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what do you want
your kids to learn, do you care
if they know factoring, chemical formulae, theory
of numbers, equations, philosophy, semantics
symbolic logic, latin, history, socalled, which is
merely history of mind of western man, least interesting
of numberless manifestations on this planet?
do you care
if he learns to eat off the woods, to set
a broken arm, to mend
his own clothes, cook simple food, deliver
a calf or baby? if there are cars should he not
be able to keep his running?
how will he learn these things, will he learn them i ul oil' in a plaster box, encased
in a larger cement box called ‘school’ dealing with paper
from morning till night, grinding no clay or mortar, no
pigment setting no seedlings in black earth
come spring, how will he
know to trap a rabbit, build a raft,
to navigate by stars, or find safe ground
to sleep on? what is he doing all his learning years
inside, as if the planet were no more than a vehicle
for carrying our plastic constructs around the sun
i like the last line
TODO: tag all these as poetry
Free Julian Beck
Free Timothy Leary
Free seven million starving in Pakistan
Free all political prisoners
Free Angela Davis
Free Soledad brothers
Free Martin Sobel
Free Sacco & Vanzetti
Free Big Bill Hayward
Free Sitting Bull
Free Crazy Horse
Free all political prisoners
Free Billy the Kid
Free Jesse James
Free all political prisoners
Free Nathan Hale
Free Joan of Arc
Free Galileo & Bruno & Eckhart
Free Jesus Christ
Free Socrates
Free all political prisoners
Free all political prisoners
All prisoners are political prisoners
Every pot smoker a political prisoner
Every holdup man a political prisoner
Every forger a political prisoner
Every angry kid who smashed a window a political prisoner
Every whore, pimp, murderer, a political prisoner
Every pederast, dealer, drunk driver, burglar
poacher, striker, strike breaker, rapist
Polar bear at San Francisco zoo, political prisoner
Ancient wise turtle at Detroit Aquarium, political prisoner
Flamingoes dying in Phoenix tourist park, political prisoners
Otters in Tucson Desert Museum, political prisoners
Elk in Wyoming grazing behind barbed wire, political prisoners
Prairie dogs poisoned in New Mexico, war casualties
(Mass grave of Wyoming gold eagles, a battlefield)
Every kid in school a political prisoner
Every lawyer in his cubicle a political prisoner
Every doctor brainwashed by AMA a political prisoner
Every housewife a political prisoner
Every teacher lying thru sad teeth a political prisoner
Every indian on reservation a political prisoner
Every black man a political prisoner
Every faggot hiding in bar a political prisoner
Every junkie shooting up in john a political prisoner
Every woman a political prisoner
Every woman a political prisoner
You are political prisoner locked in tense body
You are political prisoner locked in stiff mind
You are political prisoner locked to your parents
You are political prisoner locked to your past
Free yourself
Free yourself
I am political prisoner locked in anger habit
I am political prisoner locked in greed habit
I am political prisoner locked in fear habit
I am political prisoner locked in dull senses
I am political prisoner locked in numb flesh
Free me
Free me
Help to free me
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free Barry Goldwater
Help to free me
Free Governor Wallace
Free President Nixon
Free J Edgar Hoover
Free them
Free yourself
Free them
Free yourself
Free yourself
Free them
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free us
DANCE
hate the last line but i kind of like some parts of this
Machinery : extended hands of man
doing man’s work. Diverted rivers
washing my clothes, diverted fire
dancing in wires, making light
and heat. To see it thus is to see it, even
diverted rivers must resume their course, and fire
consume, whatever name you call it.
RANT
You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology
a cosmogony
laid out, before all eyes
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
you do not ‘make’ it so
there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence
you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from
hangs from the heaven you create
every man / every woman carries a firmament inside
& the stars in it are not the stars in the sky
w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire
history is a living weapon in yr hand & you have imagined it, it is thus that you ‘find out for yourself history is the dream of what can be, it is the relation between things in a continuum
of imagination
what you find out for yourself is what you select
out of an infinite sea of possibility
no one can inhabit yr world
yet it is not lonely,
the ground of imagination is fearlessness discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play but the puppets are in yr hand your counters in a multidimensional chess which is divination
& strategy
the war that matters is the war against the imagination all other wars are subsumed in it.
the ultimate famine is the starvation
of the imagination
it is death to be sure, but the undead
seek to inhabit someone else’s world
the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is ‘it all adds up’
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
There is no way you can avoid taking sides
There is no way you can not have a poetics
no matter what you do : plumber, baker, teacher
you do it in the consciousness of making
or not making yr world
you have a poetics : you step into the world
like a suit of readymade clothes
or you etch in light
your firmament spills into the shape of your room
the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves
A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory
Dig it
There is no way out of the spiritual battle
the war is the war against the imagination
you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance
it is a war for this world, to keep it
a vale of soul-making
the taste in all our mouths is the taste of our power
and it is bitter as death
bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden
the guy at the gate w/the flaming sword is yrself
the war is the war for the human imagination
and no one can fight it but you / & no one can fight it for you
The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
it is not only fierce, it is practical
men die everyday for the lack of it,
it is vast & elegant
intellectus means ‘light of the mind’
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun
the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central
It’s fitting that Huey dedicated this book to Bobby Hutton, the first member to join the Party after Huey and Bobby Seale, and the first Black Panther to be killed: Bobby was just seventeen years old when, after a stand-off, police gunned down the unarmed youth as he surrendered. Huey was devastated by the murder but also clear-eyed enough to understand that a revolutionary is “a doomed man.” In other words, every revolutionary fighter by definition struggles against the power imbalance of the establishment, and the cost of this struggle is often paid with one’s own life. Huey coined the term “revolutionary suicide” to describe this phenomenon. Not to be confused with what he calls “reactionary suicide”—wherein a person kills himself in despair and helplessness—revolutionary suicide is infused with the possibility that one’s death will further the revolutionary cause. As Huey explains, “[I]t is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. . . . Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we move against these forces, even at the risk of death.” [...]
I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions. This possibility is important, because much in human existence is based upon hope without any real understanding of the odds. Indeed, we are all—Black and white alike—ill in the same way, mortally ill. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
footnote after Establishment: The power structure, based on the economic infrastructure, propped up and reinforced by the media and all the secondary educational and cultural institutions.
My high school diploma was a farce. When my friends and I graduated, we were ill-equipped to function in society, except at the bottom, even though the system said we were educated. Maybe they knew what they were doing, preparing us for the trash heap of society, where we would have to work long hours for low wages. They never realized how much they had actually educated me by teaching the necessity of resistance and the dignity of defiance. I was on my way to becoming a revolutionary.
About two years before I completed high school, my inner life was plunged into a sea of confusion and turmoil that lasted until Bobby Seale and I organized the Black Panther Party. For four years I went through the kind of pain that comes when you are letting go of old beliefs and certainties and have nothing to take their place. This distress had begun earlier and was a result of contrasting and varying elements in my life. As I matured physically, the problems seemed more insoluble, the strain became greater; I felt adrift. I began to question everything about my life. There seemed no haven of security in anything I was doing or hoping to do.
I questioned my religious activities and my search for God. I questioned whether school was worth the effort. Most of all, I questioned what was happening in my own family and in the community around me. My father’s struggle with bills was common in many of the families of my comrades. He had worked hard all his life only to sink more deeply in debt. It seemed that no matter how hard he worked and sacrificed for his family, it led to more work. Things never became easier. I began to ask why this had happened to us and to everybody around us. Why could my father never get out of debt? If hard work brought success, why did we not see more success in the community? The people were certainly working hard. It seemed we were predestined to endless toil. We poor people never reached the point of having time to pursue the things we wanted. We had neither leisure time nor material goods. Not only did I want to know why this was so; I wanted to avoid a similar fate.
The struggle with religious faith is a difficult experience to describe because it involves many things that are either repressed earlier in life or not understood. In the process, the fears that are not related to religious beliefs are released. By then you no longer have any protection from your religion, and you have to start dealing with your dread. The real world closes in on you, cutting off traditional comforts like a simple prayer. Eventually, you, and you alone, have to deal with troubling questions. This always leads to anxiety. There is nothing, so you are free—and terrified.
Maurice taught me a lesson that I try to apply to the Black Panther Party today. I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.