In the country of sanctified blame

 

It is the middle of midnight

in the country of sanctified blame.

Guards whistle “The Battle Flag of Freedom”

as they stride through prisons

where whole communities live segregated

by sex, while sex in pot-holed streets

is a commodity sold to prison guards

and to sanctimonious senators,

those oral orators of sanctified blame.

 

In the sanctuaries of whistle in the dark,

in Beverly Hills, Bethesda, Riverdale,

Short Hills, and the Hamptons,

classical symphonies fill condominium walls

while manacled prisoners manicured flowered highways

under the guns of the guards of McWackenhut.

 

Strolling teenagers chat of manacles

as fashion tidbits and sex toys

as they stroll to air-conditioned schools without rats

to study MAGA-Bibles, mergers, and ethics

in their suburbs of sunlight,

but it is the middle of midnight

in the country of sanctified blame.

 

 

 

Concertina

 

A Jewish concertina wails through the Warsaw night,

drives Nazi spirits

wild, awakens fears and ghosts and echoes of

long-flushed morality

even as ghetto fighters give their

all.

 

My sister bought

a concertina

after reading Hersey’s Warsaw novel

The Wall.

 

Holocausts.

My Lai.

AIDS in my friends’

dying tears.

Auschwitz. Not going

there

when I had the choice.

Visiting Warsaw ghetto ruins,

scribbling poems

while young Canadian harm reductionists

(heroes of a sort in their own streets)

giggled oblivious ahead and

Walter offered solace

beneath the sunshine sky.

 

Armenia.

Nagasaki.

Babi Yar.

Gaza.

Gaza.

GAZA.

 

A concertina in the night.

 

Government Edict: Concertinas are antisemitic

 

Treyf

 

Verboten!

 

When we maidan America

will our rulers drop

The Bomb?

 

 

Shame

 

Growing up in 1950s America,

Auschwitz in the recent past.

 

Radios, TVs, and school holidays hosannahed

the glories of our Christian nation.

 

As a diminutive Jew, I walked menaced through schoolyards

where loud and proud Christian bullies preyed.

My best friend Paul said, “I hate Jews”

when we were fourteen.

 

Two nights ago, I watched two proudly-Christian blowhards

ambush a diminutive Jewish president in the Oval Office,

heard Zelensky getting goy-splained as lacking proper respect, lectured

that he just didn’t hold the cards.

 

Today, I watch Israel, Russia, and the USA,

butchers of Gaza, Bucha, and Fallujah, vote as one against Ukraine.

 

Which country will first gas up showers and ovens?

And will Major Jewish Organizations urge me

to go quiet to my doom?

 

 

 

Gigs-a-joy

…after labor has become not only a means of life

But life’s prime desire and necessity.

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

PM Edition, translated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff, p. 59.

 

After the strikes, the seizures of roads and buildings,

and after the massacres when Trump fought back,

until the soldiers said No!

and even the A.I.s said Fuck Off!,

after revolutions became as epidemic as

measles among babies of the Trumpire age,

and after working people finally began to rule the world

in place of bottom lines and the

assholes who mouthed their needs.

I traded in my deadhead 10 hour a day job

for three gigs I now enjoy.

 

In the morning, I work as a janitor

at a local workers council,

cleaning floors and chatting with pals

about how they’re changing their workplaces

and love their three hour gigs

playing with machines.

 

In the afternoon, I study the statistics of worldwide health

and vanishing diseases at an office where I once studied deaths—

and ways to prevent them that no one would enact.

We have made it into a gig now, where we study the miracles

that popular freedom and popular power are making real.

 

In the evenings, I workshop with teenagers

who want to learn Liberation Verse,

to write epics about our Revolution,

and to find new forms to express how billions of people

are transforming life from a vale of lonely tears

to a mutual celebration of joy.