"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."*

I
You probably already know, William,
that it’s pretty much all the same
as when you paced the battlements
and howled to the indifferent stars
"It seems I must bid the Muse go pack!"
, caught in Passion’s cataract –
that torrent of emotive poetic grief.

II
Though politics have changed,
there's still old men in the Senate
who stare but don’t seem to see.
They’re caught in youthful daydreams ---
the girls’ bras’ are too hard to unclasp,
even when employing that agéd charm.
(“But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!”)
You weren't an exception;
politicians are also subject to the Human Condition.
Perhaps more than a poet,
probably more than a poet.
So I guess you got the double dose, William.
In a split second the State slips,
staggers, and reinvents foreign policies,
only to double-back on itself again and reverse.
I know you remember those you rhymed out in verse:
MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse;
their rifles still ring in the recesses
of the Public’s  miasmic mind –
the haze just dissipated over the Irish Sea.
And it's the spring of 2012.
Gore-Booth and Markiewicz are but marrowless bones,
Collins as well.
His still mix in the grave –
They’ve been for ninety years.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same,
Synge’s ******* is still unpopular.
In fact, plays are largely unpopular,
and playwrights work in restaurants
where sweat lingers on their brows
to eventually drip into an already-unfit meal.
It's hard to imagine a play once
brought Dublin to riot;
you couldn't start a riot now if you had
thirty drunken anarchists
with two Molotovs a piece
watch Godwin’s grave get gutted.
Though information is more accessible,
it's an age of information-apathy.
You'd **** a shotgun to your temple
if you saw the state of education today.
I'm afraid, William, it's all the same:
the gyres still run on ---
I fear they're running out of breath.

III
But it’d be imbalanced to leave you here;
at least you split on a Saturday.
Late-January trembles each year,
as the earth did the day you were consumed
in Helen(“who all living hearts has betrayed”)
’s immutable embrace;
your heart alone she could not betray.
And blind Homer who sang her betrayals
has ceased; mouths ran dry the day you died.
You left before your trade imprisoned you;
before the pen enchanted
your remaining years to a page.
You left before you couldn’t:
before the blitzkrieg;
before the world lost ten million more Robert Gregory’s
and you died from exhaustion mid-rhyme on the seventh-stanza of the five-million eight-hundred and fifty-fourth
elegy.
Regardless, it's really all the same.
Even those beggars are still playing twister with their whip.

it's scary what people want to hear,
i feel, nothing at all, to be honest,
whenever i think of fame
i feel all famous people speaking the words:
don't become even by our standards moderates...
szlafrok: bathrobe -
              szuja: lizard-like-homeless person -
then again chattering ratty too -
does that mean: if i write i'll
get a penny for a structure where a brick is
worth just as much to the letter, the word
           or the line or the paragraph?
                  cukier: sugar...
   for every brick i'll get a penny's worth?
      writing discourages you from dreaming...
only the most adapted
                   who get encouraged by
   advertisement and who fake writing will ever get
the technicolour coat of Joseph...
         writing erodes your perspective of dreams,
it actually censors your ability to do so...
    i hear them, make novels from their body-language...
        and get an itch... nothing finicky... just
barring without baritone...
      poet's alphabet st. - barring without baritone...
antinomy of anecdote... false impression memorisation,
nothing rubric bound nothing alphabetical,
         nothing Pythagorean...
      antinomy... and there was me thinking of
antimony...                  there's no cascade of the sound
encoding of b or of a...
    there's the alphabet... and then there's
the dictionary... na na mmm, ma ma nun..
                    so cool with it, fit-bit....
      or should i claim you a toyo-bot?
           a ******* Hamleys' jack-in-the-box
     chuckles?
            either way... it's all a strategic **** -
or a macaque - or mà-cá-qé!
         herald the surgeon!
             grave a in the first syllable?
a delay... let's term yhwh as surd invocations -
           mà! (and yes, exclamation marks
are part of the necessary progress -
   unless you'd prefer anti-German anti-compound
allocation of a word to be turned into syllable mince...)
         mà! alternatively that's non-ambiguous -
what's ambiguous is the second syllable...
   mà!... cà!     màcà!        it's almost like holding-off
*******...          màcà!
      and then there's the qé!        or for optical reasons
as well as for reasons for the priestly monopoly
written as macaque - my-khaki-haka...
  (haka is a dance in rugby by the new zealanders,
   and khaki is diarrhea brown, diluted brown) -
   it's almost Spanish in a sense, huh?!
   well, because it's not exactly queue -
  or: que(h)? i.e. qweh?
well yes, it's a monkey, a tiny little bonsai
of a gorilla... cute... funny... loves tea-bags
and sugar... great company on a hot Kenyan night,
gets pestered with slingshots by the courtesan
   "bodyguards" of a tourist hanky-panky free whiskey...
  the time those kenyan entertainer girls
came up to me i sorta wished to play the
white-guy-****-history-joke...
stood my ground, went to sleep on one of the lounge
chairs one night... could have been stolen by pirates...
and i kinda wished it, but it didn't happen...
   still, the application of diacritical marks to
define syllables... the grave mark above vowels is
a bit like "holding back"...
         for some reason i first wrote mà-cá-qé...
but i realised... the avalanche only comes with
the acute marking above eh!....
        grave markings means restriction, a holding back...
and by this i mean that when the acute stress is
added, no number of optically adequate spellings
can erase it...
     in this case qé for what's encoded as -que -
   and still the four surds appear whether invited or
uninvited - softened laugh, eh? as in the asphyxiating
form of breathing, and then relaxed: ha ha ha ha!
       then again, i'm wrong,
they call them macaque: ma-ca-qac....
         so as a good revisionist does:
                grave and acute without a macron:
      má-cà-qàc - ma-cac-cac - not ma... ca-que!
   macaque!          Fawlty Towers and Mánuèl...
i know... nothing - hairspray romance,
and a horse called dragonfly...
   macaqué! olé!              
                          mácáquè -
    for the love of u - or parabola...
                 truth be told? i'll never know!
why? because no one taught us the rules of how
or when to apply such demands!
   let alone semicolons or commas...
                   macaque - barbarism sentenced to:
ma       ca              qak
                or simply my kayak...
**** me... it's still a monkey whether you like it or
not taking a **** and calling that chocy part of
its inverted intestines' toad-stool.
  let's just call it a mácàq monkey... because
the -ue suffix is just getting unbearable, like
an umbrella unfolded in one's **** -
   and applying diacritics to a suffix of pure-vowels
is beyond missing an ******, and making
rationale (the part where you miss stating an olé -
the part where rational is elongated into rationál
or the non-diacritical addition of -e)....
and then they worried why people never punctuated
correctly... maybe because people never applied
diacritical marks that they went beyond,
and didn't punctuate correctly?
                       humpty-dumpty hmm hmm:
                   eggs St. Benedict's, and a falafel Sunday!
me? trying to invoke a vocab that transcends
the ******* cool, however condescending i can be,
without trying or eating rye bread to boot,
    and then wear a balaclava calling it a Gucci neckwear,
drinking rather than throwing Molotovs.

a ****** of crows gathers
over Hamburg, carrion carrying on
with business as usual.
feeding on the festered flesh
of a gentrified populace.

in private jets coughing carbon
they fly from the west on turbine wings,
engines screaming as they dive towards a nation
secured by razor-wound walls
and barb-wire borders.

they pitched a battle in Germany,
convinced that austerity
would ******* the resistance
and give justification to premeditated violence.
but the tables have turned on the thieves again.

we are the end result of your failed policies,
globalization has destroyed our homes.
if your cabal rallies like a kettle of vultures,
you will do so behind closed doors,
cowering in your fortress' halls.

you shall not pass. watch as the power shifts
like the melting gears of torched BMWs.
we will tear the vestiges of your authority down.
we will black out your surveillance cameras,
smash your windows, and block your limos. no pasaran.

flee, while you can still run. this city belongs
to the wild ones, a black bloc, thousands strong,
dancing amidst the tear gas, tossing molotovs.
marching to liberty's sturdy drum,
equal in our solidarity song.

From within my
Glass house
I keep a pillow
Full of stones
To lay my
Weary head
A chest full of
Bricks
To build my bed
And a cabinet
Full of molotovs
In case I need
A drink

Sitting at work watching the scenes of mayhem and gross misuse of force pouring out of Missouri doesn't really phase me the way that I think it should. And that in itself is cause for alarm, this kind of nonchalance in the face of injustice. It's become a common phenomenon in the years since the Towers fell however, local police armed with military grade automatic weapons, riot gear and armoured vehicles confronting crowds waving signs and throwing plastic water bottles. Albeit the violence was escalated by a small group of agitators within the crowd throwing molotovs and rocks, the vast majority of the protesters were completely respectful and well coordinated by local activists. In a kind of eerie throwback, Gov. Nixon ordered a National Guard detachment to the St. Louis suburb early Monday in an attempt “to help restore peace and order and to protect the citizens of Ferguson.”* Granted, civil disturbances are never a stroll in the park, and I commend the efforts of community leaders and law enforcement attempting to prevent violence and looting, but common sense dictates that you shouldn't shove weapons in the faces of people that are just standing in your way. Crowd dynamics being what they are, one of two things will happen when authorities respond to civil disobedience with violence, 1) the response is heavy enough and quick enough to prevent organization and coordination by the protesters, or 2) the peaceful protesters respond to violence by becoming violent themselves.

i wish i could put my fist
through this wretched city,
march straight down Monroe
to the capitol building—
that flaccid, *******, hideous tower
looming like the tomb of god
over Tallahassee.

this bastion of neoliberalism
sits in the heart of a red state.
escalating rent and gentrification
go hand-in-hand on occupied Muskogee lands.
statues commemorating genocidal colonizers
defended by neo-Confederate bootlickers
keep watch over Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.
everywhere you look in this college town
you’ll find indigeneity reduced to a mascot.

so let’s introduce a little anarchy.
we’ll clash with riot cops
armed with tire-irons and Molotovs.
occupy the academy, transform the cafeteria
into a people’s kitchen. teach freely
on Landis Green. come, dance
with abandon and reclaim these tired streets
from those beset on our alienation.

Molotovs explode, windows shatter
But to them, it doesn’t matter.
Their sheltered lives are bliss, while little children die,
They sit in their bubble baths and let out a sigh.
They burn their coal to heat their homes,
While warplanes fly from aerodromes.
They clink their flimsy wine-filled glasses,
While the earth rots in a shell of gases.
They talk of truth, peace and love,
While praying to the skies above.
They ask for good things, for themselves.
While kids, teenagers, join cartels.
They “Save The Seals”, but they are blind,
The thing that needs saving is mankind.
A thousand cry out, but they claim to be powerless.
How would they feel if they were towerless?

Conform if you wish to that taffeta norm where you're clean and crisp, sparklingly bright condemning the night to an endless quest.

Best foot forward, two steps back.

Follow the magnate through the factory gate, drill your own teeth confirming that state is the new God, but I'm the old sod who will always be the odd one out.

Capture the dance,
Oh
sweet death's
a romance that flits across dreams.

I am in awe of the door ajar
the step too far
the car out of control.

I drink my cocktail of Molotovs and cough out a firestorm
conform?
ifya believe that
you must be smoking dope.

If you ask me on a good day
What we need to change the world
I'll tell you "each other"
If you ask me on a bad day
I'll look you in the eyes and tell you
"What we need are more riots"
We need people out in the streets
We need a little fire, chaos, and to embrace our friends like its the end
And I would say both answers are realistic
Realistic in the way that I don't have an actual plan

There's a reason I'm not an insurrectionist
Because while freedom is out there
If I only reach out and take it
You don't know how hard it is for me to reach out and turn off my alarm in the mornings
So I tip my hats to all the Dean Moriartys out in the world
Those beautiful adventurous people who go to marches and take a stand or take their whole life and move across states
People who know what it means to "live like you mean it"
I have trouble knowing if I really mean anything I say anymore, much less what I do
I've always been more of a Sal Paradise anyways
The background character in my own story
Writing the chronicles of all the Roman candle people
Beautifully illuminating in the night sky

But I still haven't wrote myself off completely
And I hope you haven't either
Because there are still times where there's power in my step and fire in my mouth
I was born a militant apathetic
All that's left for me is the right catalyst and I promise I'll burn brighter than all the molotovs thrown in Greece
And while I can't promise to make total destroy
I can promise that I'll try my best to fight when I'm needed
Because all we need is each other
Today's gonna be
A good day

“Oh good you are here!”
The child was was being scolded when I walked in
“can you tell him why he should not use the N word?”
Can I get time and a half
Actually can I get worker’s comp?
Do you mind if I put my jacket down first
and my coffee
“It keeps repeating in my head”
the white kid says with his thumb in his mouth
smiling to the side in some spaced out ecstasy
the child enjoying the power he has gained in this interaction
My entrance into the school interrupted
Ok so I explained what the word actually means and what it came to mean
why it hurts me
the nightmares of my father being tortured by peers in school and their families and friends
Confederate flag molotovs
I would put under their beds
the resting place of this putrid confidence
the one that they call now
reality that is the future already when they say now
and the future is at first now before it is already the past
you cannot just open your ****** mouth and describe the future
and look at me with expectations
as if I don’t notice how far gone into the past
you have become in your communication
and in doing this
a defense and assumption of white supremacy being the generator of value
but experience of being human is most valuable
whiteness is inorganic

Media bias contamination,
guilt through association,
run and hide from freedoms speech,
most are a blood ******* leech.

Riot, run and break some glass,
none of them have any class,
not really here to protest,
just destroy and make a mess.

Watching the news,
a sad reality,
good and evil,
the real duality,
changing daily depending on your view,
this is what we’re going through.

Stealing, mayhem, and destruction,
not interested in critic construction,
fires lit and cars upended,
until our rights are suspended.

Water cannons, pepper spray,
still, they will not go away,
**** police, they think it's right,
then run away into the night.

Watching the news,
a sad reality,
good and evil,
the real duality,
changing daily depending on your view,
this is what we’re going through.

Sleep all day, so they’re ready to,
ignore and defy the new curfew,
businesses and stores destroyed,
now none of them can be employed.

From ideas, safe spaces sought,
Some of them have been bought,
Soros, Obama, and others pay,
so those people are led astray.

Watching the news,
a sad reality,
good and evil,
the real duality,
changing daily depending on your view,
this is what we’re going through.

Nefarious criminals with Molotovs,
riot police with tear gas bombs,
leading innocence into flames
simple chaos is their game.

Where it stops it’s a guess,
But right now a complete mess,
one day we may get along,
but for now, division is strong.

Watching the news,
a sad reality,
good and evil,
the real duality,
changing daily depending on your view,
this is what we’re going through.

Feed your ego to the dogs
Finally freed from the fog
That's alot
That's a body
That's like alot to follow
Also,
Make sure you mock
The other comics
Cuz I wouldn't wanna cause
False hope
Ironic
How you lost confidence
When
You was on top of the world
Til you got on stage
Stay tuned
All the way to the end
Ya'll prolly ready for the plot twist
It's all for show
But yo, watch this
Finale' I voluntarily
Throw a bottle
Of cotton and lava stones
I lit from the suns' light
My cocktails are molotovs
Why flaunt or front
Im fully flawed
And now Im wishing I
called home....

Oh no
dot dot dot
....................
"thought so"