Monday, April 30, 2007

A Morning After Shadows

© 30 April 2007, The Griot Poet

We have shadow warriors for shadow governments:
124-billion dollar appropriation bills sent to the hill that will surely get vetoed by our Skull and Bones pirate president…
Doesn’t count beyond the 145,000 active-duty forces the 126,000-contract mercenaries beyond our laws and given impunity…

Bechtel…
Blackwater…
Halliburton…
Kellogg, Brown and Root…

Beyond a famous SEAL, Scott Helvenston, that made his previous public appeal in exercise videos,
Finding his fiery end on a bridge over the Tigris and Euphrates,
Unlike Phoenix, at least for now, he will not rise again from the ashes…
How many have we NOT accounted for in the deplorable body count reported weekly?

Only
770 contractors killed and 7700 injured sounds like books cooked!

We voted Democrats into power on a unified anti-war stance and losses on both sides by their constituents and Republican opponents (because in graveyards, no one cares how you voted)…

Each side ciphers a bloody calculus of power looking forward to the future of 2008, and if either were to win, the midterms in 2010…

Sacrificed on the altar of democracy is the will of the governed expressed in our displeasure vetoed by a modern-day fascism Mussolini aptly described as “corporatism.”

I’m not here to advise we support third-party candidates, because they are expertly designed by the same corporate kings to drain votes: Reform/Libertarian drains Republicans, and Green Democrats

Which is just enough to keep the status-quo playing games of quid pro quo and selective amnesia regarding what the people sent them to the hill for!

I will advocate
What we the people of late has started listing ourselves as at a rate of 38 percent of the electorate:

Independent.

And I won’t be satisfied until that number is 90 percent with each majority party suddenly staggering at the notion – as I borrow from Maya Angelo – “on the pulse of some future morning” that they are in the minority!

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Question Mark

© 22 April 2007, The Griot Poet

Cho-Seung Hui at 23 had enough of reserved occidental polity.

“You can’t hear me” rang loud and clear from his murderous spree on the anniversary of Holocaust survivors, preceding Adolph Hitler’s birth by four days.

A door blocked by Professor Liviu Librescu heroically to ensure his students could flee through a second floor window avoiding another needless tragedy.

At 23, he walked under the same spell as the demoniac, dwelling among the dead, breaking fetters, possessed by Legion, the same cast ages ago at another time into a herd of swine.

If
“The joy of the LORD is our strength,”
Then
This man was void.

Since a boy,
Weakened by
Masculine expectations
Of pride, honor and strength in violent machinations:

Rambo,
Commando,
The Specialist,
The Terminator…

Manhood in America

Celebrates

“Strong and silent,”
“Big boys don’t cry,”

Congratulates

Players,
(Name-the-sport) winners

Denigrates

The emotionally expressive male

The (name-the-art) creative

As gay…

On the day he decided was his last

The die he cast in arcane numerology

Matching numerically in bodies (excluding his own)

The age of Christ at His crucifixion: 33.

He was an instant hit. The sordid deed documented in multimedia flit from web sites to print to pod cast.

This will repeat and last

Until we

Treat the mentally ill

(Not as a “question mark”), but

With the same regard

As physical maladies!

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Ishmael’s Axe

© 19 April 2007, The Griot Poet

Notes:

James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie: Character Ishmael Bush had an axe. "And the axe, which created and transformed through destruction, clears the figurative way for the deflowering of the New World."

The axe is apparently both literal and symbolic, and references are made about the character's having moved from the east to the west, creating change through the destruction (using the axe), and the like. Just a possibility: especially for someone who was an English major? (Google search)

Amazon.com review: Set in the immense landscape of the Great Plains, The Prairie (1827) addresses many questions raised by the penetration of the American west: the displacement of the Indians, the destruction of nature, and the creation of a just society both ordered and free. Natty Bumppo, a man now in the autumn of his days, is the spokesman for the conservation of the natural environment. But as his physical prowess wanes he is ultimately unable to thwart the despoilers. In this, the last in the series of five Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper resolves the issues of The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, but at the same time eloquently suggests that humility, self-control, reverence for God, and respect for nature are tragically lost on the prairie.

Poem:

In his twisted mind… he was Ishmael. As an English major that savored the macabre, he crafted a tale in blood.

An odd, occidental male, quiet and quite weird that lived more in fantasy than reality with an imaginary girlfriend named Jelly.

The fire in his belly was from a hellish psychosis that blamed everybody else for his maladies.

The carnage of 32 bodies plus his own and 22 wounded does not atone for the lack of progress in this civilized society and country on treating mental illness and pathological difficulties.

The axe in James Cooper’s The Prairie described as both “literal and symbolic.” And Cho-Seung-Hui chose a similar path, east to west using his personal axe to grind for offenses only existing in his mind and like Ishmael Bush change his landscape by carving a path of destruction.

I had to stop reading his play Richard McBeef, because his logic had no sense, dénouement or relief.

Two stalking charges and diagnosis as a “danger to himself and others” he left “bread crumbs,” clues to his personal seclusion that now gun advocates would love to use to ensure every college age student and professor is packing heat!

In this 24-hour news cycle, how many other Ishmael’s walk our streets

The seed of destruction planted firmly in the firma of their minds, how many have their own axes to grind?

Our current gun laws allowed him to purchase not one but two guns and pass a criminal background check

That currently does not vet the emotionally unstable, the mentally disturbed.

April is a month for showers that birth May’s flowers,

Orbiting the anniversary of Hitler’s birth we now have:

Columbine,
Waco,
Ruby Ridge
Oklahoma City

Spring gets kind of gritty when lives are snuffed out without impunity or regard to the great human beings these young people were becoming, or the professors that gave their lives protecting them… already were.

We answer pathologies with the ideology that violence begets peace… note its effectiveness in the so-called Middle East.

The carnage of 32 bodies plus his own and 22 wounded does not atone for the lack of progress in this civilized society and country on treating mental illness and pathological difficulties… to ignore such a responsibility goes beyond the pale.

Was 9/11 our destiny, were we fated for the belly of the beast when another pathological beast named Osama traces his own patronage to Ishmael?

Imus Mourning

© 11 April 2007, The Griot Poet

What duck-billed platypus had the temerity and demented sense to pass down the twisted, christened name of Don Imus?

Because I must admit he is literally the “pot calling the kettle black” as his own mane looks most mornings whacked, like beavers in heat used his mop for bedding, flip-flopped and tossed, tingled with static like he’d stuck his tongue in a light socket!

Yet,
I cringe at the chagrin of our two-faced outrage: 50 cent has spit worse epithets than “nappy-headed ho” or “jiggaboo,” and we get mad at Oprah because she challenges LUDACRIS to up his game and won’t allow that kind of trash on her stage or show!

We need to turn a page on this long-needed discussion on gender and race in the public square.

Thank the noble women from Rutgers University that were achieving athletically and academically for pulling the sheets off this bed of public hypocrisy (and forgiving their repentant tormenter).

Let’s not forget:

Rush Limbaugh calling Barack Obama a “Halfrican”;
Newt Gingrich: “Spanish is the language of the ghetto” (news to me);
Bill Bennett on CNN: “Aborting black babies would lower the crime rate”;
Michael Richards N-word rant

And Howard Stern, Savage, O’reilly, Scarborough and other “schlock jocks of slant TV and radio”

Dancing between their own “views” and real “news” like lying Pinocchio

Puppeteered by their corporate master Jepetto

The same CEO that controls the rap music industry with the driving beats

Hypnotizing urban and suburban kids with a love for the streets

Glamorizing a “diamond in the back, a sunroof top, digging the scene with a gangster lean”

Until living clean is perverted and obscene, and smoking blunts, performing illicit sex stunts and shooting guns at images of your own reflection a path to glory and a quest for Nirvana!

I must thank Don Imus before ending this story, his professional mishap (chronicled over the years) revealing this work so well:

If WE want to stop the hate-filled words, WE must stop using them ourselves!