"tiananmen" poems
It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that it ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming through a crack in the wall,
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming from the sorrow on the street
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of G-d in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on
o mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
past the Reefs of Greed
through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on
It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
that the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming to the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on
o mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
past the Reefs of Greed
through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on
I'm sentimental if you know what I mean:
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
12.4k
We live in a time of uncertainty
No jobs
Climate change
Mass killings
warnings of pandemics
Where is our utopia
where is our heaven on Earth
1900's we had
San Fransisco's earthquake
McKinley was assassinated
First Nobel prize
The Tunguska Event
nothing as changed in my eyes
1910's we had
Spanish flu
The sinking of the unsinkable ship, the Titanic
and World War 1
What else is needed to say about this decade
nothing changed as the human race lived on
1920's we had
Discovery of penicillin
The great depression
and prohibition
1930's we had
Bonnie and Clyde
Hindenburg disaster
Discovery of Pluto
Al Capone imprisoned
1940's we had
World War 2
Mount Rushmore completed
Big bang theory formulated
Israel founded
Nothing changed but who knew
1950's we had
Castro becomes Dictator of Cuba
Laika the dog goes into space
Korean War began
History never changed and neither will the Human Race
1960's we had
The rise of the Berlin wall
First man on the moon
Vietnam War
Nothing changed and won't any time soon
1970's we had
First test tube baby
Tangshan Earthquake
Kent state shootings
Elvis died
1980's we had
Chernobyl
Tiananmen square massacre
Exxon oil spill
Nothing changed and never will
1990's we had
Oklahoma city bombing
Princess Diana died
Columbine massacre
World Trade Center bombed
End of the Cold War
2000's we had
Hurricane Katrina
Pluto reclassified
Obama elected
September 11th
2010's we had
Haiti Earthquake
Japan Earthquake
Bin Laden killed
BP oil spill
England riots
Brazil riots
China banned time travel.
We're only 4 years in.
**** sapiens are nearly 200,000 years old
nothing changed
and never will
Jun 8, 2014
Jun 8, 2014 at 6:07 AM UTC
An airplane crashes into an uncharted island and hundreds of people die in the burning debris, and somewhere a group of boys and girls are taking selfies as they stand next to a burning office building.
Thousands of teenagers sit on the couch and eat ice cream until the buttons on their pants explode off.
Kids light themselves on fires as if they were monks from the Tiananmen Square, trying to gain acceptance, their dreams of stardom translated through a series of YouTube comments.
We can't afford books for college because the tuition is ridiculous, but these glossy tabloid magazines are only a few bucks; pick one to set the course of your life.
Middle-aged people spend their lives indoors, away from the thirsty, hungry, withering children, and check how many likes did their photos receive on their smartphones.
Pornographic images in front of our tired faces, our eyes locked to the screen and we do not blink as our memories become embedded with objectification.
So we don't look up and see the chaos transpiring.
Cat memes and colorful gifs hold our attention while our parents slave away at their boomerang-shaped desks, trapped in clustered cubicles.
I saw a post on Facebook of a girl who was sexually assaulted at a house party and now her name was being hashtagged and kids were posing in photographs, laying on the floor, legs and arms sprawled out, left and right, trying to mimic the injustice.
We swipe right to find our future hookups, but what if our future husbands and wives were on the left?
Society spends millions of dollars on drinks to numb our conscience, until our brain cells are wretched like the homeless guy on the street corner drinking liquor from a coffee mug.
Israel and Palestine battle each other day after day while our generation gossips about Solange Knowles beating up Jay-Z with her patent leather purse as if that news conquers every other bit of information out there.
The world will always be corrupt, but it suffers more from the apathy that belongs to us.
Jun 24, 2016
Jun 24, 2016 at 7:56 PM UTC
The students stood at Tiananmen Square
That’s where they went to fight for public gain
The government said they must get out of there
The people stood their ground and so were slain
In utter shock the public stood defeated
They were in disbelief of what occurred
They thought the stand would have to be retreated
The protest of the mass would go unheard
But one man stood alone and he said No.
And blocked the tanks; observers thought he’d die
They tried to pass, he’d still not let them go
For all those silenced voices he would cry
Because of him they did not go in vain
Around the world, one man had made a change
Feb 21, 2014
Feb 21, 2014 at 12:03 AM UTC
I could be falling apart
breathing this american air
the taste of kerosene
is on the tip of my tongue
pressed against my teeth
I can hold it and wait
once a traveler said to me
Jesus could put his tongue
into the back of his throat
and block all air flow
achieving nirvana
on a single breath
I exhale out ennui
another overdose victim standing beside me
and the mutilated legs from Tiananmen square
blown off by the country boys the party called in to ****** the city kids, or so its said
my words are noted in the public record
and I'm called up to the bench
and told to file a motion for release
in 30 days
I sit in a hallway and explain to the guy who found him
on indiana street because he just got the feeling he needed to go back
that nothings guaranteed on this timeline
but he only half listens
and looks at me with suspicion that softens
with steady detachment
all the masks
and mines a suit and title
the robe and the stare
are you on the level?
Feb 8, 2019
Feb 8, 2019 at 1:24 PM UTC
The year I would turn nine
Charlie Kelly threw his pint over Paul Brennan
in the opening scenes of a new Irish drama
called Fair City. The 25th Dáil was dissolved.
Ireland got its 1st lotto millionaire.
There was talk of mining for gold in Mayo
and Christy O’Connor Jnr
won the Ryder Cup for Europe.
(Years later playing Trivial Pursuit
one of the questions wanted to know:
what profession gets the Ryder Cup? —
a cousin from Carlow answered; prostitutes.)
I was growing through 3rd class
St. Brendan’s National School; Loughrea —
on the other side of Tiananmen Square
another student stood up
as the Guildford Four walked free
after 14 years innocently incarcerated.
While in Germany, a wall
that had been built to divide: separate, fell.
Pushed over by people. While Hungry, Poland
and Czechoslovakia: all said: enough.
The Russians left Afghanistan and in South Africa
Apartheid began to crumble. Pity
it was allowed to even begin.
Iran was ****** off about some book
and on Christmas Day in Romania
Mr and Mrs Ceausescu were executed.
In 1989, the Church of Ireland allowed female priests.
96 people died at Hillsborough.
Haughey was Taoiseach,
Mr. Heaney was conferred
as Professor of Poetry at Oxford
and we qualified for Italia 90.
I was 9 and the only thing I remember
about that year; I fell out of a tree
and broke my arm.
Nov 7, 2010
Nov 7, 2010 at 11:53 AM UTC
Mao Zedong’s revolution deposed the ancient, 5000 year old rule of Dynastic China.
In doing so he espoused the continuous violent struggle by contradictory forces within society to produce a perpetual disequilibrium of revolt against intellectualism and Confucian principle and practice.
With the global collapse of Communistic systems, the wily genius of the diminutive, Deng Xiaoping, breathed new life into the faltering rule
With a cunning rebranding of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, he maintained the stability of Chinese Communist kleptocracy until relatively recent times.
But the middle class awakening of Tiananmen Square and the recent Hong Kong massed protest, has brought into focus the demands of an increasingly educated, increasingly affluent, Chinese society’s expectation and demand for increased democratic rights and freedom and a more just system of the Rule of Law.
The day of the old, strong arm, autocratic rule is over.
China is emerging, quite naturally, into a world of increased information freedom, where the seeking of each individual’s betterment and independence promises a brighter future of personal dignity, increased self-esteem and an emerging sense of high anticipation.
President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party is now presented with the challenge to moderate in order to survive. To endeavour to embrace and meld the old concepts of Confucian harmony to the vaulting expectations of China’s new world beckoning.
M.
Denmark, Western Australia.
5 October 2014
Oct 17, 2014
Oct 17, 2014 at 3:57 PM UTC
Charred remains, of jungle burned:
Fire steeped, laotian leaves.
Who we lost, in what we earned;
For the love of ******
Of sweet release.
Korean craters, Mexican invaders, &
The Boxer rebellion.
The sinking of Maine, the panamanian strait;
Meuse–Argonne, inherent freedom
Is there a place, for the peaceable to congregate?
Versailles, Geneva, Nuremberg, Tokyo.
What point to rules are made,
When no one follows them.
Bagram, Mai Lai, Tiananmen, the Chechen genocide
Is it merely in our nature;
To fight, and argue, divide?
We can conquer, but can we conquer
The lust that is
The love of tribe
Jun 21, 2023
Jun 21, 2023 at 6:43 PM UTC
My grandpa who eats steamed sweet potatoes on foothills textured in green rice patties
dreamt up a tall brick house with a black iron gate
barbwires sprung around the tips of the entrance to keep out thieves
right now he wonders how long he can keep fibbing to my mother—
their rotten hut at the end of the massive foothill, not fleeting
monsoons come early, swells the ground till it gave
a landslide takes four people and a child
that day, red stars hung above Tiananmen square gates
grounded bones came in sacks, white cement hauled by green skin trucks
My grandpa who loves sweet potatoes constructs an ivory wall.
after the revolution, the sun peeks out in montages
peering through the smoke
gunpowder stuck to the tank tire roads
black heads roll off yellow tar dirt into a pit
My grandpa gives his best friend one thousand yuan—
visas for my mother and grandma,
His best friend disappears,
writes my grandpa
an apology and, leaves him a large white sack of uncooked sweet potatoes
light tan, severs in half and plops down on the lumpy cutting board,
dusty orange inners, grandpa tosses them in the boiling water
and later, while gnawing down,
he pretends they are oranges for once
Grandpa, who’s kneeling on our dried front yard with a worn out copper pail
waters the salty earth slowly until it sprouts sugar canes
chops one down, breaks it in half, the sun beats
peering through palm leaves
a viridescent river of silk and pale honey
my small three year arms grab a hand full
sliced by grandpa into pieces neatly placed
in a blue flowered ceramic bowl
years later, I chop a stalk down and chew until
English becomes a second language again
and in my twenties, I grab a hand full
sliced my mom into pieces, places them in a weaved basket
made of reinforced bamboo
I put it in front of my grandpa’s grave
in Fujian on the foggy mountainside of a small retirement town.
The edge of the South China coast covered in a thick plastic smog,
I sit on a stone eating sweet cold potatoes with my grandpa facing outland,
a red kneeing sun, barely visible past the trees
Apr 25, 2017
Apr 25, 2017 at 12:41 AM UTC
Buy the top guns in the world
now all in one same album.
Trump, Jinping and Putin
their ode to the public
now meticulously is one same lyric.
Get in, stay in, the home is big!
Believe it or not, it's big
Bigger than Times Square,
Palace Square or Tiananmen Square.
But how they are so sure
have they seen my home or yours?
Yes they say and surely not alone
in one voice they sing, love it
or loath it lockdown is sweet
they saw the next big thing.
Dare not follow their coronavirus lyric
it could be the grave the next we step in.
What we see now, what are we to learn?
When the Almighty wants to whisper
there can be no other power broker.
In no time the sky can turn upside down
and lo back to the basic home flies the lark!
Mar 26, 2020
Mar 26, 2020 at 6:55 PM UTC
Is it discriminatory to hate
the fungus that can spread in the bodies of ants.
Creeping
through the nerves
infecting
until it scrapes through the cerebral nerve
driving them mad
climbing the heights of rainforest giants
which they can’t get back down from.
When it takes their mind,
Are they now the same?
Is it discrimination,
If I **** the select black pages of a book that tumble along the desert winds, their words cursing those
under the God.
For those in letterboxes, I have a message: do you want to be defined by your value as a possession?
Is it discrimination,
To wish us rid of those who will condemn our humour and joy,
for it is a sign of humanity.
On online forums that do not have to except a human flood and a culture crushed to single metal pieces,
Will not except a yellow glutton carnivore
as president,
Will not except the red and blue beams from the sun being darkened by a night-black swarm of red and yellow striped wasps,
the vibrant joy of star fruit now as constructing as imperial gold.
Speak,
Rid your bike,
Shine your light
For Tiananmen is abroad.
Location decided not by a treaty,
But by those who cling to a rising sun,
Not shineless stars.
Aug 10, 2018
Aug 10, 2018 at 9:12 AM UTC
stara prawda...
to tylko nuda;
coś więcej?
eh... chyba emerytura -
tak na policzku
braku aesthetics
na tle cegieł - bo to ha ha dla
"uczonych" z prostatą na telefonach
niby jak kupcy z arabii
jest równe sezon z wybrykami szeików
kórw i koni - ale nie jest tłem z czołgami
Tiananmen - o tyle blisko by dać
wywrot historii wspomnieniem
słowo Panzer:
nad dot com boom słownictwa;
jak ten noworodek lewicy szczy w portki
bojąc sie ozora powiękrzenia zasobu słów!
Apr 9, 2016
Apr 9, 2016 at 8:08 PM UTC
Paper bags running down the avenue
Cars swerving to avoid them
Companies scrambling for their revenue
Crocodiles in the mists of Tiananmen
Life is not a heaven or a hell
Life is but a finite chain reaction
Dares to be a selfish organelle
Won't evoke the fearsome ire of faction
Oct 31, 2021
Oct 31, 2021 at 3:04 AM UTC
A brave little man with a shopping bag
Defiantly stood before an army tank
A foul machine designed to grind free men
Into ****** scraps to be hosed away
Two unknown men - it was not the tank that stopped
It was the tank commander who stopped the tank
All that is left is old videotape:
Two bullets made all problems disappear
A brave little man with a shopping bag
Another brave man with a battle tank:
They stopped -
And, yes, someday China will be free
Jun 4, 2019
Jun 4, 2019 at 2:25 PM UTC