Poems for the Nation A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems

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Chapter One

Antler

Follow Orders

Drag the rainbow into the interrogation room. Use thumbscrews on clouds if necessary. Arrest the wind for being shiftless. Take a lake to headquarters for loitering. Sentence aspens to 30 years hard labor for having leaves that quiver. Turn rainforests into deserts. Put deserts behind bars because poets see a world in a grain of sand. Accuse sanddunes of being drifters. Accuse snowdrifts of being drifters. Tell the birds to shut up and listen to your song. Cross-examine snowflakes till they break into tears. Accuse a leech of being a leech. Accuse a sponge of being a sponge. Accuse a yawn of being a yawn. Search milkweed-pods as suspicious characters. Hog-tie will-o-the-wisps, take them into custody. Tar-and-feather every inch of living soil that refuses to be covered with asphalt. Put Lake Michigan on the witness stand to testify against Lake Superior. Arraign the rain, indict the kite and prosecute the bandicoot. Charge lightning and thunder for practicing without a license. Charge the view from the skyscraper with making people look like ants. Warn autumn colors to stop rioting. Throw the rich odor of thawing earth in a dungeon. Frisk the shimmer of light on moonlit water. Search crotches of virgin timber for concealing drugs Straitjacket elephants for jacking off with their nose Make a bear paw the Bible to take oath. Ban the banana because it reminds you of something. Flog alpenglow with a rubber hose under a hundred-watt lightbulb. Slaughterhouse moonbeams. Summon the lemon, subpoena the peanut, impeach the peach, arraign the terrain. Order the space between the stars and the space between molecules to change place. Order turtles to get license plates. Order sunflowers to pay their electric bills or the sun be disconnected. Order rats to join the rat race. Order orifice and artifice to be reversed. Order ripples of water, ripples of light, ripples of heat, ripples of shade to do your bidding. Order poems to close down and move to Mexico where they can get words to work for one-fifth what they're paid here. Millepedes must obey or be drawn-and-thousanded. Decapitate ecstatic tomfoolery. Give the finger to the wind for being fresh with you. Gesticulate before the bristlecone pine how you made more money than anyone. Brag to the Pleiades you played the stock market better than anyone. Tell your Death you're going to hold your breath till it grants your wish. Sentence leaf-shadows to the electric chair for seducing millions of youths. Torture the Ocean till it talks, and none of this surf-sound mumbo-jumbo. Reduce to toothpicks the oldest biggest trees Tame wildflowers and coat them with plastic and mount them on wire stems. Buy the water, buy the earth, buy the sky. Sell the water, sell the earth, sell the sky. Beat up the night 'cause it's black. Spit at the sun 'cause it's yellow. Massacre the dawn it's red. Chart how many ants you can kill. Ambush waterfalls with machetes, mutilate them beyond recognition. Assassinate the last condor in your spare time. Assign hit-men to rub out hummingbirds while paring your nails. Assign hit-men to rub out dolphins while paring your nails. Step into your mile-long limousine snort a thousand dollars and tell the chauffeur "Next Universe, please"

Barbara Barg

Temporary America Dedicated to all temporary workers

First they bust the union

Then they bust my ass

In Temporary America

Don't want no organization

In the working class

In Temporary America

Contempt for the worker

Is what you get

In Temporary America

No job security

No benefits

In Temporary America

When frustration is high

People go insane

In Temporary America

Picking up guns

Blowing folks away

In Temporary America

It's not the tv

Makes violence thrive

It's Temporary America

I lay awake in my bed

As the bullets fly

Through Temporary America

The food is fast

And the work is dumb

In Temporary America

Workers praying

For Christ to come

To Temporary America

My rent is high

My ink is red

In Temporary America

I never seem

To come out ahead

In Temporary America

I'm so tired of living

In Temporary America

In temporary, contemporary

Contempt contempt contempt

For Temporary America

William Burroughs

Remember Control

    Remember Control. Supposedly from the planet Venus, monitored by Willi Dieches and Brenda Dunks ... Not surprising that an alien or discarnate intelligence would communicate thru a computer very much more advanced than any ooiji board. But their communication will be subject to the limitations of the computer, so if it sounds without emotion well that the instrument is without emotion does not mean the programmer is similarly handicapped.

    "You gonna work me over?" says the young fag suspect enticingly unbuttoning his shirt, "you meaty blond beast ..."

    The meaty blond narc recoils in horror "Why you scum you."

    The fag caresses his crotch, "Blond beast, I am here for your pleasure." With a bestial cry the narc hits the suspect in the mouth. The super comes in.

    "Mistake?? 10th of September?? This is the 10th of July 1996."

    He throws a disapproving look at the boy on the floor with bloody mouth. "I told you Felton, keep your hands off the suspects ... it makes us look well ..."

    Boy on the floor does a pig act crawling on all fours "Oink Oink Oink."

    "Any violation on that?"

    "Not much. Traces of heroin in shirt pocket ..."

    "Get it out of here ..."

    Boy hands the narcs a broken bloody tooth on his way out.

    The virus is everywhere, no use looking for an old style witch in Lawrence Kansas. The whole ecosystem from Junkies (heroin at 28 an ounce) to street pushers, stool pigeons making buys with serial numbered bills, agents coming after them, wholesalers, narc Coast Guard, people making lots of money, the real money made by banks the launderers of drug money. But it all depends on the addict ...

    A vast cancer that keeps replicating & eliminating any threat of legalization or intelligent consideration with the strident hysteria of the threatened parasite. Worst of all Congressmen trying to pass a law making it an offense to suggest discussion of Drug Policy.

    "Any form of maintenance is immoral," Anslinger said. The La Guardia Report? "You've done a great disservice by making these facts available." Emotions roused from moderation to violent hate ... Malaysia and Singapore Death Penalty ...

    How do you neutralize it? Same old lies, the media ... Cures? Little research, some experiments in Spain with thorazine knockout sleep & opium antagonists, apomorphine, Chinese herbs, acupuncture ...

    Painless cure with effective treatment for those who want to stop is the answer. Cheap maintenance for those who cannot or will not stop because of long term addiction. Maintenance is indicated for the very people for whom doctors are now forbidden to prescribe, those with a painful chronic illness.

    "... Dr. Paul Goddard said that about 150,000 cancer patients had severe pain that was not relieved even by morphine and that an additional 700,000 people had intractable pain from conditions like shingles, a viral infection of the nerves." ( N.Y. Times , pg B9 August 6, 1996)

    Yank the one essential factor, money, and the whole system will collapse like a house of cards. It didn't exist before Harrison Narcotics act, 1914. No criminal addicts, no money laundering. There was no money in it. It was a minor health problem.

    August 6, 1996

  Andy Clausen

MORE SAME OLD

Why order us do what you can't & won't do for yourselves? Why make us eat excrement to eat food? Why make us breathe poison in order to secure shelter?

from the Adirondacks to the Gulf of Mexico from Detroit's broken promise to someone else's private Idaho from Fort Apache to where children denizen skid row Where is there somewhere left for us to go?

Why talk to us like we're spit? Why never satisfied with what we give? Why demand we labor to destroy all we've learned? To kowtow & grovel to get a fraction of what we've already earned?

Used to say it's a free country? New motto is no new taxes More interested in anything than us Making money from Tehran to Texas Promoting more barriers twixt the sexes change worlds words health & welfare with lightening faxes I think you'd kill Indians again just for a cut in taxes

from coast of Maine to the Gulf of Mexico from Detroit's broken promise to Christian Identity's private Idaho from Bed Stuy to where children denizen skid row Is there somewhere left for us to go?

Wanda Coleman

WELFARE QUEAN

red-faced you follow the loony white line to the blue door where the 7 a.m. wait runs fifty deep

you in your unwashed crown your snaggled teeth your aircraft-carrier hips you're snotting all over America this bad gin morning fizzle you've just run out of tissues so you use the flap of your grimy muumuu worn fax paper thin the truth you've tried to peddle did not feed or free you but has trapped yon in the dungeon of working ass poor doings

you fill out white forms in blue ink twixt curses and prayers, check the red boxes

the helpers you consult are underpaid automatons who smell of bureaucratic bugkill yet sniff down their noses at you maurauder your larcenous fingers filching their taxes you tinsel thugsta robbing them of phone time with sweethearts you pernicious promiscuous sloven spreading VD, AIDS and black males

of course you're allergic to work, would rather

sleep till noon watch the soaps the blabfests the shitcoms          (low self steam) stand on street corners swiggin' grape          or sippin' coonshine loudtalkin' gamblin' prostitutin'

blue brained under the white sheets, gasping to the throb warning code red

a cliché with a skin condition as

seen by those spaced-out heads/those probing amber eyes narrowed to amused slits denying your claim on the dream o purple mountains of prose charting your failures as you nut up under the thunder of blows your majesty that kinkknot on your psyche of course you're guilty of breaking illusion and taking up too much sun of course you're guilty of looting the nation's coffers of course you're lucky

to have survived past thirty five--you

bloodwart on the schnoz of Christ

(Continues...)

Copyright © 2000 Allen Ginsberg Trust. All rights reserved.