, Georgia, for trying to steal 11,780 votes!

 

He is a criminal and a con man.

His only skill is at picking and exploiting his marks.

He’s torn between going back to his old life as a two-bit criminal that other billionaires chuckled about,

 

In Winston-Salem, North Carolina,

My hometown,

Former New York Mayor, and presidential candidate, Mike Bloomberg was asked how he felt about two billionaires running for President in 2016,

Mike replied without skipping a beat:

“Who’s the other one?”

 

MAGA has a lot of meanings:

“Make America great again,”

First said by the Ku Klux Klan, then Ronald Reagan.

 

It also means:

Morons are governing America,

During our shared four years in hell.

Where he tax cut us into a trillion-dollar deficit and killed one million Americans during the pandemic through stupidity and incompetence,

 

It also means:

Make attorneys get attorneys,

As many are jumping off the Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane Express,

Pretty soon, all he’ll have left are public defenders, and they may not want him!

 

He’s, in southern parlance, “a HOT mess!”

A political party without a platform since 2016,

Reflexively defends him like a chorus jazz riff,

 

As a “nihilistic moron,” he takes his party of lemmings over a cliff!

And I am SO here for it!

Enigma...

 

Image Source: Twitter/Mark HarrisNYC

© December 30, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

Is George Santos’s real name even George Santos?

I’m not sure HE’S even sure!

 

We’ve been gaslit since 2015,

It was inevitable that we’d get a spate of copycat con men and women,

Who wanted to take the mantle from Jack Napier,

AKA the original name for The Joker,

And rule a world that has become Arkham Asylum.

 

He’s not Jewish: he’s “Jew-ish.”

Violating the creative copyright for the sitcom “Black-ish.”

So, let’s push the envelope (a bit):

 

He divorced a woman in 2019 before coming out: “gay-ish.”

Marjorie Taylor, “Secret Jewish Space Lasers,” supports him,

Meaning he probably gets a seat in Congress,

Because Kevin McCarthy is more of a totem than the Speaker’s gavel he hopes to grasp,

Like his clown car party,

George Santos is “Republican-ish.”

Leaving open the possibility of switching to being Independent,

A tactic now called “pulling a Kyrsten Sinema,”

 

Umair Haque opines that we’re in “the golden age of con artists,”

Desperate times call for desperate measures,

Which gives rise to snake oil salespeople,

Charlatans and hucksters who prey on the fearful,

You find them in businesspeople, social media influencers, politicians, religious figures,

Not as often in artists, comics, poets, and scientists,

One group preys on your Pollyannish frailty,

Promising Brexit is better, or to “Make America great again,”

Neither Nigel nor Boris hadn’t a clue about Brexit’s consequences,

Or Trump how to deal with the Coronavirus,

 

Artists, comics, poets, and scientists,

“Tells it like it is” so that you can deal with what’s coming,

 

Reality:

In November of 2022, we crossed the Rubicon of eight billion people on the planet,

The Earth is reaching its breaking point in sustainability,

Its spherical volume doesn’t matter, just the number of its inhabitants,

We have no superluminal warp drives in progress,

We need fewer boorish billionaires and more sharing of resources,

 

So, expect the rise of con artists,

Like Sam Bankman-Fried, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump,

Who promise you the Moon (or Mars), as part of their grift,

But don’t have a clue how to do it,

 

Through the slow-motion train wreck of Twitter,

We’re getting a clearer picture of how Martian colonies would fair if Elon managed to talk a few of us into doing it,

Bernie Madoff made the mistake of conning the obscenely rich,

These new snakes are different.

 

Howard Dean, self-described “from the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party,”

Took no big money from Wall Street like Third Way Democrats

Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin,

He raised millions in two to five-dollar increments over the Internet:

That became the framework of the grift,

 

What started on the Left as declared independence,

The Right stole and perverted,

George Santos went from being bankrupt,

To pay his campaign $700,000,

 

We are in the age of con artistry,

Phishing emails,

Vishing phone calls,

Multilevel Marketing,

Cryptocurrency,

Billion Dollar lotteries,

And “reality TV,”

 

Because the monied elites have broken society,

Racism, sexism, homophobia, and misogyny,

Are tactics by the 1%,

The actual thieves clearing the shelves of the Earth’s bounty,

And WHY you don’t have the rent,

Student loans are the only ones you can’t declare bankruptcy on,

Because Bank of America and Goldman Sacks require it!

 

They are suffering from Hoarding Disorder:

 

Selfish desires are burning like fires.

Among those who hoard the gold

As they continue to keep the people asleep

And the truth from being told

Racism and greed keep people in need

From getting what’s rightfully theirs

Cheating, stealing, and double-dealing

As they exploit the people’s fears

 

Now, Dow Jones owns the people’s homes

And all the surrounding land

Buying and selling their humble dwelling

In the name of the Master Plan.

The Last Poets, E Pluribus Unum

 

Hulu has FINALLY streamed Season 1 of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,”

A metaphor for our time,

As Dana, a reluctant time traveler, attempts to save Rufus Weylin,

Destined to rape her great-grandmother,

Making Rufus also her kindred,

And important to her existence,

Anthropology and biology say that we’re all 8 billion distant cousins,

Who has allowed some of the group to elevate their self-importance,

Species survivability is going to mandate SHARING resources,

We’re too immature for warp drive: we’d be spreading empire and war over parsecs.

 

The hoarders call themselves:

Billionaires, chiefs, Popes, priests, kings, queens, “wolves of Wall Street,” plantation owners, Sheiks, and oligarchs,

And they hire,

Willing squires,

To carry out their orders in the halls of World governments,

Don’t expect them to give a wit about democratic republics,

 

Is George Santos’s real name even George Santos?

I’m not sure HE’S even sure!

He’s either a pathological liar or a [really] good kidder,

I am sure that whatever he HAD of a soul, he’s already sold to the highest bidder!

Twit Wits...

 

House Judiciary Republicans delete ‘Kanye. Elon. Trump.’ tweet as rapper praises Hitler, Amanda Terkel, and Garrett Haake, NBC News

© December 1, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

Kanye. Elon. Trump.

A tweet sent by the House GOP and Jim Jordan,

They took it down after 56 days,

Instead of a “red (tidal) wave,”

They had a urinary tract infection,

They lost the senate,

They barely have a majority in the House,

The real Speaker will be Marjorie/Martha Wayne/Joker in the alternate DC Universe Flashpoint.

Democratic candidates took governorships,

Katie Hobbs campaigned on Twitter against the nut job Kari Lake,

And WON without a single debate,

Before Q-Elon burned it to the ground in a narcissistic collapse,

Herschel Walker keeps finding jilted lovers and spare babies,

 

Kanye,

Is the saddest of this axis of evil,

He was a lyrical genius,

Rapper and street poet,

Raised by a single mother who got her Doctorate in English,

Open about his mental health issues,

She was

Victim of a botched plastic surgery,

When she died, he lost his balance,

 

Ye went beyond “death con three,”

He said kind words about Adolf Hitler AND the Nazis,

On Alex Jones proto Fascist podcast,

Who owes a billion dollars to Sandy Hook parents,

He’s filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy,

Alex gave him a softball question: “you’re not a Nazi, are you?”

Ye swung and missed,

He said Hitler invented the microphone and highways (news flash: he didn’t),

When Dave Chappell, in his SNL stand-up, tried to cue Ye in:

“I’ve learned that there are two words that you don’t say together: ‘the,” and ‘Jews.’”

 

Q-Elon,

He reveled in the mythology of being the “Real Tony Stark,”

He’s never designed any tech in his life,

Tesla Motors,

SpaceX,

Are staffed with brilliant engineers and scientists,

Do you know how I know Elon’s not that smart?

He wants to nuke Mars to warm the planet.

Plutonium 236 in thermonuclear bombs has a half-life of 24,100 years,

Mars WILL be warm and lifeless.

When he tried to bully software developers,

At Twitter,

All of them gave their two weeks’ notice and middle fingers.

He has resurrected “Pepe the frog,”

A Nazi trope,

Posting a picture of his guns and caffeine-free Diet Coke,

He’s let Orange Juice Jones back on the platform,

Confusing “free speech” with troll cesspools

Advertisers are fleeing him,

So, in full narcissistic meltdown, he’s threatening them!

 

T-Rump can never be perceived as a loser,

Even though most successful people have had multiple failures,

They, unlike him, admitted it and LEARNED from them!

He is in the shadow of his abusive, successful father,

Who was arrested at a New York klan meeting in 1927,

Of course, “OJJ” claims he knew nothing about that,

Just like he didn’t know who David Duke was when he endorsed him,

Just like he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were,

When he said, “stand back and stand by,”

During the presidential debate,

Just like he didn’t know anything about QAnon, except that they LIKED him

Just like he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was,

A self-owned Incel that advocates for it,

Who was in Charlottesville, and on January 6,

Sitting across from him at Mar-a-Lard-o,

Saying (of Fuentes): “I like him. He gets me.”

He could have stayed a fake billionaire on “The Apprentice,”

What is my evidence he’s fake?

He once cashed a check for thirteen cents!

He’s had six bankruptcies,

No American bank will loan him money,

No one calls themselves a “stable genius,”

Unless he knows he’s a blithering idiot!

Accounting 101 evidence:

He OWES more money than he takes in,

A fake University that fleeced thousands,

Another data point:

If this narcissist was, as he said, “really rich,”

He’d wallpaper his taxes on the side of his limo and jet!

Top Secret/SCI documents were too much of a temptation for a debt-ridden kleptomaniac,

 

Kanye. Elon. Trump.

Congressional GOP Tweet deleted.

Ye tweets a swastika in a Star of David.

Elon re-kicked Ye off Twitter.

 

Yet,

This behavior is the ID of the Republican Party,

Trumpism = Fascism.

If you can’t compete democratically, you resort to violence.

There is no Republican Party,

They have no policies, principles, or framework for governing.

It’s all about rage, revenge, trending on what’s left of Twitter, and “owning the libs.”

The evidence for a dysfunctional party was in 2012, after Obama’s reelection, and on January 6, 2021.

Faced with the prospect of confronting facts that should have made them change course,

They doubled down on conspiracy theories and madness.

No longer grand, but needing viagra,

They double down in meanness,

Fascism, cruelty, weirdness,

Refusing to face reality,

And their elect-tile dysfunction,

Trolling the libs is all they live for,

They said they took “the red pill,”

But they set up a new subroutine

A Karl Rove “created reality,”

And another Matrix,

They gaslighted themselves.

 

A new definition:

The red pill makes you angry, bitter, and blissfully ignorant,

The blue pill makes you calm, generous, and wonderfully intelligent.

 

Tony Morrison said, “racism is a distraction,”

It’s a tactic the rich uses to divide the 99% into warring factions,

We should treat it like that,

Every generation, we have to fight this,

And press on for democracy, peace, and justice,

And take the wealth that is rightfully ours,

And take the gold from Pharaoh’s palace!

Stochastic Terrorism...

 

Image Source: Instagram

Also:

The stochastic terrorism against the Constitution and people by Donald Trump

Public Intellectuals

© November 1, 2022, the Griot Poet

 

John Wilkes Boothe

Read the pamphlets published by

Dixie oligarchs sent southern peasants,

Who fashioned themselves as southern gentlemen,

Like them, he believed that printed gaslighting,

The peasants took themselves

To the war front for the protection of the institution of African enslavement,

That made the plantation oligarchs wealthy in the first place,

They didn’t own the pavement they marched to war on,

All Confederate soldiers got for their troubles was: PTSD (shell shock),

And the ensign that was flown by North Virginia’s Robert E. Lee regiment,

Who told them after surrendering at Appomattox,

To “fold it up and put it away.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest pulled it out of the drawer,

He got some bed sheets,

Put some holes in them,

Set fire to crosses to terrorize freed black people,

Put together the first domestic terrorist organization,

That STILL isn’t designated as such by the United States Department of Justice!

His BUST was at the U.S. Capitol for over a century!

The oligarchs didn’t lift a finger,

Lived on to age in grace and dignity,

And still got reparations from the U.S. government for “loss of property.”

 

Like Pontius Pilate,

They could walk away from any responsibility,

Wash their hands of any guilt,

Influence violence by remote control,

As a fanatic, they launched screamed:

Sic Semper Tyranus,

Assassinating Abraham Lincoln, the 16th and first Republican President,

Now, his former party advocates it.

 

It is the formula for stochastic terrorism.

 

Stochastic terrorism (noun): the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted:

Example: The rhetoric of stochastic terrorism influenced the lone-wolf attack.

 

“Don’t retreat: RELOAD!” Sarah Palin, summoning the mentally disturbed [being] Jared Lee Loughner,

“Tiller, the Baby Killer,” Bill O’Reilly, sending Scott Roeder like a missile to his church while he served as Usher,

 

“In the old days, folks, they would take them out on a stretcher!”

“Do me a favor: [just] knock the crap out of them, will you? I promise you that I will pay your legal fees.”

“There were very fine people on BOTH sides! I know it, and YOU know it too.”

“Stand back and stand by!”

“Come to the Capitol on January 6th: it WILL be wild!”

 

They say what they WANT to happen,

 

And absolve themselves of any responsibility for the consequences.

 

In spy parlance, it’s called “plausible deniability.”

On the streets, it’s abject cowardice.

 

It is the proverbial “shouting fire in a crowded theater” where none exists,

Then, getting off sexually like a pyromaniac from the mayhem proceeding from it,

 

This poem is now my eighth piece mentioning it,

 

There’s blood on the streets, yet no laws against it,

 

227 million dollars spent over the last four years,

Denigrating Speaker Nancy Pelosi,

Engulfing her face in flames,

Calling for her execution (Marjorie Taylor, the ex-Mrs. Greene),

Shooting an AR15 in a gun range, tweeting it, with the caption: “FIRE PELOSI!”

When questioned, they’re evasive and dismissive:

“Can’t you liberals take a joke? Geez!”

 

Her possible, inarticulate successor, suggesting that he might hit her with the Speaker’s gavel,

Like John Boehner and Paul Ryan NEVER did!

Laughing it off

Deflecting the origins of the violence

To conspiracy theories about:

 

A spat between gay men (obviously, they haven’t met any: ask Lindsey Graham)

The attack was staged,

High crime in blue states (red states have the highest murder rates),

It’s “deep state,”

He overstayed his Visa (so, now we have to build a wall on the Canadian border?),

The Arizona fascist, Kari Lake, making a joke onstage,

Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, touted as the “normal republican,” doing the same,

And, the last gasp of desperate gaslighters: “he had it coming.”

 

This obfuscation is a multiverse of B.S. Mountains!

 

This madness is Karl Rove’s “created realities” on steroids!

 

The reality:

 

The 82-year-old husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi,

Grandfather and great-grandfather, “Pop” of their family,

Attacked in his household at 2:30 in the morning by David DePape,

A disturbed man, a conspiracy theorist, not a male prostitute,

The shortlist is as follows:

Breaking and entering,

Attempted murder,

Elder abuse,

And a laundry list of federal crimes to choose from,

Inspired by a Big Lie and other obfuscations,

David confessed: saying that it was a “suicide mission,”

But somehow, he was going to survive to wheel the Speaker into the Capitol,

As a warning to democrats and quite a few republicans,

And NOT get arrested,

Only if the “rule of law” is WHATABOUTISM and irrelevant.

 

These people are Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane incarnate!

It’s gone beyond the Big Lie Orange Satan sputters on podcasts,

Paul Ryan and John Boehner were driven insane and into early retirement,

By the TEA PARTY,

How do you think you’ll fair with MAGA, Kevin McCarthy?

You would be a SINO: Speaker In Name Only.

You’d be on the hook to Orange Satan and the MAGA Insanity Caucus,

You wouldn’t be able to make deals with Nancy Pelosi,

You wouldn’t pass any legislation beyond tax cuts for the wealthy,

Financial physics would send the economy crashing,

Within three months, we would be shut down because you absolutely wouldn’t know what you were doing,

Nor does your party have any cogent ideas for governing,

You would be in a state of sheer sweating, televised panic,

Nancy would have to save you from your [own] incompetence and plug the holes in the Titanic!

 

No one would watch any sporting events if they erupted in riots,

Political discourse would devolve into disgust and indifference,

 

We have two choices in this election:

 

Harmony, or dystopian fascism,

Autocracy, or federal republicanism,

Democracy, or the Wild West.

 

There’s no way back if we go over this cliff!