Like Voltaire in a Frenzy

Like Voltaire in a Frenzy

I am in exile from prosperity
I study the downtrodden
Minorities, elderly, disabled, the poor
I’ve become one of them to

Realize what it means to be human
Perfectly happy in struggle and stress
I wonder why this is, for poetry
And prayer, and meditation

It’s the gardening of the spirit
In this culture of materialism
Sometimes to live you need friends
Partners, lovers, inspiration

Cajoling life from festivity
Scolding life from monotony
Screaming life from anonymous cities
Cleverly hoping to civilize

I am in exile from justice
I face discrimination, I would know what it means!
I eat poisonous GMO food
I am becoming obese and with diabetes

I hold religion up as an icon of identity
But I believe in the human spirit
In how to overcome adversity
I’ve met my match in this generation

Too poor to be a father, too poor
To know how to be patient like a peasant
I become my own revolution
And find in society a kind of apathy

That the uncomplaining stars understand
But in my lucid song, I do not
I suffering a martyr and I doubt
The world is a kind or good place.

P r a y e r s for Baltimore #BaltimoreRiots #poem #society #Baltimore #inequality

P r a y e r s for Baltimore

Give me a broom or a shovel
And I’ll walk with you, I don’t live in
Baltimore Maryland, but I’ve seen enough
Black teenagers shot this year, by police

I think Baltimore burns for a reason
It’s a crime Americans hardly demonstrate
Here in Montreal, we’d be on the
Streets every night, if this happened to us

We’re all slaves at one time or another
The white man did a lot of things
But racism has got to stop, in a freakin’
Melting pot, where I hear Spanish more than English

If Baltimore bleeds, I think it’s worth it
Boys in blue do it again and again
White cop shot another black teen
Say again, you mean to tell me again?

You bring in the army and line the streets with soldiers
There’ no restraint in it either way
If you don’t want rioters, clean up your act
Changing your culture, grow some equality

This American dream is a pitch of Wall Street
Fund some education, keep families together
Instead you spend on the military
Baltimore, we don’t need any more martyrs
The state of emergency is pretty clear.

Question & Answer

Question & Answer

We are the not famous poets
We celebrate the common person

Black, Hispanic, Chinese, gay, Trans, Disabled
Senior, teenager, semi-homeless, poor, impoverished
Please excuse this poem

A poem has no right to make a dollar today
Only to celebrate the breathless holiday
Of art, the tragedies of living

The news doesn’t talk about
The violence in impoverished lands
Where billions have no enforcement of law
They talk about the privileged

It’s a state of affairs run by the entitled
Were you born in an entitled nation?
Where you have the luxury of

Talking about God or the state or art
There are human beings out there
Who if they wrote a poem it would be

About survival, about how not to be
Drowned by immigrant traffickers
Off the coast of Italy, or how

To move to a county with some semblance
Of prosperity, those would be words
Worth hearing, but how many have no voice.

For Michael Brown and Fergusson

Beneath a black moon
I bled for the mountainside
And for the homeless
In the city of the valley
Where night spurs

In black flanks
Piercing the stars
With the cold whisper
In my throat, life had been
The scent of a flower on a knife

Survival had not come easy
Far away and alone
The black moon did not know
How to shriek for bonfires
The voice that did not know songs

What do you carry, oh
Black youth, beaten by police?
Mixed with your blood
But the true roots of Africa?
Beneath a black moon

The white man, the young race
Is still privileged, but these
Salt tears are not for them
Not for men in suits
Born of privilege and an easy life

I bled for strangers
Killed in a chase-down
Slaves to poverty and ghettos
Where children carry guns.

Ebola Outbreak

Ebola Outbreak

i heard another person in my village
died today, we didn’t dare touch
the body, his organs had bled out

there are no white people here
white as ghosts, they are going home
my friends in America tell me
we are not on the news, only Jewish
people fighting muslims, but

don’t they know we all come from Africa?
i heard the super-nationals took this
virus into a lab and created a way

to rid itself of the old people of civilization
if Ebola spreads maybe the world
will not remember what it means
to come from tribes that your mother came from
once, we left Africa and now we leave her

to her misery, well you know what
maybe fiscal ebola is just around the corner
for people who live in America, people

who live their lives on debt, credit, profiting
from heatlh insurance, death insurance, the works
but the fact is, I don’t think this is going away
I think Ebola is here for a very specific reason
The world is ready for another plague

to hemorrhage like a zombie, it’s not news?
not if you are black, if your body fluids
don’t stain your white skin, not when
it’s on another continent, that you don’t have
relatives in, don’t call it a “black death”

just because it originates in bats from Africa
there isn’t a vaccine because the world
intentionally doesn’t wish for our well-being
you say it isn’t airborne, it doesn’t spread easily
because we are somehow dirty, and you are clean
because you are somehow rich, compared to our poverty?

~ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs103/en/