Rates for the Union [Today's News Poem]

Rates for the Union

By Khakjaan Wessington

“We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August ”

-President Obama, State of the Union Speech, Jan 27, 2010

“The principal foundations that all states have, new ones as well as old or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws... Mercenary and auxilary arms are useless and dangerous; and if one keeps his state founded on mercenary arms, one will never be firm or secure; for they are disunited, ambitious, without discipline, unfaithful; bold among friends, among enemies cowardly; no fear of God, no faith with men; ruin is postponed only as long as attack is postponed; and in peace you are despoiled by them, in war by the enemy.”

-Machiavelli, Chapter XII, The Prince


A poet knows another one,
Despite attempts to hide the creed.
This State of Union speech was spun,
To duck again the cost of greed.

Obama said the combat troops.
The mercenaries? Nothing said.
Omitting truth: the easy dupe.
With 'victory,' an army fled

Before, look up every major war.
The Prince's time was just the same.
The wealthy mercenaries maim
Their host: buying access, rotting core

And faithful laws within the state.
The CIA depends on mercs
To redefine, prevaricate,
Subvert the law. That clan: berserk

With the expedience of bribes.
And power dizzy in their heights,
They hide their trail—their worst of gibes—
And do it too with rifle sights.

A hidden war away from news,
The 'troop withdraw' a cunning ruse.



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Work Will Set You Free [Today's News Poem]

Work Will Set You Free

By Khakjaan Wessington

“Unemployment reached highest level on record in 2009...”
-The International Labor Organization, Jan 27, 2010

“...You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.”

-What Work Is, Philip Levine

“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. “
-John Adams


The world is full of people born of guilt.
Disposable or dark or both—they're made
To serve their patrons. Yearning freedom kills
The urge to die. The surest way to thwart:
Implant the hope that slavery's a lie,
That clay can change to flesh. To work in hope
That those we spawn might live as we desire.

They stole the sign at Auschwitz. Lies expire,
Becoming truth with age—and then just lost.
The maxims--never uttered sincerely--
We know that work will never set us free.




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Beware of Imitators

Once upon a time (2003), Toylit was distributed through the restrooms of San Francisco. Apparently it was inspirational, because some twatty degenerate who lived in the lower Haight around the time Toylit was distributed, decided to name his league of bitch-scribbles 'Toylit.' So in case you're an old-time reader, surprised at the presence of low-quality purveyors of toylitries on the web, rest assured that the trisomy 21 addled freak has nothing to do with fine literature for the (m)asses.



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Ernst and Röhm [Today's News Poem]

Ernst and Röhm

By Khakjaan Wessington

“...reverse the overall erosion in middle class security...”
-President Obama, The New York Times, Jan 25, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/politics/26obama.html

A specter haunting President Obama haunts
The textbooks, episodes of History Channel.
In film the Fuhrer dies by it—it saved a gaunt
And saintly Private Ryan. Secretly, panels
Of Koch executives gloat as Teabag pawns fight
For vassalage. 'Aren't Ernst and Röhm the tax people,'
I've heard them ask. Security from thought—to spite
Their loneliness, they seek control of courts, steeples.
Oh Hannah Arendt dance with me, don't dance too deep—
A squad of goons are coming into town: beep beep!




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Global Village [Today's News Poem]

Global Village

By Khakjaan Wessington

The television is haunted
With saints and demons.
We worship personalities
And then networks
And then simply brands.

They say television is insidious,
That it destroys minds,
Families and so forth.
What nonsense!
Who has time to drive to church anymore?
Pizza is delivered.
So is religion.

Who says television kills?
Who calls it the idiot machine?
I say it saves. Jay Leno saved
NBC millions and millions are saved
By his monologues. I don't know how
But they still tune-in.

The North Star was once a brand.
Just because sailors used it in metaphor
Doesn't mean it didn't guide a ship northward.

Conan O'Brien has all the fun I want to have,
So I don't watch his show.
Jay Leno should have fun,
But loves comedy as accountants love.
They laugh at our sins.
They are our sins.
They've made sin irrelevant.

--

The edit to this poem, in full metered verse, can only be read in the print edition, on sale here:




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Haitian Fright Song [Today's News Poem]

Haitian Fright Song

By Khakjaan Wessington

The Haitian Fight Song
Is curious, because of whom they might fight.
The French,
The Americans,
But mostly themselves
And their denuded dirt.

They were liberated into poverty
As the White Man unburdened himself
Of the people,
While keeping the plantations
And conspiring against voodoo.

A man interviewed said that only the Haitians screamed
During the aftershocks. He said he wanted to emulate
The foreigners. It's not easy to divorce one's self from one's
Animal instincts. To be reptilian where others are mammalian.
To be pitiless in work and to pitilessly extract work.
To fight man and soil
And child and woman
And most of all to fight the self.
To be better than human
To be inhuman.
To dry the ducts of pity
So that when our turn comes
And we are smothered with rubble
And we are trapped beneath our own excrement
Nobody will save us.
Not even ourselves.
And nobody should save us.
I didn't save anyone.
They shouldn't save me.

--

The edit to this poem, in full metered verse, can only be read in the print edition, on sale here:




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The Oracles of the Supreme Court [Today's News Poem]

The Oracles of the Supreme Court

By Khakjaan Wessington

Re: Citizens United v FEC, Jan 2010

I wish to pray as wealthy people do,
In silks and gold: a prayer shawl—a suit
To consecrate and make me worthy. God
Rewards those offering the sacred graphs
Whilst burning cigarette incense. The law
Of margins—uncontested—wins again,
While under oath The Chosen testify
For Heaven's Mandate: live on tv now.



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On Zombies

By Khakjaan Wessington

Re: 3.31.06, 8:50pm: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/31/DDG6TI0A8N1.DTL

The pundits miss the main reason why zombies are ascendant; after the werewolves of the 80s, and the vampires of the 90s: it is not because of genre fears of disease, or betrayal by loved ones- zombies play on the fears of human mass extinction. Vampires and werewolves live among us- feed upon us. To drive the human species extinct works against their interest. They are perhaps interested in creating perpetual thralls of humans, yes, but not the annihilation of the breed.

Zombies are the anthropomorphization of death- and yes, this seems tautological to the literal-minded- but need I remind those very same literalists that death cannot be expressed literally? One can depict a state of death, but not the pure distilled phenomena of death. While it seems obvious to point out that 'undead' is now a culturally tautological term, it is an error to mistake the monster zombie for the monstrosity of zombie-ism. Death is usually defined as post-life. Unlife is a distinctly different state from death, as a rock, or a hydrogen atom was never alive. So un-deadness is then a way to personify deadness.

The zombie is the conformist and only the living are non-conformist. Zombies depict action without meaning. Undeath without life. They serve solely to spread the contagion of death, just as the conformist seeks to force others to conform. By contrast the werewolf and the vampire are iconoclasts. They live secretly in civilization and their special properties are a constant source of trouble and excitement- the very things that give life meaning. So though zombies and vampires are both undead, only one exists without the ego we call the 'self.' If there is an internal cognitive life for a zombie, it is unknown to the outside world and seems to do nothing to aid the zombie's fulfillment of a 'satisfying' afterlife.

Zombies are a manifestation of the fear of total annihilation and the meaninglessness that such eradication of the species brings to enlightenment values of secular humanism and 'progress.' This is the most terrifying consequence of the zombie: if zombies exist, then the Creator does not. Or worse, the properties of the Creator are malicious and more akin to Descartes' evil genius. In this regard, the zombie is a post-nuclear age monster that perhaps owes more to Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" than it does to the rather civilized monsters of the pre-industrial age. The most terrifying possibility of course, is that the Creator as we know it, lost to a gambit by some malicious entity; and that the force that was protecting our souls is gone. The existence of zombies suggests a breakdown of the natural order of things and that doom is imminent.

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