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Michael Marchese Apr 2017
Prometheus ignites to spark this
Molotov to make his Marxist
On swine Fuhrer's Faux News tweet
Hashtag it #GorbachevWallStreet
'Cuz Putin's puppet Pinochet's
Whipped Creme de Kremlin's CIA  
From JFK to Allende
Like Russian roulette ricochet
I'll Trotsky through McCarthy's brains
Leave slain these ****** sugar Keynes   
Discred' the Fed’s six-figureheads
With strikes at dawn more red than Debs  
Still breakin' breads with Mulan Bouges
Makin' men of Khmer Stooges
Seein’ Rouge when Al Spans Greens
Potemkin loan wolf ponzi schemes
Who count the sheep like Philippines
Then Black Pearl Harbor GRANMA’s dreams...

Of Marilyn Monroes in store
Just off-shore ****** who **** the poor
A Glass of Steagall's broken trust
Half emptier than bowls of dust
In rust beltways still spewin’ fumes
As factories become Khartoums
No carbon footprint tax the hint
Of Amazon decays in Flint
Just pop the caps and drown in debt
Like Kent State drinkin' to forget
That cuttin’ class engenders race
Leaves glory, gold and God's disgrace
To slaughter Moor than Reconquista  
From Marti to Sandinista     
With Zapata sharin’ crops  
Till my Mexica heartbeat stops

I'm Pancho infiltratin’ villas
The Magilla of guerillas
In the midst of Congolese  
Same colonies, just different thieves
To me, my breed’s of landless deeds
So how you like ‘dem Appleseeds?
FReeducatin’ caves of youth
Fed Citizen’s United Fruit
‘Cuz now my open eye of Horus
Battle cries Grito de Lares
Che is centered in these veins
So my Ashoka takes the reigns
These Iron paci-Fists pack hits
Like Jimi on some Malcolm ****
Still Hajj mirages I barrage
The Raj with sheer Cong camouflage

Deployin' Sepoys on viceroys
And pol desPots’ in the employs
Of Tweedledums who run the slums
With country clubs of loaded guns
These Betsy Deez bear arms to school
Till no kids fly kites in Kabul
So gas-mask your Sharia flaw
I'll Genghis Khan Sheikoun it raw  
'Cuz refugees are rising
And we're anti-socializing
Subsidizing private party plans
Who take commands from ***** hands
These grand old klans coup klux control
Your diamond minds with mines of coal
An oil Standardized existence
Solar powers my resistance

******* sun of Liberty  
My fear itself is history  
Rewriting wrongs of Leo’s creed
In culture’s blood and vulture’s greed
An alt-right/all-white cockpile   
Stockpilin' human capital
In tricklin’ contests over spoils
Of the cotton-ceded soils
Jingos chained to Cruci-fictions
Swallowin' good Christian dictions
I spit Spanish Inquisition
Trippin' Socrates sedition
Droppin' Oppen's fission quest
For "now I am become death"
'Cuz G-bay pigs in-Fidel's sites
Flew U-2's into my last rites

These Saddamites, I smite Assad
Then spread 'em like Islamabad
Convert for-profit prison tsars
From Escobars to Bolivars 
Like currency in Venezuela
Current police-state favela
Where 9/10th's of your possession's
Worth less than your Great Depression’s
Upscale bail ‘em outs of jail
With Dodd-Frank banks too big to fail
Your FDA-approved psychosis
From Campos’ daily dose of
More defense? Here’s my two cents
These slave wages ain’t excrements
So just say no to Reaganomics    
Got us hooked, but not on phonics

Just that Noriega strain
Of Contras stackin' crack contain
Like MAD dogs who trade weapons-grades  
For Ayatollah hate tirades
On “don’t ask, don’t tell” plague ebonics
Drug crusAID Jim Crow narcotics     
Warsaw rats injected, tested,
Quarantined, and then arrested
Guess the J. Arbenz' lens
Still Tet offends their ethnic cleanse
Still Wounding Knees of Standing Sioux
Till Crazy Horses stampede you   
For Mother Nature’s common ground
My Martin Luther’s gather ‘round
Is hellbound sounds of Nero’s crown  
Let's burn this Third World Reichstag down

Vox populyin’ to remove ‘ya
Like Lumumba then Nkrumah
So some Pumbaa kleptocrat
Declares himself the next Sadat
To hide supply-side Apartheid
Increase demand for genocide
So check your factions in Uganda  
Tune into Hotel Rwanda
Come play pirates with Somalis
Then desert ‘em like Benghazis
Thirst for blood so French Algiers  
It boils mine in Trails of Tears  
My destiny unManifest-
Oppressive Adam-Smitten West
So pay your overdues to Mao
I’ll Mussolini Chairman Dow

Then flood this 9th ward Watergate
With killing fields of glyphosate
I'll redistribute IMF’s
With leftist depth so deft it’s theft
I’ll My Lai massacre these lines
With sweet Satsuma samurhymes
I'll make these Madoff Hitlers squeal
With that Bastille New Deal cold steel
Now feel that Shining Pathos wrath
Drop Nagasaki aftermath
On Nanjing kings and dragon’s Diems
With ****** bodhisattva zens
To show you how I pledge allegiance
With razed flags still rapt in Jesus  
Laosy liars pogrom psalms
Can’t Uncle Phnom my Penh’s truth bombs

On heroes shootin' ******
My fix is un-American
Tiananmen democracies
To Syngman Rhee hypocrisies  
Theocracies drive me Hussein
With Bush league’s mass destruction claim
So I dig laissez pharaohs graves
With pyramids of Abu Ghraibs
Then nail their coffers closed like Vlad
I AM THE GHOST OF STALINGRAD
My hammer forged in winters past
My sickle reaps the shadows caste
By pantheons of penta-cons
Whose Exxons lead to autobahns
When liberal Arts of War and Peace in
Free speech teach my voice of treason
“Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross”
-Sinclair Lewis
Steven Fortune May 2014
I.   Warning

A boundary of warning issued premature
to a lad settled on adventure
will plant definition in a red
corruption code of ketchup on a
post-picnic bib orphaned to the wind
like a fictional friend's home continent's flag

The vision-fielding velocity of neighbours'
arrows augment the sleep-shearing flares
of the father's eyes in the centrifugal
bullseye of his boy's current-green nursery
so close to swelling wide as a planet
now a marble left behind in favour of
a shrunken moon's spheric promise
of an otherworldly adventure

II.   Island

Subservient to boundaries of none but its own
the loner of landmass nurses its nautical mischief
through the employment of sensual labour in darkness
sizing them up to encompass a knowing glow
for the enigmas of bare-faced daylight

The premature thirst for adventure
attended to by the drink of sanctuary
poured from the skew of its welcome-mat shore

III.   Neighbours

Game and Disappearance serve
the Monarchy of Volume under code names
of Hide and Seek undertaking missions in the name
of circumstantial viceroys: decibels
scanning search parties through the x-ray of silent night
for the orchestration of the morn

Tweeting birds equate an army horn
rainbowing the insurgent black sky
with adventures in crusade-recital grooming

An airy beach of reeds is looming
in the coastal fog bracing to embrace
the route taken on the faith of melodic compass

IV.   Discovery

No labourer of mortal being beats the sun
out of bed not even the little one
succumbed to slumber in the bony shadow
of the instrumentally inscrutable contestant
to the claim of composition by his
solar brother's sacred nursery rhyme
insuring the rest and energetic rise of time

This adventure-hearted child heard no battle cry
in what the rivals of his bearded babysitter
dubbed The Sound Of Panic
just the anthem of a little conqueror beneath
a bucky smile of approval on the heels
of a swim befitting of an older lad but not
the aura of exhaustion conquering
the eyes of a goal imagined and achieved
and the smiling gratitude duet in return
from the dutiful and loving neighbours
lulled to their reunion reed field
in anticipation of a father's target met
with a son's accuracy in tow

11 26 11
Inspired by chapter seven of The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame...it is also the title of Pink Floyd's first album.
Curtis Matthews Nov 2014
Acting is carried away and the dazed, wise boy is alone smoking viceroys. Without a word or a day to change the things that should be running down the shower drain. Wipe the sweat off his face and he could shave to the grain to make himself okay. Putting his act in place, but his special place is forevermore changing.

Sweet tastes of likely lead to an addiction for a boy who always runs blindly, but when the ground gets icy, the boy will break through ever so lightly and even after hopping the fence, love and lovely still has a big difference. So, the boy will keep on filling his bed, forgetting the age of his existence.

Maybe he is just homeless, scouting out a place to live. Jumping couches with people he loves and people he knows love him. Hardwood floors and springy couches aren't enough to break his back, but when the time comes he'll have to choose and face the facts. Business and opportunities can still make you homeless and the fact there's no love makes you almost boneless. This boy is bright and clever and will be able to rise up whenever, but without cutting off the extra cartilage, he may never find a home because home is where the heart is.
Megan Parson Nov 2017
She inspires and destroys,
She conquered, before the Viceroys.
Her power & beauty, in awe we see,
Mercurial, blossoming immortality.

Insidious fingers creep over the fence,
Leaving thriving forests, ever so dense.
Weaving for Earth, an elegant cloak,
Yesterday, to the truth I awoke.

She favors none & is never antique,
A surreal presence, ever so unique.
Leaves shrivel & flowers wither,
But time, her splendor does not tether.

The die has been cast, the battle lines drawn,
Nature gainst her destroyer, as she awaits the morn,
Look not so forlorn,

For tis from chaos nature brings,
Peace and order to all things.
#nature #beauty #immortality
Khoisan Jun 2022
The attic statics
Viceroys of the white noise
The devils finest
Wk kortas Dec 2016
If you observe occurrences in Nature
(The way a stone ripples the water,
The arc of a cormorant descending toward its prey)
You will note a precision in the movements
Which is utterly Pythagorean in its pattern
(Not that the natural world is without its inconsistencies;
The progress of a conflagration, for example, seems entirely random.)
It would seem that such a thing is good;
No, more than that, entirely holy,
All that is necessary and sufficient to prove beyond doubt
That which is equally necessary and central to our belief:
A plan--His plan--which governs all things under the sun.
Such notions, I have found to my considerable dismay,
Do not sit well with viceroys and archbishops,
Who have a vested interest in the maintenance of certain mysteries
(To be fair, they are not evil or necessarily even impious;
They are men, nothing more or less,
And have to navigate perilous, unmapped straits
Between the secular and the sacred; at their appointed time,
They will have their own commissions and omissions to answer for.)
Nevertheless, none of us can escape the certainty
That the root of our faults can be found at our own doorway,
And I cannot deny that the attempt
To reduce God’s works to a schematic of formulas, diagrams and triads
And then, preening and squawking as a peacock,
Trumpet the results to the world
(As if the mystery of faith would be no more
Than a handful of equations and charts)
Is simply the manure of arrogance, the flotsam of sinful pride.
I have had, these past few weeks,
Considerable leisure to pray and reflect;
My thoughts have not drifted, curiously enough,
To the great and sweeping, the grand and all-encompassing
(Perhaps that is due to the whys and wherefores of my current predicament, Perhaps due to the narrow window of my enclosure),
But rather to the most pedestrian of things:
The clarion of the wind in the trees prior to a brief summer storm,
The lover’s dance of the hummingbird and the lupin,
And I am comforted (and, I confess, a bit amused)
By the notion that Our Savior may take a moment from his labors
To watch them as well.
Brother Juniper appears courtesy of Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which is as fine a novel as has ever been forgotten.
Devon Brock Sep 2019
Her eyes fold gently
as she takes bits of honeycrisp
from my fingertips -
the first from the tree,
still hard, ****,
warm in the thick after rain,
hinting at cinnamon.

Her usual distractions,
squirrel on wire,
bobbing heads of neighbor girls
on trampolines,
lifting reigns of monarchs
and viceroys, mourning cloaks,
slamming doors,  
jumbled voices beyond the fence,
bright musks of night prowlers
in the grass,
all ceased to beguile.

As if desirous of desire,
she stiffened at the first crack
of my teeth through the flesh
of this first apple,
then bounded across the lawn
and sat before me,
not as a beggar may,
but as an adherent
to the rites of giving.

Bit by bit,
taking each with neither lurching forth
nor brushing my fingers with her teeth,
her velvet black ears lain back,
her brown eyes reduced
to sweet slices of rapture,
she chews each in its time,
savoring each in its time,
not as a dog may,
but as a disciple
to Autumn's way
of giving.
Wk kortas Apr 2017
Such children, our playwrights;
They labor under the sad misconception
That, having written their labored little prose,
They shall be presented wholly unfiltered by the performers.
From God’s lips to their ears, they say, ostensibly joking
While their features and inflection bear full witness
To how deeply serious they are in truth.
The poor souls have no idea
(Really, no more than infants, every last one of them)
Just how little their tottering little farces have to say
Concerning the profundity of suffering, the fever of desire,
(How could they know, locked away in their rooms with nothing
But their parchment and quills—truly, from whence will come
The Moreto or de Molina for our age, artists yet men as well?)
And yet the trained performer is able
With no more than the odd inflection,
The certain insouciance  in the crook of an elbow,
The telltale arch of an eyebrow
As another actor declaims his lines,
Provide blood and marrow to the sad scratchings of the purported author, Create meanings never conceived of by the dramatist.  
How many nights have I shot glances
At these poor men of letters, wringing their hands anxiously,
Huddled in the wings on the opening night of their turgid set pieces.
What performances (however involuntary and unconscious)
They would give, faces contorting with surprise and fury,
Fists clenching with rage or grabbing at their tresses
In frustration and stupefaction at what had been made
From their foolish idioms, their labored clichés.
And, after a surfeit of bows had been taken,
They would come before me,
Bowing slowly, stiffly, mechanically in an effort to keep their anger
From virtually surging from their bodies,
Meekly saying Truly, Senora, I did not know
What effect your legerdemain could have
Upon the audience and my humble words
,
But, for all their politeness, their hatred is palpable,
For I have thrown their cherished natural order on its head,
As I have usurped them as the creator.

Still, one should not be so harsh with these hijos;
The error is a common one:
So many viceroys and kings, so many priests and archbishops
Have tried to fix the yoke of man’s poor misapprehension
Upon the forces of the universe,
Forces which would brush them into the abyss
With no more forethought than they would rend the web
Of the poor, innocent spider.  
I have, on several occasions,
Accompanied many a man of means to the gaming table,
Have seen them win handsome sums
And seen others lose those every bit as spectacular.  
I have found the victors to be men
Who do not try to ascertain the hidden mysteries of the deck,
Nor bemoan the fact that they are denied the deal,
But rather treat the cards as simple things
(No more than mere bits of paper, drabs of colored ink),
Minute stages provided to display one’s craft and wisdom
In the pursuit of pleasure and profit.
Senora Villegas appears courtesy of Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
They Trusted Us
by Roderick Falconer


God gave them sad brown eyes,
And faces that were kind;
Kind of faces children love to find
At dawn on Christmas day,
Or look into for sympathy,
When hurting and alone;
Kind of eyes that follow us through life,
And heartbreak, love,
Forsaking never even when all else,
And all the others go away.

When unknown men came walking in,
They brimmed with happy expectations,
Wagging tails, their trusting faces, shining with anticipation, raised.
Without words - it was with souls - they understood,
We were their best friends,
And they were ours.
A double bond, in blood, in love:
Decreed by the creator before the dawning of dawns.
The truth, deep-written on their hearts and ours,
Like something scratched into the walls of prehistoric caves.

One day a man-shaped shadow fell over life,
While it was very fresh and new,
With yet so much unlived,
The young ones were taken, trustingly,
To a room of stainless steel and ultraviolet light.
The puppies licked the hands of those
Who lead them to the obscene edge of arch-betrayal,
Cooperating when injected, too;
A mere pinprick of pain.
And then the world of sensory excitement -
Anticipated joy - went dark,
As drug induced unconsciousness covered them like a shroud.

After that, things would never be the same.

They went trusting, into darkness,
And for just a little while,
A friendly dreamscape comprehended them.
Memory, and instinct, unleashed:
The who and what they would've known in this life on Earth...
Bright shining rivers; hills of green, jeweled with morning dew;
The birds and butterflies and creatures of all kind -
Rejoicing, every one - around the tree of life,
Their beings, amplified beyond our best imaginings.

And to the many-colored scent of life
Bright burning pixels of idolatry, reality,
Carried on currents of intoxicating air,
A remembered presence of their mothers, nuzzling them,
And then, a glimpse of us, as we were meant to be:
Their supernatural guardians, and trusted friends.

That was their final day of innocence,
Before they woke up to the murderous men in white,
With death's infectious bite-marks on their souls,
And antiseptic perfume like clouds of egg-filled flies.
That final sleep was peaceful, without fear,
No sense of what was happening to them in the white room,
Where their sleeping bodies lay.
The horror they would wake into,
Because evil men were selling lives
They hadn't made...
Selling beauty, life, and friendship,
To disfigurement and death.

In unconscious innocence, their necks were shaved,
Preparation for their voices to be surgically excised,
Cut out to insulate their ghoulish torturers
With manufactured quiet,
A counterfeited piece from ugly truth.

Their hound dog voices - barks -
Their howling into distances through woods and neighborhoods,
And deep into night's crystal-starry skies,
Were silenced now, forever.
But what need have they for voices, anyway;
For everything their voices might have meant,
No longer means a thing?

Though mutilated by their trusted friends,
They never could expect the terrors yet to come.
Lab techs didn't look them in the eye,
When they pilloried compliant puppies
To torture tables, set to ****,
Locking little heads inside plastic boxes,
For parasitic insects to eat them while they lived.

Strange arrays of imagery rampaged through their suffering minds,
As pain ran rabid and overtook them, there.
Locked down and unable to run away,
Or even by an act of will, to die.
Torment that they couldn't understand
Was on them like devouring fire.
And with their human friends so near,
And checking all the time,
Why did no one see, or hear,
and no one move to comfort them?
They trusted in us, all the way, it seems.

Howling in their minds was raw electric overload -
High voltage snakes of melted circuitry -
As hordes of hungry jaws gnawed and sawed,
And burrowed into them for many days...

Until at last, some inner life star got impaled.
Imploded, then exploded, and the lights went out.
And they were here, no more -
Just somewhere where there was no pain.

They trusted us;
God's viceroys to the dogs -
Our faithful-to-the-end companions
with a single deadly flaw:

They trusted us.
They Trusted Us | An Original Poem by Roderick Falconer

— The End —