So Modern

In our cars
On our buses
On oil-drenched roads
In our maze of concrete walls
We feel safe

Because we are safe now
We worry about tomorrow
Or yesterday
The present is gone
Only mindless action remains

In our freezers
On our plastic plates
Our dead food sits
We don’t have to chase our food
So we take what comes easiest

The most expensive factories
Were built to produce
The cheapest food
Colorless
Lifeless
Thoughtless

Gone are the gardens that nourished us
Within our concrete walls

But our minds are gone too
So our stomachs grow
Disease is our new enemy
Because we like our safe life.

(February 27, 2009)

Regarding the Haves and the Have Nots

Have Not
Want Not

The things you own so easily own you.
Want Not,
And if you’re really serious
Have Not.

Living for others is an easy way to know God.
How can you serve others when you are collecting from them?
How can you minister to others when you are climbing over their backs?
To pass through the eye of that needle
Into the expansive life of bliss and freedom
One must be naked and humble

In the end
You can’t take it with you
Love God or love money.
You cannot serve two masters.

Have Not
Want Not

(November 22, 2008)

Back to Basics

It is amazing that the last
Two legs
The conservatives are standing on
Are sexual and reproductive “morals”

Think of what that means…
An election so important
That even if he is right about
Everything else
He is threatening our coersion of
One another to
Reproduce without limit and fill the earth
With copies of our imperfect
DNA

Are we that unevolved to still
Think that propogating our genes
To the next generation
Is all that really matters?
So moved by our fondness for babies
To believe contented gay lovers must be sinners
In need of reprogramming
And an aborted pregnancy demands punishment?

This is as simple as you can get.
And I’m not interested in simple.

God’s plan is full of randomness,
Violence, distortion,
Pain and confusion.

Most times it feels like we are swept up in a tide of events we had no control over;
We face dilemmas we could never have imagined for ourselves.
Then we watch ourselves act in our own theaters.
We boo, we applaud, we laugh, we cry
We wonder if there is a lesson anywhere in the movie.

I still wonder.

For all my reasoning,
All I know is what I feel
And half of that is false

But when the poets
And the saints
And the prophets
And the leaders that inspire us
All beat the same drum
It resonates
With the selfish parasite within us all
Called life.

(November 4, 2008)

Nothing to Say

Politics are like sports
Not yet blood sports
In this country
But the hockey moms
Want to change that

A party bound to religion
Must lie about science
Or betray their allegiance
To unchallengable dogma

The easy position is theirs;
Protect the unborn innocent
And kill the guilty offender

I take the hard road to defend
The wider way of freedom

That sometimes the guilty
Deserve a second chance
And sometimes the unborn innocent
Must die so that quality of life
For those already here
Can be maintained

“Filling the Earth”
Through science is now possible
But is it moral?
I have over 100,000 unborn children inside me
They could all grow in a petri dish
I could fill a small city
But it wouldn’t be right

We don’t need them now
They would only hurt us
Because we don’t know what to do
With ourselves yet

(September 19, 2008)

Getting Real

It’s about to get real
Real fast

We’ve been living a fantasy
Most of us

Our lenders
Took advantage of our
Lust for comfort

And our keeping up with the Jones’

Now the bank’s taking your house
As the stack of bills climbs
No one else will pay them anymore

And the bubble that held our dreams, our wants
Is bursting everywhere

There are new ghost towns
Where dogs have to find their own food

People will see you for what you are
Are you afraid?

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that
one day, we’d all be movie gods or rock stars…”
Shit, if they deserved it
So did we.

Or did we miss a step?

(August 20, 2008)

Naked

Naked human bodies
Draped over the glittering seashore
Smooth and supple
Vulnerable and innocent

Have you seen them?
They look like another race
Or another era
Rubenesque and shameless,
What happened to our nakedness?

We’ve devoured the planet.
A parasite in a 3-piece suit
Homeostatic inertia
Prevents quick changes
Even when the sky is falling

Together we are virtually unable to act
In the absence of
The smell
Of certain palpable death

This must be how the dinosaurs felt
So large and slow to move.

We are a biofilm
One part linked to 6 billion others
Moving in unison, guided by ancestral instincts

So self-righteous and smart
Distinctly aware of being separate
We play the part of separatists
But none of us holds the strings.

We’ve all done the same things
And had the same ideas.
We paved the world over
To make smooth roads to roll on
In doing so, hastened our work
And our demise
By sucking resources faster

We came to this land just 300 years ago
To find a place to be free.
We didn’t need anything else.

And what did we do with it?
We divvied up the land and
We set up a game where you could trade
A paperclip for a house
As long as you worked harder
And faster
Than your neighbor
And smiled when you bumped into people

But everyone played the game.
Eagerly, too eagerly.
And our frantic exhalations filled the sky
With smoke and poison gases
And our massive steaming piles of feces
Got buried with our giant claws
And we peed into our lakes, our rivers, and our oceans
Until our toxic urine fell like rain
Stinging our eyes
But we kept grabbing.
Because that was the game.

And we didn’t know what else to do
So the President said to work harder
And buy more things
And move faster
Because we all know it hurts to change
And he’ll be dead before the Parasite
Runs out of food.

We all thought we had a hundred years
Before the party was over.
But the lights went out
Her parents came home,
And they yelled at us to leave.

And now we can’t make any more babies
Because they’ll do just what we have done
So we deserted the cities
And left them to the rich.
We put a wall around each one and let them
Bury themselves in their own trash.

Then we started over
And we limited the size of our colony
And we limited the size of each person’s wallet
Because money is power
And power corrupts
Corruption is greed
And greed is a deadly sin

And we enjoyed our nakedness together
And the beauty of life and death,
And celebrated the heroes that passed on their love of freedom
And not their hoards of Monopoly money

And we stopped killing everything around us with bleach
And sprays
And we accepted that a human might get sick
And we accepted that we might die
Because that’s what happens on earth.
Even though they told us we had a right to live.

_______________________________________________

I sterilized my cat.
I felt bad about, but everyone told me it was the right thing to do.
Otherwise, cats could take over the city
Eat all the mice, then the garbage,
Then get sick and spread diseases that kill people.

Well, guess what folks?
We are those cats.
We are already spreading poisons and diseases that are killing people.
We are not innocent.
Each one of us that has chased the American Nightmare
Has collected faster than the waste we trusted others to manage
And killed thousands of people and animals
In pursuit of our parent’s
Mutated dreams for an easier life.

Ahh, the easy life:
The comfortable life.
A life without pain.
A squeaky clean bug-free body
Inside and out
Draped in expensive fabrics and jewels
High on a lonely mountain of man-made treasures
Away from hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes
And general Acts of God

And we thought we would be happy.
And we thought we would be safe.

(August 15, 2008)

Terrorist

Fear is your weapon
Hopelessness your fuel
Twisted by sexual repression
And lack of resources
Skin is the enemy
Lust an evil temptress
You say ‘Western girls deserve to die
For the way they dress and dance’
Well the Dark Ages passed
And light won out.
Your reign of terror
is destined for failure
Because the spirit in us all,
Even in you,
Longs for freedom
And justice and life
And expressions of joy.
But you see no future
And you are fed lies
And your desire to change your world
Yields only a fool’s bitter destruction
And one day the frantic despair
You vomit everywhere
With your bombs and nails and gasoline
Will disgust you and kill you too.
And if you were not already dead
You would mourn the
Lives wasted
On the fruitless and heartless
War you waged.
And there will be no virgins
No one will forgive you
And no one will tell their children your name.

(June 30, 2007)