What year is it in Mississippi?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell,
You’d think in the 21st century,
We’d be able to tell time well.

Talking slow and taking it slow is okay
At least for most of the time
But there’s a big difference in drawling what you say,
And never reaching your prime

What year is it in Mississippi?
I don’t think it has its own zone.
Surely it’s impossible for the entire state
To have their watches on loan.

What year is it in Mississippi?
They seem so hopelessly behind,
Most other states quickly recognize
That her flag is hatred-lined.

What year is it in Mississippi?
Sorry, but I have to ask,
First in everything bad, and last in anything good,
To even tie with another state seems an impossible task.

Because when you act like you’re still in the past,
You’re going to keep being last.
And passed.
And bashed.
And masked.
And trashed.

No one thinks it’s hopeless yet
Or that the whole state is obscene,
I just hate to break it to Mississippi
That it is 2015.

We can wait ten years to change the flag,
Or another whole generation.
We can turn this thing into just a snag
or rebuild from the foundation.

We can change the confederate flag tomorrow
Or just wait around til we’re last,
We can bring the next fifty years some sorrow
Or mark it as a thing of the past.

We can get made fun of by every other state
First place in everything bad,
Or we can start to fix our problems with hate,
And make being actually first the new fad.

We can cling to a symbol of hate and loss,
And pretend it’s simply tradition,
Or we can dispose of that top-left cross
And avoid all of the opposition

Because Mississippi,

We can wait a week, a month or a year,
It really is a choice.
But the flag is going to change, it’s clear,
With or without your voice.

He raised me the old-fashioned way
Never spared the rod
Worked daylight to dark
Except for Sundays
Never heard him say
His life was hard
Taught me to drive a stick
To hunt, to fish, to throw a lick
And how to take one

Good times fly by
Years fade away
Yesterday dies
Time cries

Daddy was a good ol' boy
I'm talkin' about them good ol' boys
They're the heart of the South
Them good ol' boys
Well they're about as good as it gets

He gave up all the boyhood dreams
And plans he'd laid  
So that I'd have some
Sometimes he'd speak and gaze
A glimpse of better days
Back on the farm
I can just see him now singin'
"Not Fade Away" and "True Love Ways"
There in the sun

Good times fly by
Years fade away
Yesterday dies
Time cries

Daddy was a good ol' boy
I'm talkin' about them good ol' boys
They're the heart of the South
Them good ol' boys
Well they're about as good as it gets

I carry his picture in my wallet
Together with his boyhood dreams
The picture is of him at 12 years old
My wallet's bustin' out at the seams

Time cries out for them good ol' boys
I'm talkin' about them good ol' boys
They're the heart of the South
Them good ol' boys
My Daddy was as good as it gets

Time cries out
For the heart of the South

Time cries out
For the heart of the South

Time cries out...
Time cries out...
Time cries out...

© Jason Cole

A touch of sadness
               ten years gone
Like a midnight's voice
            of a far away song

Caught me unaware
              when I thought
I no longer cared

A sudden spark
              that flew
                    into eternity

A dance done then
             now done
                    in effigy

A poetic terse
              taughtly strung
                    deligently

At first dawn
           fades away

I can't believe how idiotic I was.

Loving you was harder than David's stone, knocking me dead mentally, and I didn't realize it until blood dripped along my temple.

Two opposites I thought would go great together only rebelled  when close.

Let both stay far apart, for neither were meant to be close, rather "symbolically paired".

(j.a.r.)

In the darkness
Flashes of light above casting
Brief sunlight onto the ground below
And then the distant rumble
Like cannons in some old forgotten battle
And the pat-pat-pat of rain against the window.

A cricket makes his brief song. A frog croaks.

The sudden reminder coming of a brief life in the marsh.
A place now gone forever as it was, only to live on in memory
And half-forgotten dreams.

This seductive South wraps its warmth around me.
And I soon forget the politics, the semantics, the loneliness
And I fall into the dreamland
To sleep in its breast

You're sitting on your grandmother's porch
Eating watermelon
Spitting out seeds
While grandpa is reading the Sunday paper
You feel a stillness, a peacefulness
to the rolling earth around you
and you understand
You'll never be in that exact moment again
The South has a way of holding your heart in a way you wouldn't know
Always wanting to leave
But when you actually do,
You miss it more than you could even miss a person
It's the stigma of home

Fluff and puff,
water plugs,
power plants,
paper over eyesores,
paint it matte,
pink as salmon,
pack the homeless
into the Bird's Nest,
ghettoise Moses,
bleed the Amazon
down to size,
moor the battleships
to Yamuna Bank,
let white elephants
run riot on warm Black ice
over those who won't
play ball in our
electric garden
free your head
from the rails
for what?
roti kapda makaan
or BSP ki maya?
be buried or a sport
let laal battis through
ab bus, stop
blaming it on Rio
don't you know
how India shone
in October 2010,
or that Russians love
their children too?
So what if they don't
believe in modern love?
Potemkin villages are
built brick by brick
by BRICS,
Red, Yellow, Orange
kilned to Black.