They're
doing it again.

They're gonna stuff
the corpse of
Hugo Chavez and
put it on display
in a glass case.

Why?

They did it to Lenin.

For 80 years he lay
on a bed of flowers
in a glass topped coffin
lazin away the days
in the Kremlin Wall
before they locked
him away behind
closed glasnost doors.

For those eighty years
Lenin's comrades
paraded his
corpse around
like an extended
Weekend at Bernie's;
raising old Ilyich
to mouth every
dictatorial diatribe
uttered by the
deathly stale
bread breath
of Stalin and all
the petty knockoffs
that followed him.

V.I. did a lot of
talking for a
dead man, serving
the dictatorship
of the proletariat
with valor and
distinction.

They did it
to Mao,
reminding all
happy Chinese Proles
that great peoples
revolutions must
dutifully mind
the unerring
instruction of
the secular deity;
resting assured
that progress is an
historical
dialectical
inevitability
proceeding apace
until classlessness
is realized in every
Hunan rice paddy,
Shanghai noodle
factory, Mongol
Steppe Village
and Buddhist
Tibetan Temple
in the glorious
workers paradise.

As of this writing Mao
hasn't been heard from
since the
Gang of Four
walked the last
Capitalist Roader plank.

Lady Mao
indignant to the end,
coolly quipping final zingers
from the Third Edition
of the Little Red Book as
last death sentence breaths
escaped her charcoal stained
great leaping forward
lungs.  
  
As always
Deng Xiaoping
got the final
laugh, counting
heavenly
Renmibis;

his yuan
piling up faster
then the number
of displaced
peasants
clogging the
streets of
The People's
Republic
new and improved
discount cities
beggin for jobs
at a toxic
iPod
factory.

Crafty
Deng  bought
the copy rights to
Mao's Quotations
his profit driven
start-up
fills
fortune cookies
with the
Chairman's
wise maxims
eagerly consumed
by the country's
burgeoning
class of
happy
lunch time
capitalists.

By the
waters of the Nile
they stuffed dead
pharaohs with
with onions,
spices and
frankincense
and buried em
in billion dollar
pyramids.

When a pharaoh  
crossed the River
Styx the expense
was justified
because of his
station in life.

The undertaking
also served as a
shovel ready
infrastructure
improvement
initiative for
idling slaves.

The humongous
public works project
didn't do much
for the economy back then
because the wages of
slaves don't go too far;
but through the
expanse of
expired millennia
the strange fruit of
chattel workers
is a proven boon
for the tourist trade in the
Valley of the Kings.

Its a bit unfortunate
that enterprising
grave robbers daring
the risk of the mummies curse
and imperialist archaeological
pillagers wouldn't let the
league of buried
Pharaoh's -like
young King Tut-
just
RIP.

..and then
there's the case of
Sweet Jesus...

Half of America
believes him to be
Chairman Emeritus
of the GOP,
authoring a gospel
of righteousness
in the party platform,
sprinkling holy water
on the hardest edges of
free market capitalism.

Though
his body was
lifted to heaven
on Ascension Day
Jesus
remains
the main course
at the festive Eucharist
every Sunday morning.  

Pious padres
transubstantiate
sacrosanct wafers
say its the Lords Table
but they act more
like its their own.  

Wrapped
in riddles
within sacred
paradoxes
exclusionary
catholic churches
refuse spiritually
starved pilgrim's
slices of happy meals
if they ain't down
with their
righteous
creed.

I recall
Jesus feeding 5,000
soul staved people with
seven loaves and five fishes
and had enough left overs
to feed every famished
woman and child
in Biafra;

don't remember Jesus
checking membership cards
before filling their bellies
with wholesomeness;

but the
pietistic pastors
parsing out
the holy loaves
remain quick to draw
heinous crucifixes
believing in the
holy justice of  
their crossianity
to ecstatically
bludgeon a
fallen heathen...

some Muslim
fundamentalists
do the same thing

a Hidden Imam
been walking
the earth since
the death of
The Prophet
Muhammad
(PBUH)

the ubiquitous
Mahdi is around
somewhere
and when he shows
his face he'll team
with Isa
enabling the Shia's
to tell the Sunni's
I told you so
and demand
that they
stop
murdering
fellow
Muslims

I just want to
tell my brothers
and sisters in
Venezuela
that they are the body
and soul, the heart, hands
and mind of the nation

the body is theirs
the body can't be
without them.
el corpus es usted

what ever happened
from dust you have come
to dust you shall return?

and now as a
Caracas glazier
cuts a glass box
for Chavez

i say
i think its a bad idea.
it never goes well for the dead ones

and as for the living
when myth becomes history
the potentates of politics
and the priests of power
become ghoulish tyrants
that devour the lives of
the living


ERRATUM
+++

As Marx observed in the  
18th Bremaire of Louis Bonaparte

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living...
he goes on to say, "history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce"...

I hope my Venezuelan brothers and sisters avoid the tragedy and don't fall victim to farce...

Final thoughts from Jesus:

"Wherever there is a carcass,
there the vultures will gather.
Let the dead bury the dead"

Smash the icons!
Hugo deserves his heavenly rest
he wouldn't want it any other way.

Hugo Chavez
(28 July 1954 – 5 March 2013)
Godspeed Beloved


Joan Baez & Mercedes Sosa "Gracias A La Vida"

jbm
Oakland
3/8/13

THIS YEAR 2013; IS THE YEAR OF GREAT DEATHS


Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com)


This year alone world society has lost more that ten great intellectual and political leaders. They have been lost to death in a deeply wounding manner. Human society has indeed been robbed. It is so sad. Three of the leaders have been Nobel laureates and the rest are leaders of intellectual, moral, political and spiritual stature in their respective capacities.
It began without any stampede in early part of the year some where March when Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian and Francis Davis Imbuga a Kenyan, both succumbed to early deaths caused by stroke. Rendering not only the citizens of world of literature, but also African society as well as global intellectual communities to the most desperate bereavement. Thereafter, within short while of the subsequent days, The Venezuelans president and Marxist intellectual, Hugo Chavez also succumbed to death caused by throat cancer. Even though the Pravda, the daily circulating paper of Russia contended that Chavez was poisoned; it is dismissible as only a Russian stand attributed to ideological hangover, because the Pravda also made similar allegations in relation to deaths of Yasser Arafat, Pablo Neruda and Frantz Omar Fanon, but it did not go a head to establish the factuality of this very allegations.
What we know is that human life is in most cases contested for by the three spiritual forces of fortune, fate and death. As decried William Shakespeare in his Romeo and Juliet. This time round in the year 2013, the angel of death has dominantly reigned with its untimely consequences in form of fangled early death of our leaders. Herman Melville will remain classical in his concern in the Moby **** about death that; O death! O death! Why are you untimely?  
Sadder is when the Al shabab terrorists killed the Ghanaian born global literary citizen Kofi Owonor. Kofi Owonor the poet and author of This world my brother was among the people killed in Nairobi during the terrorist attack at the Westgate mall. Of course he had come to Kenya to celebrate in literary festival organised by a society of publishers in Nairobi. This is an eventuality of some month ago. In September 2013, the Irish born literary Nobel prize poet; Heaney Seamus died. He died prematurely when the world society most needed his service to literature and his literary service to human society.
A couple of some weeks ago again the world loosed two prominent artists, political leaders, human rights crusaders and intellectuals. These are none other than Doris May Lessing and Tabuley Rosseuru. Lessing was a white African living in London, literature Nobel laureate and a feminist as well as an anti apartheid crusader. She is known for her firm stand against communist utopia, championing for the  courses against dehumanizing  human behaviors like racisms , but mostly Lessing is known for  her  great literary works like ;the grass is singing, Golden Note book, Dann and Mara as well as so many other works. Whereas Tabuley was an African Congolese , a musician , a businessman , once a husband to Africa’s most beautiful songstress Bellia Belle. He was the composer and the vocalist of African Rumba music. His song Bina Mudan which we in Africa always pronounce as Simbukinya was actually an artistic and cultural bombshell. Tabuley has been a politician, who enjoyed a gubernatorial position of the city of Kinshasa for ten years (two terms).
Most disastrous is the currently trial-some moment for the world community as they all commissarriate the death of Nelson Mandela.Mandella died early decemder 2013 at his home in the Johannesburg city of South Africa. The death of Mandela is an open sore to the society. It is a window for social, political, intellectual and family abyss in Africa. It is indeed a sad moment. But what can we do? For it has already happened. We can only swim in the consolation inherent the wisdom of the Babukusu people found in the western part of Kenya that; Mis-brewed wine behooves volunteer carousers. And truly, I have personally joined the world community to commit a poetical kamikaze in volunteering to drink this sour wine of humanity .May god give us and our leaders in their diverse capacities long live. Amen.

They weren't born with a silver spoon
only an umbilical cord tied round their necks
alas this stopped enough oxygen getting to their brains
creating minds full of mumbo jumbo ideas and fantasies
and a bleeding wound that gives them pain without relief
reminding them all the time they are low and never good enough
cause they were born without a silver spoon on a dusty ***** track

It's a blemish that can never be erased
even with a million lucre they still feel small and stained
you can take them out of the manger not the shame out of them
they always believe and know that those others are better than them
with stunted-brains and raving-angst they never see the world right
its us and them burns the burning passions in conflicted sad minds
life long struggles for the struggle to find that silver spoon never had

Their leaders had a brilliant idea in time
mind without a silver spoon their brains always suspect
find all the silversmiths and **** them all and then nationalize silver
one called Stalin killed millions because he saw silver in their teeth
one Pol *** decided he saw silver in the educated and killed them all
this Chavez took all the silver and gave it all away now they are poor
and Fidel says we'll share equally but I and my brotha will only give

The Silver searchers in the some of the West
decided, we should just fight and talk and hold rallies and hate
all those born with the silver spoon must be punished to kingdom
but look says some, you can have silver if you only apply yourself
that's a trick says them of the befuddled minds and complexes bad
let's just be nuisances and hate and holler and torment and harass
Looking closely all their leaders had silver spoons but that's OK

I do it to myself.
stirring and creating the pain
letting tears fall like a gentle rain.  

My mind should be set,
on the goals that need to be met.
a university experience, no regrets.

But, the city and you drift together.
Los Angeles concrete heat, the sunny weather.
tearing me away from the clouded haze
of my darkened Vancouver days.

Your mind is a remedy, a stimulant to my own.  
your environment entices me.
like a small mouse in the jungle all alone.
 or an arctic fox in a desert far from home.

your hands tickle with my backbone,
they melt the strength away.
they weave and loop a canopy of comfort.
your arms a cocoon from the obligations of today.

Its an attraction that cannot be explained.
split seconds, that I rapidly try to frame.
Its the one week stays and the thankfulness I came.
its the feelings we share that are the same.

But, I don't want to be a second thought.
that unwanted, suffocating knot.
tying you down, a struggle to unravel.

whats best for me, is not this, I know.
your my happiness on a book loan.
waiting for the due date, paying out the fines.
memories and words solely on rewind.

Is it so wrong?
to want you when I have for so long?
To say I honestly don't give a ****,
about the differences and this sad luck.

to keep the book for as long as I can,
to silence their voices, yes he's my man.
to return once more to the california sands.
and to have those quiet evenings holding hands.

Mr. Chavez, why don't you call?
I'm coming back to you, even if I fall.
I told you I loved you, please just wait.
because I will always be your best mate.