poem

PARTY OF FIVE

you could put a chair at the end
or push the tables together
but dont bother
This banged-up little restaurant
where you would expect no rules at all
has a firm policy against seating
parties of five
And you know you are
a party of five
It doesn’t matter if one of you
offers to leave or if
you say you could split into
a party of three and a party of two
or if the five of you come back tomorrow
in Richard Nixon masks and try to pretend
that you don’t know each other
It won’t work: You’re a party of five
even if you’re a beloved regular
Even if the place is empty
Even if you bring logic to bear
Even if you’re a tackle for the Chicago Bears
it won’t work
You’re a party of five
You will always be a party of five
A hundred blocks from here
a hundred years from now
you will still be a party of five
and you will never savor the soup
or compare the coffee or
hear the wisdom of the cook
and the wit of the waitress or
get to hum the old -time tunes
among which you will find
no quintets

Robert Hershon

This is me
But
Not the way
YOU see me
More the way
I see me
'Cause I don't get to write me
Any more than you
Get to write you

That's just how it works.
Neat
Like a poem
No loose ends
And when I die
I won't know me
But
You
Will

[Author Unknown]

The stars are so big, The earth is so small, Stay as you are.

[Author Unknown]

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg

Drill, Drill, Drill
I am having Sarah Palin nightmares.
I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles
and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks.
I have a particular thing for Polar Bears.
Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness
or the fact that they live in the arctic
or that I have never seen one in person or touched one.
Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice.
Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women.
I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women
and stop violence against them.
It is hard to write about Sarah Palin.
This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical.
The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism
which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth,
ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options,
opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime.
And should this country choose those candidates the fall-out may be so great,
the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover.
But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, this is not a joke.
In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution.
I take this as a metaphor.
In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves.
She does not believe in global warming.
The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers
are all part of God's plan.
She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list.
The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered.
The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered.
The oil is here to be taken and plundered.
Iraq is here to be taken and plundered.
As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion.
She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will
should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control.
I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking.
From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency
to dispense with people who think independently.
She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference.
This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States .
She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns.
She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip.
She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right.
But when God and guns come together in the public sector,
when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name,
that is the end of separation of church and state
and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands.
This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S. , but of the planet.
It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans.
It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world
or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack.
It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning
or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction.
It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare
or whether we build more and more methods of killing.
It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society
or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected, then consider
the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill."
I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination.
I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain
of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent.
I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling?
More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations
and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?

Eve Ensler
September 5, 2008