SOLUTIONS FOR OWS: GIVE WALL STREET BACK THEIR OWN
The Wall Street wizards in their towers call
Up hungry demons from damnation's halls
To spread across the globe a plague of debt.
Then when their virus sinks in they can get
The money's value and the hard resources
Of the public. However, now our voices
Are learning our first words of opposition
To the bankers so we need solutions:
For the human race to beat them back
We must return to them their psychic attack.
Shift Depression's cost back to the banks
Who've taken trillions from us (without thanks).
Then take back from the bankers our own money
So it's not private but owned publicly.
They made this crisis, well then, let them keep it
Until they're fully cooked in their own bullshit.
OCCUPY WALL STREET, DON'T PLAY THEIR GAMES!
Don't play the politicians' games
Or let the corporate media frame
You in their Left/Right paradigm
That has been rusted for some time.
They'll send out belly dancing call girls
With cliches tattooed on their middle
And shaddy saints decrying 'sin'
In their attempts to fence you in.
The bankers pay for both the Parties
Then sit back and laugh at the dummies
Who're drunk on shallow dialogue
At the level of Lincoln Logs.
Victory's key is independence
And breaking down the mental fence
The bankers weave with their dark spells
To call illusions up from Hell.
THE GOLDMAN SACHS BRIDGE TO WEALTH
“It's just up there, we've built a bridge
That reaches to the golden ridge
Where money grows upon the trees
And wealth is had by all with ease.
“With our financial instruments
And algorithms we have set
The beams; it's triple-A construction
So run up in the clouds of speculation
“That hang there empty in the air.
We'll make sure you get your share!”
They took their money, gave them guide-charts
But failed to tell that lower parts
Of the varnished, rotten beams
Were under-cut in other schemes
And though both sides died in the fall,
Still, Goldman Sachs gained from it all.
THE BANKERS' BUBBLE
They stand on cliffs of fool's gold shinning bright
In silken suits like colorful jester costumes
And chant hypnotic songs with all their might
To lure the hapless to their bottomless coomb.
They blow smooth bubbles, all in different sizes
That run with juices, glisten in the air,
And some hold hints of vaguely glowing prizes;
Oh yes, one's dreams of wealth are promised there!
Long chorus lines of naked dollar bills
Dance wildly circling round in all the bubbles
And cheerlead soft-core pornographic thrills
As the bubbles bounce and their seize doubles.
But when the bubbles burst then the illusions
Of wealth just melt: it came and went with ease.
Revealing to the dumbfound world the vision
Of rotting vultures feeding on green feces.
RAGE AGAINST WALL STREET
a call for peaceful and legal expression
Rage on against the biting gears and noise
Of economic terror's hacksaw reign
That grinds across the earth as it destroys
The orchards and the homes for short-term gain.
Don't listen to the painted plastic lips
Which drool dismissive phrases from the tips
Of tongues long rotted by their charcoal lies
And blink their blind and hollow TV eyes.
The stakes are high, because if oligarchy
Can bury us within a digital illusion
Their debt will drag us deeper, into slavery,
Entombing mankind's Spirit in pollution.
It doesn't matter that, right now, you're few:
Think of yourselves as Johnny Appleseed
Preparing orchards for a future need
When mushy masses learn, through pain, what's true.
UNCLE BEN'S MAGIC MONEY MACHINE
CHORUS:
Uncle Ben has a money machine
Turn it on, it makes lots of green.
Then when your wallet feels the pain
CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! CLAP!
It's just your blood going down the drain!
Our uncle Ben there at the Fed
Just doesn't worry over debt.
In fact, he likes it and has said
That if our nation wants to get
Out from our debt we do so by
Just printing money to the sky.
If they need money for the banks,
Both in Europe and America,
That's no problem; he just cranks
The shafts and all the gears go-gaga!
Creating money's such a breeze
When it's just book keeping entries!
CHORUS
So grab hold of that easy money …
Now hold on, just where did it go?
The bankers made mead from that honey
And nothing trickled-down below.
The public's waiting, waiting still
But found we got stuck with the bill!
The value of the world is just
Some sixty-four cool trillion dollars.
America's far past going bust
Since that amount of debt is ours!
We'll all be trapped with no way out
If we don't all stand up and shout
'Stop the banks!' and 'No more bail-outs!'
CHORUS
THE BANKERS' BUBBLE
They stand on cliffs of fool's gold shinning bright
In silken suits like colorful jester costumes
And chant hypnotic songs with all their might
To lure the hapless to their bottomless coomb.
They blow smooth bubbles, all in different sizes
That run with juices, glisten in the air,
And some hold hints of vaguely glowing prizes;
Oh yes, one's dreams of wealth are promised there!
Long chorus lines of naked dollar bills
Dance wildly circling round in all the bubbles
And cheerlead soft-core pornographic thrills
As the bubbles bounce and their seize doubles.
But when the bubbles burst then the illusions
Of wealth just melt: it came and went with ease.
Revealing to the dumbfound world the vision
Of rotting vultures feeding on green feces.
DON'T BASH THE BANKERS?
The British PM said, 'don't bash the bankers'
Despite the fact that they're a gang of robbers
Who brought upon us this calamity
So they might profit from our misery.
Political puppets who're in on the deal
Dread, of course, that someone may reveal
The slaughter house that's hidden behind illusion
That's generated by black magic's pollution
Because if they can not control the herd
They'll be spooked off their tuffets without curds.
Don't bash the bankers? Oh, no, bash
Them with our sharpened words and facts that smash
Right through the threads of maiden's beard they wrap
Around us trying to keep us in their trap.
ON THE SUPER CONGRESS
They tell us that this Super Congress
Is going to clean-up our debt mess.
But is that all? One thing's for sure
It's going to clean-up so much more.
Twelve Congress critters and the President
Will keep away that mold, amendments,
From bills and scrub-out filibusters
While bleaching out those damn dissenters
Who only want to spill debate.
For them they have a mop that's great:
The Congress just votes 'yes' or 'no'
(But, of course, that's just for show).
These Apostles of Austerity
Will make sure we're cleaned-out and tidy
By being cleansed of our prosperity
And that dirty mess . . . democracy.
HUNTING GROUND OF THE MEGA-FORMS
Great green chimeras roam through concrete jungles
In blindness driven by their bloated needs.
They leave long trenches of industrial rubble
And with their droppings feed political weeds.
A game warden, Greenspan, pulled down all the fences
That served the animals as their mutual defenses
Against irrational exuberance by the predators
And helped them flourish in their habitats' borders.
The larger beasts who dwelt within the pen
Of the warden rushed across the land
To rip up greater and much deeper dens
And eat whatever creatures came to hand.
Their hunting makes a wasteland of life's surplus
And when the meat is gone they turn to trees
Or other resources they consume with ease
Till all that's left for them to eat is us.
TO SERVE THE BANKERS
“Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”
-
Incoming chairman of the House Finance Committee, S. Bauchis in the Birmingham News, 10DEC10
What shall we serve the bankers for their feast?
A broiled bail-out with taxpayer liver,
The Constitution as curly fries in extra
Large helpings with a savory sauce of debt
And dollars shucked of meat; just digital shells
That glisten on the plate as decoration.
Or stuffed congressional critters basted with
Black bribes of jellied lobbyists set in cold
Clear low-fat regulations and to drink
We'll hand them (with white gloves) tall Waterford mortgages
Filled with fermented greed from Wall Street's vats.
Or shall we serve them in another way?
Boy pages in a 13th century manor
Their necks locked in a collar set in frills
That hides the bites of lice and anxious sweat
That they'll be called at night to service their master.
WORLD FOR SALE
The Robber Barons now are Robber Kings
From riding on Depression's leather wings
To penthouse perches over cracking skies
From where they wait to swoop with hungry eyes.
They dropped their waste and spread out useless trash
To fatten rats up with their GMO cash.
So now debt-bloated states are going bust
Their only assets are the public trusts
And thus the way out from their money troubles
Is passing through the auctions of world nobles
The prisons, pensions, parks and infrastructure
As well as other resources, such as water.
Dismembered on the auction block they're cooked
In Moloch's flaming digital accounting workbooks.
The public paid for them and we shall pay
Again, again in many other ways
Like tolls and taxes, fees to freebooting kits
Who'll pick us clean for oligarchic profits.
The world's for sale: cut-prices and cut throat
Deals can be made while it's still afloat
In iceberg waters waiting for the edge
Of some glacier to push us off the ledge.
CUT OFF THE WELFARE QUEENS
The ones who truly are the welfare queens
Are not in ghettos but in limousines
With hunch-backed husbands who, like rolexes flaunt,
Their satin dilettantes and débutantes.
If you're a JP Morgan executives' housewife
Too board to run the cocktail circuit life
The Federal Reserve will pay for your new hobby
Just like they did for Susan and for Christy.
Although they only dabbled here and there
In thoroughbreds and less-bred derrières
They qualified for two-hundred and twenty billion
As the working public contribution
To their doll house scam called 'Waterfalls.'
Aptly named, the public rides the falls
On what they loose on loans and real estate
While, of course, the gains are purely private.
These spa-cooked, over-painted plastic hags
Embalmed in Prozac, wrapped in haute couture rags
Are just two cancer cells within the tumors
That bloom across the globe in sickly horror.
Cut off the welfare queens, no, no more money
Which is a step towards healing our economy.
A BANKING LESSON FROM 0.3%
Churn and churn the dirty money
And wash it in the bank vault laundry.
Pour in fresh loans as fabric softener
And dyes to hide the blood-stained dollars.
Hang out the clean white bonuses to dry
While Mexicans are hung out to die.
Wells Fargo and Wachovia were
Financing Mexican drug lords' war
By laundering $376 billion.
It's true, when caught, they paid 100 million
Which is a fine of 0.3%.
It's telling how no one was sent
To join drug users in the penitentiary.
More telling still, they kept the money.
The reason is that those in power
Live by one law and we another.
HEY, OLIGARCHS, OFF-WORLD YOURSELVES ALREADY! OR: THE USES OF TRANSHUMANISM
a polemic
I've seen in Time, to mention just one place,
By 2045 the human race
Will be redundant (much like our appendix),
Replaced by AI's virtual-techno-tricks.
Then all the oligarchs will be immortal
And higher order cyber-gods. How wonderful.
Transmuted into circuit they'll still be
Unchanged; just digital dregs of lost humanity,
And still the same old vile and parasitic clans.
I'd rather share this world with Zulu tribesmen.
I don't know if they want an ET-lizard Reich
And if such claims made by one David Icke
Are literally true, well, probably not
But they're good symbols for our social rot.
But I think it's great. Yes, go ahead, transhumaize
Yourselves right now. Hook up and energize
What's blackened in those projects. What're you waiting for?
Hurry up! Don't let the Van Allen Belt's door
Of planet Earth hit on your virtual asses
(Which will, no doubt, spew Fukashima gases).
Take all your Skunkworks secret, dissected UFOs
Charge up the anti-gravity zero-point and . . . GO!
Download your brains as holograms or astral projection,
We don't care. Just go in one direction:
UP! OUT! AWAY!
Have Davos on Draconis, Bilderberg on Boutis Beta
Rebuild Bohemian Grove up in the Gemini's reticula.
Go bask within your blue-code cyber-greatness
Above mere flesh in space's farthest, deepest darkness.
Hey, David Rothschild, grab that other David,
That warlock, wizened shell of toxic agéd
Shat Plutonium, Rockefeller, and those others;
Saxe-Coburgs, Orange-Nassaus and your lizard masters
And fly off to the Pleiades to molest
Those Nordics as you have your native nest.
And don't forget to pack your Goldman 'Sacks'
With the IMF, the GMO and other jacks
You use for games. We're tired of all your toys
Whose single aim is simply to destroy.
We'll be much better off when you're all gone
And man can turn with hope to a new dawn.
Or, when you're all 'downloaded' maybe someone will bump the delete key . . .
THE DARK SAINTS
They pray to the demons of power
Who dwell in bright gemstones of fire
Locked deep inside nightmarish visions
Of torture wherein they find heaven.
They're slowly constructing that nightmare
In scattered, small pieces right here:
A temple of poison and lies
In spires that stab at the skies
With portals of fear and sharp iron
And pathways of humiliation.
Mankind is passé, second-hand
Old trash they want swept from their land.
They dream that our earth will be theirs,
Of futures in silicone stairs
They'll climb to a magic technology
And seize for themselves true divinity.
THE ELECTRONIC IMPERIAL OTTOMAN EMPIRE
The Isles of Greece of which Lord Byron wrote
Have once again been eaten by an empire:
The IMF, an Istanbul that bloats
Itself on carrion from economic warfare.
They spread incendiary phantom tools
Of finance that ignite as roasting debt.
Then with the flames, like lasers, carve out rules
Of iron cages where the prey is set.
The brokerage barons or derivative
Dukes then scavenge valued real estate
And sift the poor and middle class in sieves
Of fees and taxes from a privatized state.
But more than Greece, they've gnawed the Grand Teton
Park (which others are on their agendas?)
As well-groomed Turks in Brooks Bros. Armor drive on
To capture us as they did Argentina.
THE HAUNTING OF WOODROW WILSON
Embassy Row in Washington DC, winter of 1923
I saw the footprints come in from the garden
And leave a trail of black snow through the kitchen
While Negro servants stood with wide-eyed looks
Of fear and harshly whispered it was spooks.
My Edith always had a level head,
And lectured them that all the Christian dead
Are resting in the Spirit's arms asleep
Till Judgment while the damned are in a deep
Abyss of sorrow and can not go strolling
About our house while midnight chimes are tolling.
Each time this happens she will blame the Negroes
For dragging in the rain, the leaves or snow
And though each time I tell her that her verdict
Is wrong, she does insist on being strict
And will dismiss them just like Shakespeare's Lear
Cast out his faithful daughter. She just won't hear
Me when I tell her that I see them too.
With chilly logic she will launch into
A diatribe that builds to icy fits
That in her house there are no “knocking spirits.”
She tells me it's the fault of my condition
Of weakened health and convoluted vision.
She is a copy of the Colonel, my dear Edward,
Who always had to have the final word;
And I suppose it's for the best as they
Know better than I do of “practical” ways.
But much like Brutus the night before Philippi
I fear the darkness of my sin now haunts me.
It was in 1919, in Colorado
When first I saw the slouching, shuffling shadows
Of men and women dressed in soaking clothing
And wreaths of seaweed that they were all dragging
Like chains. Their faces were as white as china.
“We are the souls who died within the Lusitania,”
I heard them say in choppy, garbled voices
And saw their sunken eyes alive with curses.
My very body twisted in a spasm
And I collapsed there from the rising venom
Of guilt. I heard them speaking in a tide
Of noise that flowed across me from my left side:
“We've come up from the black floor of the ocean
Where we were bound by hideous water goblins
Who prowl the wrecks of ships with pale green lights
To capture souls with panic's numbing frostbite.
We wandered lost across that alien land
Through heavy currents dense as grinding quicksand
Collecting shinny pebbles on the sea floor
Because our deaths could trigger dreadful war.
It's only rational is so the bankers
Won't loose the mammoth loans they made to foreigners.
Accept our pretty pebbles as a payment
To J.P. Morgan for the Allies' debts
And to the oligarchs so they won't need
To use our deaths to justify their greed
By bringing America under war's red hatchet
So they can grant the Allies boundless credit.
Please help us, Mr. President, for you
Had failed to warn us even though you knew
The dangers and the plans of financiers
Who dismissed our lives with mocking sneers.”
The vision faded till one autumn rainfall
I saw their faces on a White House wall
In tricking streaks with pleading dark gray lips
That gasped for breath then vanished in the drip
Of water that left pebbles on the carpet.
I saw them once more at a formal banquet
When I was better able to move around
From the strokes that left me wheelchair bound.
But when I had retired to my home
It's then these phantoms frequently would roam
Through door or windows, leaving muddy marks
Where they would pass in secret in the dark.
And always where they pass we find the pebbles
On carpets, phonographs or window sills.
My Edith would consign them to the trash
And with those frigid Valkyrie stares then thrash
The servants. But I'm gathering them in secret
In hopes that I'll discharge all of the debt
When I have horded his phantasmal treasure
That I keep hidden in an office drawer.
BANKERS' SPRINGTIME
A grim financial sun helps weeds to bud
Fed by the severed fruit trees' sap like blood
In orchards that were once a “fruited plain”
Until they fell beneath the dark saints' reign.
Obscene black petals ooze from spiky leaves
And vomit cancer spores upon the breeze.
Their roots of hypothetical-future-worth
Absorb the nutrients from the fertile earth.
This alien plant now blooms in record numbers
Since we have entered Spring time for the bankers;
A silent Spring that leaves the song birds dead
From the digital DDT they spread.
The power of these frauds is mere illusion
And sharpened skills of subtle manipulation
With all the pomp of burning shades from Hell
Who whisper at Black Sabbaths potent spells.
THE GREAT PIRATE AGE
The skull-and-crossbones never flew as high
As now that it's become a shirt and tie
With limousines instead of gallon fleets
In pirate coves along both Wall and K Streets.
The cannon ball and cutlass made of metal
Just lack the deadly power of their digital
New weapons for a new age when the booty
Is the treasuries of each client country.
But for each captain prowling on the ocean
Of politics these days there are a million
More petty pirates plotting paltry schemes
To capture narrow and short-sighted dreams
From sea washed decks of middle-management
Where with smart meters some sharpen pension tridents
And everything is crafted as a trick
For some different way to loot the public.
THE BANKERS' BBQ
They sparked the fires of speculation
And hid them in a fun house mirror
So that the deadly conflagration
From financial instruments' torture
Was glowing in a bubbly hype
Like golden grapes beneath the sun.
But yet it all was toxic tripe
Made by fat white-shoe-wearing Huns
Who poured it out as public feed
Of easy loans and flashy credit.
Then when they're fat the banks proceed
To butcher them with their own debt.
Bring out the banjos and the whiskey
For the Bankers' BBQ
Of the Western World's prosperity
Till all that's left is greasy residue.
THE POST-INDUSTRIAL WASTELAND
The Mid Twenty-First Century America
The Chinese slave goods have all ceased to flow
Upon the rusted shore where Styrofoam
White reefs rise up and GMO chimeras roam
And sniff awaiting for dead winds to blow.
An acid rain falls from thick clouds of chrome
Upon the ruin of a once-great nation
Reduced now to a stained, pock-marked collection
Of empty and dilapidated homes.
A foreign tourist, sometimes, in compassion
Will leave a Bancor for small grubby hands
Whose days are spent fixed on the grimy sands
Supporting begging phrases in prostration.
Such is the ending of a Promised Land
Whose blood was drained away for short-term gain
By treacherous leaders who mocked at the pain
Of those they sucked for their greedy ends.
GOLDMAN SACHS: THE VAMPIRE CIRCUS
Come watch, come dance, come sing along
With us and join our happy song.
You'll see the spectacle of jugglers
In silken suits of many colors
Spin hollow leaden pins, gold plated,
That flash through shinny elongated
Financial bubbles that we spin
With magic money. Dressed in sharkskin
Pinstripe zoot suits managers mix
Recycled toxic waste with goldbricks
That government regulators drop
When kneeling down to lick our slop
And nibble plastic balance sheets
With sugar numbers they love to eat.
Our tightrope walkers leave you gasping
So you won't notice when we're fleecing
With bundled scythes your mortgages
To reap them for our favorite hedges
Where dead presidents watch outside
The Big Top's slick and glossy side.
We tame both bulls and bears to spring
Through giant tax hoops that are flaming
While the laugh track loudly applauds
Our ringmaster doing gods’
Work: hungry ancient deities
Who dwell in offshore companies.
We have the experts in our rings
Addicted to confetti leavings
From our financial innovation
While our clowns twist laws within
The dingy halls of government
For cable TVs entertainment.
So come and join this greatest show
Beneath our coffin-shaped tent’s shadow
And wander in our hall of mirrors
Designed and built by speculators
Where we choreograph the crowds
Who can not hear amid the loud
And happy, hopping, hokey music
The muffled screams of those we suck
And swop the bundles of their corpses
To fill our hungry animals’ cages.
LAND OF DARKNESS, LAND OF DEBT
A mega-corporate space machine hangs in
The sky against the sun and cuts the blue
With adamantium edges as it vomits
Great inky swarms of seeping nimbus clouds.
Gelatinous sap congeals in jellied swirls
That unfolds like a cancer tumor growing
From quadrillion D.U. pixels
Which spread across the sky in bubbling layers.
These toxic clouds absorb the sunlight, drain
The air of oxygen in imploded conflagrations
Of thirsty thunder falling into flakes
And leaves a lunar landscape in its shadow.
This is the land of darkness from the debt
That deconstructs the social ecosystem
In soft-kill waves of radioactive waste
And leaves a dwelling fit for aliens only.
THE PENSION RAG
CHORUS: A Ragtime band and barbershop quartet of John Stumpf (Wells Fargo), Brian Moynihan (Bank of America), Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs) and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) in white straw hats and red and white stripped suits reminiscent of vaudeville.
Come and sing the Pension Rag
Wave our false financial flag
You can win
If you spin
Fake mortgages in the right way!
Invest your pension, watch it rise
High up the chart, see how it flies
On wax wings of derivatives
(The phantom tool that gives and gives).
You see! No doubt you'll win the prize;
A nest egg where the eagle lives.
Your money flows into our bonuses
And feeds our hunger for resources
While you pour in more and more
On seeing paper profits soar.
This keeps you playing on our golf courses
Out where we can control the score.
CHORUS:
Come and play our game of tag
You'll be left holding the bag
Of the debt
As we set
You up for the fall!
It's we who'll have the hole-in-one
Just where you'll sink when you are done.
The fish is hooked, now pay and pay
As our big bubbles pop away.
You've already had your fun,
It's now our turn for hardcore play!
So tell us, do you want, well, 'something'
As the pension are collapsing?
To save them from a sure destruction
We must have mass centralization
But we'll make sure you get some drippings
From the vertical integration
Of all the wealth that we've been craving.
We're your robbers, your salvation;
First the problem then solution.
CHORUS:
Come and dance the Pension Rag
While your living standards sag
Down and down
Don't you frown
Only terrorists complain!
CONSUMING THE FORESTS OF BRITAIN
The ancient, heirloom forests of Great Britain
Are on the menu of a corporate Sauruman
To pay the bankers', not the public, debt
So their shareholders have high-calorie profit
By cutting private losses with the trees
The public owns and maybe putting fairies
In bondage in a Chinese-style factory
That makes a 'dark, Satanic mill' seem saintly.
So no more fairy songs or midnight dances
To mourn a country mauled of its resources
To glut a digital creature dwelling off-shore
In networks forged into black Barad-dur.
Say 'NO!' and cut the trough's conveyor belt
For if it feeds the damage will be felt
For generations and the chronic toll
Will be scars upon the nation's soul
THE PROPHETS OF BAAL
The prophets of Baal are all grim
And loud with their warnings of death
By famine or flood or some dim
Disaster befalling the Earth.
Saints Ehrlich and Gore have both seen
In dollar-induced sacred trances,
Or heard from their profits the keen
Word teaching Decepticon dances;
Just see how they spin and they cry!
'Some time in the future, we vow,
The sun will explode and we'll die
So pay us a carbon tax now
To stop this disaster!' They hoot
And whistle before their high altar
And fraudulent god, Baal-of-Loot,
With hymns of a fake eco-terror
Whose tune is the click of a jackboot.
A LETTER FROM ROCROI
This letter from Conde Aurelio del Dárdano Yáñez, dated May 19, 1643, is translated from a document held in the museum of the Convento de San Marcos in León, Spain. It was written from the battlefield of Rocroi shortly after the critical Spanish defeat there.
My dear sister Aldonza,
I have no doubt it's due to intercession
By St. Celestine on his holy feast
That I survived that raging conflagration
Of battle in which man becomes a beast.
I have no wounds, though our dear cousin Quique
Fell bravely on a spear when his rough tércio
Repelled the French twice in a bloody fray.
I'm filthy, tired and craving for botillo.
The sights around me, sister, I can't tell
To one like you who's lived in purity;
Suffice to say it's like a view of Hell
And beg you count your rosary decades for me.
We lost: but more than lost our empire met
In these Ardennes a modern Teutoburg chase
And in my soul I feel a chilly sunset
Is falling on us in a rising pace.
We had both greater numbers and resources
And a reputation forged in battle.
But we set off to fight upon the crutches
Of bad supplies and even worst moral.
Our Roman fathers founded our dear city
To guard the routs of silver from our homeland
But we excelled them with our own discovery
And exploitation of a new-found land.
The Lord had vouchsafed to us all the treasures
Of Asia and the New World leaving dazzled
All civilization with our rising powers.
In those days all the silver in Europe doubled
As goods and gold poured in Seville. The wealth
The crown gained through the fifth and taxes grew.
Where did it go? By what demonic stealth
Was this all lost as our prosperity flew
To foreigners while we can’t pay our soldiers?
(And all the guns the crown bought were defective
There is no patriotism in artillery contractors.)
Why did our pride become just vain and fictive?
The bankers, German and the Genoese,
Inflated credit based upon our bullion
And as false money flowed with such an ease
It made the crown into a gelded glutton
Bedazzled with the glamour of the spell.
So we went off on mad-capped, costly ventures
To rid the earth of all the fiends of Hell;
But, it cost us all the nation’s coffers.
They take our gold for payment of the debt
While it’s in crates stowed in our very ships
Although they engineered it so we can not pay it,
And thus the crown leans heavy on the townships
And people with strange fines and fees and taxes
To pay the banks when they have taken all
We have, yet, fall upon us with their axes
That leaves the kingdom bound in Poverty’s thrall.
These leeches and the cancer of corruption
Are slowly draining our vitality
Defeat is just the obvious manifestation
Of an already beaten society.
Is Mars in Taurus that I’m melancholy
Again and rambling with my chilly humour?
Perhaps, or is that I see things far more clearly
Than others? Farewell for now, beloved sister!
THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
October 3, 2008
SNAP! “All commerce will cease” SNAP!
The plastic talking heads flash red and yellow
And with their FM voices prophesize
From pock-marked tracts of bootleg DVDs
Apocalyptic tunes in molten words.
BANG! “There will be no money in the ATMs” BANG!
The theater props, not wood and curtain but
The CGI with stormy Wagner theme songs
All roll in grinding code a binary clicking
That prompts all actors to their lines in chorus.
POP! “slip into a financial panic and a distressing scenario” POP!
Behind the make-up in the third dimension
A corset bill is hiding a pregnant bulge;
The mutant fetus engendered by the orgies
Of cannibalism when freedom stands upon
WHAM! “prevent a crisis from turning into a catastrophe” WHAM!
Her head in blushing acrobatics and
She eats bad paper debt and belches profits
For those who sank their wires in her flesh
And stacked cards on the errors dreamers made.
CRASH! “we need a deal time is short” CRASH!
The purple boarders of patrician togas
Are Freudian slips that hide behind the smiles
That eat intestines from the Congress with
The tongues of courts and severed presidents’ hands.
SMASH! “all credit will dry-up” SMASH!
ISLAND OF THE CYCLOPSES
A metaphor for the Banking Oligarchy
drawn from The Odyssey, Book IX
The fog in languid layers lay stretched out
Across the island sliding over patches
Of night greased by the stolen silver moonlight
Eroding air in an indifferent silence.
This is the island where the Cyclopses dwell.
They build a street of high stone walls obscuring
The sky and fertile parks that they eschew
For shady dens that echo with their boasting.
The bleating public runs beneath their cliffs
Providing meat and cheese from managed flocks
And forage on uncultivated fields
The droppings left by mighty swinging arms.
They laugh with scorn at aegis bearing Justice
That thunders distant in a sky they’ve locked-up;
For they by far are stronger and that gives
Them in their solitary caves a total power.
THE FESTIVAL
A metaphor of our times
Their glossy eyes all flash together
Reflecting neon lights
The curves of tubular letters and shapes
Electric color rain
That shields hard tones in airbrush focus
Layered intercourse
Of luminous shadows on the crowd
Here everything is pastel
Balloons with plastic toys as clouds
Float just outside of reach
Silk banners undress rolling on
Artificial steamy winds
They wrap around the painted polls
And beckon over shouts
Of voices in their juggling tricks
The sticky webs of gunk like
The fifty dollar cotton candy
In rotted Chinese cones
Endless chatter endless games
From booths they bark or flip
Mascara faces masked mouths empty
Jingle counterfeit words
Their Gucci collars cover fur
Wands tap on top hats
In flourish pulling bleeding hides
Nice ties nice shirts nice manners
Wind-up emotions clock and turn
With tears or smiles or laughs
The naked werewolves hunt peripheries
Their noses smell the fat
And sweat the bleeding excess sugar
Watching crowds shift towards
Shears and scalpels whetted ready.
