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Pearson Bolt Aug 2015
FTP
when i say
**** the police
i do not feel obligated
to justify or quantify an
assertion that seems
fundamentally apparent to me
i do not find it necessary
to recount the endless horrors and
psychological terrors visited upon
ordinary men and women
nor do i deem it essential
to my personal ethos of
mutual dignity and
profound respect to
needlessly revere those
behind the badges
and the guns
i just see pigs dressed in blue
prove me wrong

i'm still waiting

when i say
**** the police
there's just one thing
i hope you understand
i do not detest the finger on the trigger
nor the hamfisted hand shoveling
Krispy Kream donuts
into a bottomless gullet
nor the fist clutching the baton
pummeling the peaceful protestor
who gave a riot-geared narc
a bouquet of flowers
nor the thumb emitting mace into
the unsuspecting face of a teenage girl
with a hot-pink mohawk

i do not mean offense when i remark
officer
your mustache reminds me of a walrus or
officer
were you the high school bully or
officer
can you direct me to nearest KKK meeting
please and thanks

so when i say
unequivocally
**** the police
know that it is because i detest
a racist misogynistic homophobic
apparatus of institutionalized oppression
that harasses the marginalized
as it butchers youth of color
and masks the misdeeds of its privileged elite in
a fraternity that utterly disregards morality

when i say
**** the police
it's 'cause i realize that absolute power
corrupts absolutely but the same
could be said for even a modicum
of power that twists and churns
and transforms the best of us into
vicious caricatures of humanity
the fissures of hegemony are exposed

as hierarchy crumbles we find inside us
the power to extol truth
even when it's unpopular

and say
**** the police
'cause they're too lazy to use
their words when the State gives
them a gun and
a license to ****
all charges will drop
because the only police who police
the police are the police

when i say
**** the police
it's because the State uses fear
to control its subjects
in hopes we won't realize
we don't need them
they keep us scared of one another
of the demons hiding in the dark
focus our terror on the monsters
lurking underneath our beds rather
than the Feds driving down I4 with
firearms strapped to their hips

when i say
**** the police
it's because it has not
escaped my notice
that the U.S. has the largest
prison population per capita of
any nation in the world due
to draconian laws governing
the use and abuse of substances
and i may be straight edge but
i'll be the first to point out
that the State's manufacturing new slaves
with its arbitrary arrests over ***

so i say
**** the police
because i remember
my brothers and sisters
who swine stole from this Earth
though i wager i'd never meet them
i'm certain their so-called criminal behavior
certainly did not merit an execution

and contrary to popular belief
black lives matter
so pull your head out of the sand
with that
all lives matter
hog-wash and open your ears for just a second

brother Michael Brown shot
down in Ferguson for walking
along the middle of the street

Eric Garner
strangled by a narc
accused of selling loose
cigarettes after dark

Sandra Bland failed to use her turn
signal and we discovered her later
hanging from a rope
like Roxanne Gay said
even if she killed herself
white hands are still locked around her throat

Trayvon Martin dared to wear a hoodie
and trespass in an affluent community
for failing to return to the ghetto
a vigilante **** sent him to the morgue

twelve-year-old Tamir Rice
played cops-n-robbers in his lawn  
no one stopped to tell him
its the boys-n-blue
who're robbing young kids of their lives
with bullets packed tight in their 9's

over 860 men women and children
killed by thugs draped in red white and blue
in these first 9 months of 2015 alone

so when i say
**** the police
i say so out of a sincere conviction
that there will be no peace until we get
some ******* justice
and i know the State Department's supplying
our masters with leftover gear from its
exorbitant multi-trillion dollar wars
M-16s tear gas flashbangs,
body armor HumVees tanks
rubber bullets surveillance kits and small arms
to suppress dissent and smash
lawful assembly with violence
but when they order us to cease and disperse
or suffer arrest
we'll have three words poised on our lips
**** the police
For all those whose lives have been interrupted—or terminated—by State-sponsored terror. Rest In Power.
Mateuš Conrad Jan 2017
which makes sense eating an english breakfast
at 2a.m., and then whining:
where's the sunrise, and business of day?
but i do love how certain people can extract
a narrator out of me, a potential to be as such,
capable to exfoliate. and in my own secret
space i am milking the she-goat,
and i mean: that's quasi-Hindu given the lack of
vegetarian experts...
      i mean: having been
most benevolently excavated from placebo solipsism
a cure to experiencing schizophrenia,
i find the crowd once again, but that doesn't mean
i'm writing from a crowded scene...
i'm simply devoid of commuter squabbles, let alone
those prancing arcades of blinking lights that
are known as the protestor crowds...
   i sorta of don't get that scene...
i just don't see the need the rush for the commotion...
  wait... let me get my banner...
(enter snigger) -  i'd be more handy with a
kalashnikov or a molotov dead-end
that i will ever be.. sheep-shy-sheep-bound
to hoister a banner:
    i just think repetition is a bit of a dead
given samples in music, and how you can re- re- refresh
      on the scratched-vinyl altar...
(how a noun for again: in Latin,
  became shortened to a prefix re-, so that
it could be made into an adequate "grapheme"
builder to note things like: resaid, regained....
without it: on crutches, alone)...
maybe i'm not even zeitgeist,
and wouldn't that be a real worry for me...
   i'd start seeing the vietnamese
nail nuns... asking that it becomes hard, acrylic...
   feline grr... scratch that *******'s
scalp into an Ed Gein mask...
oh sure... the jokes are free from this point.
but i just *** it away,
farting like a zeppelin...
              and really, language could never
be poetic and alphabetical at the same time...
that bogus bow-tie bachelor of bloom
would never help to solve the daffodil's lack
of bloated turkey in april debate for
one Frenchman's vision of
         caging a > / < b...
                 subsequently c... no one new
whther a > b or whether a < b...
were either a < b or b > a? to later state a c?
talk to a greek: he won't know what the hell
you're talking about...
why is why greek didn't employ siamese
principles regarding vowels to expose
          the difficulty, of coupling consonants
into covert-graphemes... phi non-vs. theta, e.g.
perhaps ratio *******? a : b : c...
no? it's a lot to ask for when there's no real punctuation
to be sordid about... i already stated:
   how the Romans cut up words
isn't exactly how the Greeks cut them up...
  when you cut up a word
the roman way, you work from the principle
of a grapheme... or the φoνoς,
beginning with æ - some might call that
as merely: tongue tied, or tongue numbed...
ello ello... but there's a clear sound...
apart from the sounds encrusted in h, w, y...
     but it's exactly what the doctors ordered,
given they become sort of truant with
the Hippocratic oath...
   the φoνoς finally belongs parallel to the
Heraclitus λoγoς...
based upon the sole prime of how individual sounds
were noted...
i.e. it had to mean something, so Heraclitus
was looking for "the" word, only because
individual greek letters were giving a noun
status, rather than a sound status... there was
no φoνoς principle in the greek alphabet...
letters weren't mere sound units, they had the status
of nouns, which is why they became pivots
for keeping them as such, in a hierarchy of
optical superiority above the Roman encoding,
ranging from mathematical or chemical coordinates...
which is why the Greeks have no good music
these days: well, apart from rotting christ...
and aphrodite's child...
          the Greek tongue has no idea of a grapheme,
(μ, ν, ξ and π don't even come close...
  the grapheme principle needs a siamese graphic:
the cited examples would require
   a siamese of opposite sexes... and since i haven't seen
such an example... i beg to differ)...
there's no siamese entity in it, there's no æ...
nothing Greek is explicit in sound,
which is why i guess the lisp comes from...
they're eating custard every time i hear them talk
or whistling via a pigeon feather turned into
a flute... ****** fla fla... falaffel and theta cheese...
oh but there is, it exists in the realm
of consonants and vowels... rather than among
vowels, exclusively...
      but that is why Heraclitus invented the λoγoς...
he contemplated the λoγoς because he couldn't
see the φoνoς, given that α couldn't
be taking a seat in dentistry and saying ah...
   or that φ couldn't just end with phi...
but had to lead onto a complexity of φlosophy...
and god... look at the mutilation of aesthetics
with that one! the λoγoς isn't that enigmatic as it appears,
old, dusty and about 3000 years revised too late...
  not with what the Roman caricature of
the λoγoς actually is... a, b, c, d...
or how close proximity deviating from the λoγoς
makes the φoνoς pop out...
  why / i              y / why
                               see / c
        b / be
                              a / aye / i / huh?
     t / tea                     p / ***
                      q / queue / cue...
     this is the limitations of the φoνoς...
  and only with the φoνoς being presented will
Heraclitus ever find the λoγoς, that might
suggest to him: α, will never have to be suffixed
with -λφα: cue -λθα.
- the reason why he concenptualised it
is because Greek gave restrictions on how
the phonos could be constructed...
   it couldn't! it revolves around the Greek alphabet
being noun-based... logoístic... rather than
pure phonetic carrying the ideal shrapnel...
       Heraclitus thought up the logos
for the sole reason that Greek stated
α as αλφα... rather than αλθα... or merely α
(and then you'd sing the rest, say #a)
hence the concept of the logos... but not the phonos...
because even if α or β could attain a status
of being a grapheme... both would forever remain
a noun... a word: rather than a sound-unit...
or as the moderns like to call them: sound-bits...
only because of the roman concept of
a grapheme does this arise from: the æ
testmanet of an Adam and Eve, clearly making
******-***** differentiation appealing...
so a return to the thesis of androgony?
  what, make the world siamese?
you ******* kidding me?
listen, the only problem about being genius
in poetry is that: well... there aren't any shortcuts...
you want to write narrative like exponents,
but you are writing something that's to be read
standing up, like watching a canvas in an art
gallery... this isn't reading a Tolstoy reclining
in bed, the counter to turning on the radio and
listening to music to fall alseep...
   i can't simply destroy the narrative principle
that poetry is also prone to...
    and trying to provide the equivalent of
a mathematical proof / equation in purely
linguistic symbology, will eviidently mean i'll be prone
to spaghetti / digression...
     for example stating a + in language is really
a problem as to how you can comprehend me when
i write: i see a an auburn flame of a setting sun...
      is that only one + or many in that sentence?
   educated as a chemist, son of a roofer...
  am i really middle-class ponce concerning this?
do i ******* look like i'm gearing up for a tea-party?
   basics... well, better a summary than
giving a vanity project to this narrator...
poets indeed are anti-novelists: there aren't
any characters in their works,
the only thing more numerous in poetry than
characters in a novel... are the narrators...
   Heraclitus spoke about the logos working from
α = alpha...
   i'm speaking about the phonos working from
a = a multitude of sounds...
             which is why they revised this *******
alphabet with the NATO of alpha romeo...
     zulu and i should probably state: *******...
   that's the whole principle of the phonos...
to work back to the logos...
         and since Heraclitus is a bit vague about
the logos in itself...
      it has to come down to Hippocrates talking
about freeloading on ***** when
   you receive cancer's foetus and try to alleviate the pains.
The path was long and arduous
And night began to veer
O’er trees, and lanes and rusted gates
Its' shadows breeding fear

Unbridled Wind wisped ‘round
Tombstone crosses where
Hissing its’ frustration
Loudly in despair

It sought to nourish fears
The shadows did create
Searching everywhere to find
It’s soul-less night-time mate.

Moonbeam light kissed the Night
Claiming shadows as their child
Together then in lock-step
They bent on running wild

And there, where he awaited
Their cold inspiring touch
With doctrines of all Evils
Firmly in his clutch

The blackness in his heart,
Thumping ‘neath his frock
Soon it’s rancid maladies
The Wind would there unlock

Thoughts of what’s to come
Then twisted lips to smile
Revealing stained and yellowed teeth
Trapping breath so rank and vile

‘twas then The Prince of Avarice
Rose and stood *****
The world would soon be his
To ravage and infect

His eyes of snake, both bespake
Behind their reptile lids
The embrace of the doctrine
For no Evils it forbids

The Wind increased its’ howling
Icy fingers pushing fro
Arranging fallen hopes
Into a dead rouleau

And you and I so un-suspect
Of pending alchemy
Believing we were safe inside
Cocoons of normalcy.

Our naiveté so firmly grasped
Caused us to belie
The chaos we knew not …
‘twas there, and drawing nigh

As Wind fingers touched him
He yelled out his decree:
“ The Prince of Avarice shall reign
And destroy Democracy!”

His school of ghouls, dunce and fools
Clamored to his side
Greed having won the day
Was about to take It’s ride!

Greed, first blessed the banks
And Wall Street did rejoice
The Prince of Avarice then silenced
All protestor ‘s voice

With lies and propaganda
All fabricated well
Then all the bankers rang
The borrowers death knell

Morgan Stanley, AGI,
Then ‘twas Goldman-Sachs
Raking in what Greed gave out:
Billions in green-backs.

Glutted bankers,
Through laughter Greed had honed
Uncaringly showed the world
A prediction - their prodrome

Of broken dreams, foreclosure schemes
Insuring that which failed
But jobs the cost, as homes were lost
And not a banker jailed.
Mark Lecuona Jun 2016
I am America
Conqueror
Conquered
Indentured
Old world roots
New world trees

I am America
To overcome
To transform
To dream
To live
To die

I am America
Native
Black
Brown
White
Mulatto

I am America
Soldier
Protestor
Fire
Healer
Flower

I am America
Christian
Jew
Muslim
Agnostic
Atheist

I am America
Master
Slave
Rich
Poor
Divided

I am America
Capitalist
Socialist
Environmentalist
Activist
Survivalis­t

I am America
Weak
Strong
Freedom
Dysfunction
Uncertain

I am America
Diverse
Tolerant
Racist
Hate
Love

I am America
So it is written
Natural born
Inalienable rights
Created equal
I am you
K Jan 2015
the air feels like fire.
it’s cold but there’s something lingering in it
and it burns enough to make you warm.
it envelops you in hundreds of smells, wet pavement, fresh paint, gasoline, salt, the smells of a city alive at night.
heads and ears pulsating and ringing as the hundreds of voices surrounding you dance.
it’s been nine days since a boy was shot in cold blood
by an unpunished officer.
"protect and serve"
there are hundreds of sweating and shaking bodies surrounding your own in a protestor’s dance.
on a crisp night like this, nobody is a singled.
we are one, screaming, angry, and trembling mass.
a man walks by.
usually you would take into account his presence.
you would notice that he was tall, towering over you, or the scar that ran through his thick eyebrow like lightning. usually you’d be gripped by an unintentional fear by his overpowering existence, but tonight it doesn’t matter.
maybe take into attention the tiny pale woman who’s body was shoved into yours, and how her bones jut out like they’re trying to escape. tonight is not that night.
tonight is the night where the streets of portland, maine, and hundreds of other cities around the world
run with sweat and tears.
tonight is the night in which humanity falls like dropping a feather in the wind.
tonight is passion like boiling water from a teapot long ignored.
Lawrence Hall Apr 2017
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

They Shall Not Pass the Dumpster!

The Apocalyptic Battle of the Dumpster of Our People
Before the Gates of Kaplan College
Berkeley, Holy Saturday 2017

“Then shall he strip his sleeve and show his tats,
And say ‘this ink I had on Saturday’”
-not Henry V

In Berkeley, tumult; a protestor screams:
“They have opened the dumpster, and taken away
My Antifi poster of Cosmic Peace –
I’m going to **** someone! Death to Fascists!”

A Trumpi throws a traffic cone in love
Of the Constitution, and rallies then
The Go-Pro squaddies of the ball-capped cause
And bravely cries “To the dumpster, young heroes!”

And there upon that garbage barricade -
Oh, my children, history
  was
          not
                 made
nivek Jun 2014
beauty has the upper hand
despite the ugly protestor
who would weave their woe
as long as someone listens
and will pass with their passing
Gordon Warren Jun 2014
“Violence is bad”, children are told,
as we hit them again for doing things wrong.

“Violence solves nothing”, we repeatedly say,
as we march off to war to get our own way.

Surrounded by rants against the evils of hate,
as another bomb is planted to end the debate.

“War is so wrong”, they forever preach,
until they crave something that is just out of reach.

Protesting for “Peace” at a Military base,
the same day the protestor ***** his best friend.

But "**** is so bad", the media bleat,
next to some ******* and a titillating piece.

“I **** you for your beliefs; you **** me for mine”,
the unbelievable ritual of the slaughterhouse kind.

So it’s “Just another war for ending all wars”,
such nonsense is spoken to justify their cause.

Disfigured by violence, a child cries “why?”,
deafened by the world’s silence and covered up eyes.

With whispers of peace, silenced by hate,
lost voices at night, and echoes of rage.

Surrounded by cries lost in the dark,
only the loudest get heard, the rest leave no mark.

So do we hate death? I reckon we don’t,
as new ways are invented to take what we want.

Our love for the battle, of guns, power and fame,
is a far too seductive and profitable game.

But longing for peace and an end to all wars,
starts inside each of us, not slogans on boards.

Until anger, greed and hatred cease inside us all,
the foundations for violence will never fall.

(c) Gordon Warren June 2014
Mark Toney Jun 2020
time marches on
reality's fire consumes—
dreams go up in smoke

Dishonest weights, deceptive scales forsake
as chains of injustice rake the flesh
of the preyed-upon bleeding, amid wild
wolves feeding, soft sheep bleating,
protestor's pleading, jurisdictions cheating,
cajoling, wheedling, injustice repeating—
jurisprudence at the confluence
of affluence and influence

~undocumented lies exhumed
     unmitigated truth entombed~

They have their thumb on the scale!  We
have sussed every detail on the field of
debris, some so fiercely taking a knee,
others shot trying to flee!  "I can't breathe,"
"I don't care!"  Why don't they care?
Of what justice is meting beware!
One higher than the highest is watching,
waiting to signal the one riding to conquer
and complete his conquest.  What's the true
future view?  What more can we do
before we become past tense?

tragedies worldwide
flooding my senses daily—
fill my bag of tears


© 2020 Mark Toney.  All rights reserved.
6/18/2020 - Poetry form: Free verse - © 2020 Mark Toney.  All rights reserved.
It's a battle field
I tell  myself one thing
I tell myself what not to feel
When all I can really feel is me
So I tell myself not to be me
So I can live in the world  
A world I cannot conform to
Not to be an activist or a protestor
But just to be me.
It won't be ok
Until I can be ok with me
With being a real person,  not just an idea
Not just an after thought
But a true love
The kind of Love you would do battle for
Love that would stand the test of time
A love for me and no one else
So it would never be lost
This love does not yet exist

— The End —