Justice

Prisoners:

There are thousands of remote islands in the world, with food, water, and the basic necessities of life. Bare, harsh, vital. I was reading of a prisoner in solitary confinement for 24 years in NY state, I am glad they keep him apart from us, but $75,000 a year or more to keep this person locked up for the rest of his life is not a prudent cost. Instead, give him the choice: Death, confinement, or an island in the Pacific. On the island in the Pacific a thousand miles from civilization, he can fish, eat coconuts, and live out his life at no further cost to the state. What would he choose: The caged savage? The primitive? Or eternity? I would also like to take all the CEOs who have raped and looted their companies: Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Enron, and the War Profiteers like Halliburton,Bechtel, etc., and also place them on that same island. The prisoner and the CEO’s would make make perfect company; though I am a little concerned about the prisoners safety.

$700 Billion Pig Fest Wall Street

Strange dreams last night:

All these fat cats at
Lehman Brothers,
Goldman Sachs,
Merrill Lynch, etc..
all the corporate
gangsters who are
knee deep in the
muck of this latest
corporate debacle

are shackled together
in old fashioned
stocks in front of
Wall Street.Yes,
like in Colonial
times, don’t bother
with prison so
they can hide
away in shame.

Men and women
of Enron, CEOS of
Exxon, Haliburton
and so on all lined
up to join them in
the stocks.

Fat white cats shivering
naked in the autumn
air, arrayed in a circle
around Wall Street,
while the cold wind
blows off the Hudson.
Everyone who lost
money in the stock
market could drop
garbage on their heads
or simple piss on
them.
At feeding time,
long pig troughs so that
the fat cat CEOs
would be cheek and
jowl to munch the slop.

I hope the pigs don’t
get sick from the
contagion.

Some Outrage for the Genocide in Palestine?

It is strange all of this rancor against President of Iran Ahmadinejad, which may be deserved, but at the same breath do we talk about the genocide of the Palestinians, their imprisonment in the walled ghettos of the West Bank, and their isolation in Gaza? As reported on the BBC on 24 September, international communities have condemned Israeli Settlers who illegally have and now continue to take the land of Palestinians. Last night videos of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians homes while the IDF (Israel Army) stood by.
I would hope that people save some of their outrage against the President of Iran for the genocide against the Palestinians. I really do not see much difference between the Israeli government actions against the people of Gaza and West Bank, and the actions imposed on my Jewish ancestors during and before WWII. For thousands of years, we Jews were persecuted, driven out of our homes, and ironically, thrived in the Islamic countries. We were welcomed. While in Europe to Be a Jew was cause for murder. The holocaust in Palestine is happening before our eyes
Perhaps, when there is a true independent state for Palestinians and the means to genuinely survive, we will then remove any rationale for someone like Ahmadinejad. Iran had a democratically elected President in l954 who was overthrown by the US. The Shah, a puppet leader, created a surrogate US colony, it was a police state that ruled for decades that persecuted and killed its own people. It is sad that when a reformist government was in power before Ahmadinejad, the United States refused to recognize and make rapprochement. When this last invasion of Iraq took place, the Iran government made a public statement that all US fliers if they landed in Iran would be repatriated to the US. Within a week Bush declared Iran as an "axis of evil." This eventually lead to a more hard line regime.
The US Government who is one of the worst propagators of state sponsored terrorism is condemning Iran? The US? Guantanamo? Abu Ghraib? Renditions? The deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian deaths, responsible for the $4 billion dollars in military aid to Israel that supports the genocide of Palestinians, and people wonder someone like Ahmadinejad has any legitimacy?
One can understand why Iran might be disappointed in the West. Hey, maybe if we get rid of our own version of Ahmadinejad, GW BUSH, and replace it with someone who is reasonably intelligent, Obama, then maybe we can have genuine progress with Iran.
Let's save some outrage for the genocide against the Palestinians.

Walking the Black Line: The N Thing and Obama

Walking the Black Line: That N thing and Obama

In the movie Blazing Saddles Mel Brooks lays the racist arguments right on the line. The Black sheriff is riding into save a town that is being threatened by outlaws. The people are excited and then they find the “The Sheriff is a N…” Bells ring and no one can hear it. When he finally does arrive, they want to shoot him! Though it appears he is the only one who can save the town, they are more concerned that he is a, N… .

The NY Times recently wrote of Obama’s debating style as, “Cool, detached, and intellectual.” After eight years of a president who can barely speak a cogent sentence; an articulate and intelligent person should be a welcome change, but this is America in 2008: The sound byte reigns supreme, and the Republican convention, like the Nuremberg rally, is filled with obeisant patriotic chants, in this case, USA, USA. As Einstein said about blind patriotism, any one who marches in a parade denies the necessity of the development of the cerebral cortex. In this election, it is imperative, though unlikely; we will get to a substantive debate about the future of the USA. In the meantime, Russian warships are challenging the Monroe doctrine, and the US like Rome in the late 2nd century is watching its world power shrink. Welcome to the 21st Century.

People are primitive pools of emotions, passions, and tribalism. Most of humanity’s march over some 4 million years since we bid farewell to our primate first cousins, has been a brutal struggle for survival, us versus them, tribe against tribe. Despite some rudimentary signs of progress, humans have not really evolved in the fundamental way that will ensure long term survival. Wars, tribalism, us versus them, ideologically driven… Nigger, spic, honkie, redneck, fascist, and so on. We define: other and like us: Friend or foe.

Barrack Obama blows the conventional paradigms out of the water and yet through the lens of red, white, and blue – and too many, we are stuck on the N thing. Yes, the sheriff may be black, but the question is: Does he have the energy, commitment, the intelligence, integrity, and character to lead the nation? The answer is yes. If we can get past the subtext about race and look at the man, we will not see a color blind or white washed version; we will see the full spectrum of the man. A man who is white, black, African, mid western, urban, grew up poor and middle-class, earned his way through college, who forsook a very lucrative law career to be a community organizer, and though he didn’t fight in the trenches, he fought in a more dangerous place, the Illinois Statehouse.

Yes, the Sheriff may be black, but he’s our only choice.

Namaya@vermontpoet.com

JaZ in O positive:

Murder in the Cathedral of Love

“The music business will kill ya’!” said Jack.

“And how!” Said I.

In the cathedral of jazz the cacophony of sounds rolled into the void. A shiftless dreaming F minor flat, boozy, flabby with cirrhosis and sclerotic eyes, peering down the long tunnel where sounds disappeared into a melodic introspection, was lying in a nest of music manuscripts tossed out from the publisher.

It was strange, she said, that the scale disappeared into an alley that was marked with the blood hand print of a C flat minor on a white basement wall next to the Cathedral of love.

Footstep echoed like lilac fragranced notes faltering in an arpeggio. It is always the top of the note that contains the essence of the fragrance, in the middle is the melody, and along the river by the muddy shores is the bass walking line. Bones ossified peer upwards dreaming of the memory of their lives.

Along the river banks in the thick estuaries that lead from the Thames towards Kent are the bones of the martyrs who dream of redemption.

Marlow was on the case, a private dick on a public recollection.

Fragments of lies littered the sidewalk and when the janitor sprayed them with the hose, the small particles of blood tenaciously clung to the calcified particulate exoskeletons. How many corpses of bivalves make up a city block?

Ghosts, permeate every pore of memory? said Mister Jones bojangle jingling a jig of jonesed blues.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

He took a swig from the corn liquor jug and with the sun burning across the sky in an orange vengeance he drew up a glass syringe and spiked himself.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

Christ that old offay boy died only once, I die every day for you! Said Jones as the blood rolled down his arm and coagulated every so slowly. It looked like a map of the Upper Nile.

Jack wiped off the trumpet and declared, Jazz in a key of O positive. Jazz is a universal donor. Ain’t it? Or is it huffing and puffing, flaunting itself in drag, willing to provide fellatio to the string section while the jealous cuckold is simmering in the bar trolling for young beauties. It is j A Z after all. Inflagrante! Heroin addicts, pimps, whores, and saints of the mortal coil.
Saints?

Yes, you wouldn’t expect knowing redemption from a satyr posing as a monk. That is why there is Murder in the Cathedral of Love. I said

Mister Jones nodded off and drooled while humming on his Jew’s harp.

A fat sax man in a dipsomaniac roll kept spinning b flat minor rifts up the tube of the drainpipe and fell on the ear of the widow Rosalita an old prostitute whose eyes were devoured by syphilis. She sat by the window with her rosary beads and prayed for the souls of her lovers while serenaded by the bourbon soaked blues.

Sonnets are weavings of time, fourteen lines of ecstasy cut with vitamin K, strands of indigo woven into the coarse lilac of memory as the song of a grey thrush on a June morning in Vermont thrills to the instigation of love. A window to the meadow is thrown wide open. Each memory of love, sex, indiscretion and redemption cherished.

How many memories does a syphilitic spirochete devour before it explodes? How many memories are stored in its cells and fibers before it explodes in a rapturous orgasm?

To be quaint: Is there a price for love?

The quick running steps of memory disappear into the vault of time, as seconds vanish in a fugue of notes, violet burning into indigo, a flame tinged incandescent thrilling blue that inspires love to simply burn and devour itself.

Marlow with the quick white glove whipped the counter faintly and smelled the arsenic, but couldn’t find a reason for Murder in the Cathedral of Love. Four blocks down on St.Vincent’s, a quick jog down an alley where the filtering blues flittered and fluttered with a moaning effervescences of unrequited desire, and goddess Desdemona played the harmonica in a baroque D minor that hummed.

Mister Jone’s did the St.Vitus dance for the homies, a premonition of desire, and the angels on 12th Avenue sauntered down to the water front waiting for the Argonauts to return

“And is love enough?” she asked.

Ibbbidy bibby I bop dice Salve Minore of an E Flat Minor Opus by the punk poet Namaya.

Him? Mad as two melted brain cells under a Sahara sun, said his ex Philomena.

What he think he be? Like Alfred appearing in his movies?

To the Narrative Again:

She was in improvisation artist, willing to do anything for the purity of Art. An arabesque, burlesque where the words dropped to the floor, long winding Isadora Duncan scarves that sailed behind her and threatened to decapitate her. In the final proceeding, the hand painted scarves contained ideograms from lovers, sonnets from sentries who guarded her virginity with the zealotry of Sappho and the pleasing teasing love by the Satyr in the guise of a Nubian eunuch.

Not a tortuous trail, not a cosmic comic adventure, nor a salutation to the mind bending Master Calvino, but a love missive to memory and murder which was the original journey.

J a Z in O positive where the ovulation of vowels makes for the ungulations and utterances poets seem intelligible, but the dah dah dah of darhma ohm ovations defies the resistance of imagination.

Then there is finally, murder in the cathedral of love. While the widow may be seduced by the fat man’s blues, the window may look out to the meadow, in the night club there was a murder.

A saxophonist, pianist and bassist, upright at their posts, bound to their instrument. Redemption in the cathedral of love.

Ghosts, permeate every pore of memory. Said Mister Jones bojangle jingling a jig of jonesed blues.

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

What ya gonna do when the well runs dry?

Hey, hey Sambo?

Jazz in O Positive spiked for transfusion.

Murder in the Cathedral of Love an F minor ovation to the round resonant G descending to O positive in a minor diatonic scale of desire.

Nigger Hating Rednecks in Vermont

In our community in Southern Vermont a group of youngsters who call themselves, “Nigger Hating Redneck Association” (NHRA) has appeared and it is a powerful opportunity to really address how racism affects us as a society and on a personal level. The teens who espoused this “Nigger Hating Redneck Association” should be invited to an open forum to clarify their opinions. Though I disagree with their racism, I’m grateful they aren’t in the closet. I suspect that for everyone of those youngsters in the NHR there are more behind them who say nothing. Do the parents and relatives who shaped these youngsters also feel this way? The problem is when “free speech” offends or hurts someone else, then the person’s right of free speech runs up against a wall. In no case should a person feel harmed or in danger because of offensive speech. But this NHRA reflects a more fundamental problem in society, despite progress over the past decades, the United States is still a profoundly racist and classist society that is evidenced by a prison population that is over sixty percent Black and Hispanic or in Vermont where minorities are ten times more likely to be incarcerated.

I want to understand how the “Nigger Hating Redneck Association” gained their insight that African Americans are somehow harmful to them. Given the population of their hometowns of Brattleboro and Guilford, Vermont are over 90% White: Why do they perceive Blacks or minorities as a threat to themselves? What are they angry at? Not valued? Not respected? Fearful? Alone? I want to sit down and listen to them, and by genuinely listening to them, they may be able to hear my concerns about racism and how it affects my life.

Hate mongering bigots from O’Reilly to Limbaugh fill the airwaves with their verbal flatulence, but those are the obvious examples. In the recent campaign of Hillary Clinton versus Obama, I kept hearing the subtext of the Clinton’s campaign, which was that Obama was uppity – “the elitist,” as they called him. How can you call a Black man whose White mother was on welfare and who grew up poor an elitist is baffling. Bill Clinton’s ranting of Obama as inexperienced and not ready – again, was the subtext that Obama was a boy? The neo-conservatives have no corner on racism. Racism and bias are as much a part of the USA fabric as the red, white, and blue on our flag. Democrat, Republican, Conservative, or liberal the racist rat lurks in every corner.

Let us consider the vilification of Reverend Wright who correctly pointed out that the USA is a racist and classist society, built on the bones of African American slaves, Chinese railroad workers, Mexican farm workers, the genocide of Native American Indians, and the list goes on. The New York Times on a front page rant, stopped just short of calling Reverend Wright “a crazy nigger,” but they were too politically correct to be so overt. If you listened carefully to him, he hit the nail on the head, we are a racist society, and as a Black man he has lived that experience. Though the segregated water fountains have vanished, racism and classism are tightly woven into our experience as US Americans.

Martin Luther King asked, “Do we judge a person by their character or their color?” It is imperative as a community that we draw the students who are involved in the “Nigger Hating Rednecks” into a genuine dialogue. Even when racism is deep rooted there is the possibility for profound change; for example, CP Ellis was a former KKK leader who became a civil rights leader in Durham North Carolina. If a former Klansman can have the possibility of transformation, then we most also hold out that possibility for these teenagers in the Nigger Hating Racist group to be transformed as well.

Day at the Gun Club

I’ve been disturbed by the noise of the adjacent gun club for some time, large semi-automatic rifles blasting away, disrupting my sleep and work. I had opposed the 2nd Amendment’s implied injunction that people should be free to own guns and foolishly believed that people killed not guns. It was difficult to remember the correct bumper sticker of ideology, so I decided instead of railing again guns and gun violence, I needed to seize the day, and come to a genuine understanding of guns and people.
Saturday, in late May, everyone at the gun club was out for their Memorial day shoot, gun members from Connecticut , Massachusetts , and one from Virginia came to celebrate all the skeet shooting, target practice, and good natured noisy fun that a rifle range is open to. I was a little hesitant as I’m a die hard leftist libertarian and realized I needed to challenge some of my assumptions about guns. The guys and the gals at the club couldn’t have been more friendlier, though they did look askance at my “Send Bush to Iraq” bumper sticker, they knew that I was trying to reach out and connect with my southern New England neighbors who love to come up to Vermont to shoot. Liberals only can dream about having so much fun. I leaped on to a monstrous ATV with my 12 gauge shot gun strapped across my shoulders and on my hip was a 44 Magnum that would have made Dirty Harry proud and zoomed away to the practice range. I had finally found my tribe. Little kids were out there with 22’s and a skinny bleached blond girl in a black leather jacket was firing on her little uzzi like a proud aspiring assassin. These are serious folks, no wonder the liberals can’t win an election… they need more firepower. There is little that is more orgiastic exciting than coming out for a day of shooting with the semi-automatics, the shot guns, and a hand pistol. As I saw the American flag in red, white, and blue on the hillside I had a lump in my throat, a tear, as I saw the blasting of rifles on that glorious afternoon and recalled the bombing of Fort Sumter where the flag held through that night. Holding the cool long steel barrel in my hands and feeling the portent of pulsating hot plasma of fire, I knew that I was on to something big.
My new found friend Big Jim and Bubba are two good old southern boys ( Southern Vermont that is) who love to hunt, fish, and hunt. A few swigs from Big Jim’s Jim Beam and I’m feeling in the cozy warmth and familiarity of “my tribe.” Despite all the progress of humanity, bigger firepower, and bombs of all kinds there was something so reassuring about the basic connection with ones own tribe in the hunt. I was beginning to wish there were a few liberals romping across the field so I could feel the real thrill of the kill and asked Big Jim about it.
“I know what ya mean about getting something meaningful, like taking down a beautiful 12 point buck or dropping a big old black bear. Man, there are few things that compare to that.”
“How about sex?” I asked
Big Jim looked at me kind of strange, “What ya man, sex.” Then looked around to make sure no one had heard him.
“What’s better sex or killing a big trophy deer? Or is there that same rush of sex you get when you kill?”
Bubba said, “That’s a might strange way of looking at it. Why don’t you go over to the target range on yonder and think about it a bit.”
“Sure enough.” I’d give them a little bit of time to think about that one. I had my Magnum and was itching to try it. Suddenly I had an epiphany.
“Big Jim! Bubba! Come back I want to try an experiment!”
I walked over to Big Jim some ten feet away from me, raised my gun to his head and fired point blank, took a half step to the right and shot Bubba once between the eyes. Someone else came, I raised a gun and fired. It was the slow dream of carnage in the carnival of death. Then everyone ran into the woods.
“Wait! Come back!” I was so angry. I had made the effort to connect with the club, got over my narrow prejudices about guns, finally made a breakthrough and then they all fled, but I came to truly appreciate Big Jim’s perspective-- guns don’t kill, but people do.
p.s. In lieu of flowers to the Gun Club, please send donations to: NRA Youth Education Fund.