America, America

America is not the world. If it was I too would be an American. And that is not the case. But I'm not anti-America/American. I can't be. There's too much of me that has grown from Americanism, Pop Culture, Hollywood, New York, Jazz, R&R, Jumbo Jets, USAID and, yes, Coca-Cola. There's an aura of hypocrisy nowadays. Everybody seems to cower at the idea of admitting they like American things and I'm finding hard to believe the trueness of some radical, globally-anti-global speeches when I see anarchist protesters wearing Nike shoes. No, I'm not anti-America/American, I'm just anti-The White House.

Great Expectations

These words will return,
To the Prairie's last Buffalo,
As he raises his hooves,
Against Columbus unenlightened pilgrimage.
A dead man wipe's his eyes on dirty wrapping paper.
He is still unaware of his present condition.
Slowly they slide out from their sockets,
Rolling down the mountain road,
Passing through packaged homes and
Unbroken waving children.


Great Expectations II

I have seen the head through which the Indian looks.
And his skull is vast and mighty.
By the road travel the same common places,
The sense of liberty is no longer a statue,
It cannot walk,
It crawls.
King-Kong has long forgotten
The Empire State Building’s pinnacle,
From above you sense the swarm beneath.
Don’t look,
Witnessless denial walking,
The ghost of Kennedy sobs like a baby,
Fat Charlie has taken the place of K.K.
While stone giants despair impatiently.


Talisman (or: Adam’s Leaf Descending)

Yes! Earth does rotate…Forget the apple.
Let’s talk about love, Martinis, Brillo boxes
And billions spent monthly
On the (no)war effort.

Simplify Marx’s Manifesto
To feed the hungry masses
With AK 47’s and seven feeble
Unarticulated axioms,

No longer an ideology.
(A protecting red flag, a working man
With his fist raised, a Negro holding hands
With a white man holding hands with a Chinese,

A white dove flying, etc.)
– No Pasaran (The Fascists)! In 1938
There were no more Anarchists in Barcelona.
Stalin and the Republican army had the upper hand.

The concrete and steel curtain held the illusion.
It all collapsed when East German workers
Found out that their Checkpoint Charlie
Neighbours drove VW’s to work.

To sell communism communist cells
Became advertising agencies.
Don’t tell me propaganda isn’t Coca-Cola
They are the same…

One traffics in products the other in ideology.
They both need to retail their goods.
Through what means? Images!
Ideology has been substituted by imagology.

It’s a planetary thang! An anarchist
Raising his fist will kick tear-gas cans
With the latest Nike shoes.
While a kid in Thailand earns $2.00 a month.

Still some long for the Cold War
(At least the world was shaped by its meridians and parallels).
Nowadays there are enemy cells everywhere and the poor men
DO HAVE THE BOMB, the bomb, the bombs,

The bombs that will bring us together.

So, time sets its own chronology,
We talk about love; Earth revolves around its axis,
I read the New York Times, drink Martinis,
While you put on your D&G sunglasses.


Mesopotamia

Praise war!
Death is beautiful
When anointed with shellshock.
So set ablaze the stage
For Assurbanipal’s gas-mask ball.

No-man’s-land
Grows thinner,
Between conscious abjection
And flag adulation.


L.A. X

I’ve got Dashiel Hammet on line. Collect call.
He’s bashing the hell outta some yuppie
child abuser alley cat (true!), tailor cut suit an’all.
Can’t avoid a slash from Shadow Baby’s (sweet girl)
long hard day’s smile.
Teeth dropping (or dripping) like it’s October.

Trashcan Boy crack-blasted cluster-fuck
hypodermic meteor got the shakes got the shakes,
yeah man, ev’rytin’s hunda control (sniff) I’m covered.

That got my nigga smiling.
White boy wanna ride yet youth’s a too short blanket.
Haematoma ghouls moving so slow so low
under sidewalk’s neon spill o’ under its slates.

Pain pusher Latino life surveyor got my homies walkin’
the velvet white mile hiting hard on the back of the neck,

Are they mothers? Are they babying baby mothers?
¿Que pasa chavala? Baby cradle gots AIDS
I’ll do y’a BJ to pay fo’ ma days.

L.A. temperature’s beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepin’ like a flat line,
waitin’ for winter’s long distant call to shag some hole.

There’s something pathetic, hell raising, hypocritical,
Self-consuming, idiotically unnatural about non-smoking
In California.