Poems

One by one, poets go
along trails blazed
in the compass room of the mind –

All bound to find magnetic north,
all poised to say their news
according to the comfort of their shoes.

Dave Read

On land grabbed by Spanish, French, Dutch, and English
gold diggers, evangelists, trappers, and merchants,
a new race took root, to undo ancient wrongs.

That mix of invasive species produced Americanus veritas,
forever rooted in ancient lands, forever pledged to the promise of
one new united land, where freedom rings the Liberty Bell, whose gnell,
after another ninety years of hell, broke ancient slavery’s chain.

Now released from the prison of historical ties to empires
built on political lies and religious cant, Americans can grow –
with roots in earth between our great defending oceans,
and eyes on the ironclad promise written in our founding papers:

Freedom demands eternal vigilance against tyranny’s siren song;
while liars rant and rage, having seen the glory, true Americans
turn to the page of freedom songs.

Dave Read

apologies to Emma Lazarus

Before the transition, from a natural thing
to a reality-based thing, as seen on TV,
America was home to the poor and tired,
to the homeless and tempest-tossed,

Made that way by ministers and kings,
of churches and states that translate
the voice of God into pomp and creeds,
with the young fed on hate and greed.

Eventually, the young grew restless,
went over seas, where we live among natives
whose sunburned brows we beat with cross and
sword, whose tongue we twisted to sound English.

Alas, we’re done, the new collossus crouches now,
tarnished, unflagged, our riches tattered rags.
–
Dave Read

You’re in our thoughts and prayers
who cannot see that what passes
for politics on TV, does not reflect
reality, seen from above, by God,

But merely alternate facts. In truth,
what’s sold on TV by those few
chosen below, by the donor class,
is reversible, to even becoming odd.

Dave Read

It ain’t the word shaped by the wind
blown out of someone’s lungs that hurts
your feelings, or frightens you –

It’s who owns the heart, mind, and soul
that comes with those lungs that you’re
well advised to worry about.

After all, sticks and stones will break
your bones, but words will help you
locate somebody in orthopedics.

Dave Read

Whatever becomes of our dearly departed,
we must presume they’re well looked-after,

Since they let us resume our trials and tribulations,
and send but tremulous memories to our celebrations.

Dave Read

There are no them in America,
but only you and us. They fled

back to old world fatherlands.

In the new world, with her seas,
mother nature defends U.S.

Dave Read

Light as a feather, insight tickles awake
joy of something seen in something else –

Blood seen in the red of a rose is all
it takes to quicken a daydreamer into a poet.

Everyplace wanderer, everything ponderer,
the poet proposes that violets are blue

Because they envy rose’s high station; should
sparks of rose-envy ignite Wars of the **Violets,

Nobody gains more than poets, now presented
with fresh fallen fodder, to laud their heroics.

Dave Read

* The Charge of the Light Brigade
** Wars of the Roses

Poetry is not speech, nor sermon,
poetry neither pleads, nor defends.

Poetry is provocation, an indication
that poets, on their endless walks and talks

With the immortals, stumble through portals
in faux brick walls, behind fake bookcases

To launch their flights of fancy, to ignite fires
of indignation at the plight of the poor

And forever abused, who want only a seat in
the midst of our glib and gilded donor classs,

To be allowed to slurp with the fat cats
and fill up on the milk of human kindness.

When poetry can’t talk, she’s liable to swear like
a drunken sailor in Times Sq. during Fleet Week.

Dave Read

Collecting now in numbers unknown
to generations that rolled their own
poets in barrels down Wall Street,

Are apprentice and aspirant poets, sold
on the promise that school is where to
unpack the supernatural, that university

Is where the action unfolds in line with rules
that morph into walls lined with mirrors that
divide us from nature, forever free and unruly.

Dave Read

When the love of personal liberty met the hatred of inherited power
on the Concord green one April day, a farmer’s musket called the world
to witness the birth of the first nation so conceived.

America was born on paper, not in conquest, as when loyal subjects carried
empires on their backs, under a lash made lethal by reverence to religious
cant that hasn’t kept its secrets since Gutenberg unlocked holy scripture.

America was born on paper, and with paper proclaimed the death of a slave trade
worse than even Moses knew. So long as we don’t lose the paper, so long as we maintain
the right and skill to write by natural hand, not by BigTek toy from BigTek store,

So long as we maintain the papers of our founding, not copies edited for public consumption,
So long as we corral the donor class, now spied by vultures near their gilded Donner Pass,
So long as we reclaim the right to choose from among ourselves, not who the Donors choose,

Because they think of the poor and afflicted only at temple, mosque, and church,
Because the poor would tax them and keep them from their quest to control gravity,
Which impedes their flight of fancy, which brings them down, not up, to a Donner Pass.

Dave Read

Apologies to Grantland Rice*

Thanks to the grownups in charge,
onto campus still ride the four horsemen:
famine, pestilence, destruction, and death.

Away from the action, go daughter and son
onto campus, governed by men and women
whose preference is not action but order.

Order is the folly that leads grownups to
transform nature’s grass fields into gridirons,
for the harvest of concussions made there,

Which fertilize fields of study, once enough
gold has poured from gridiron professors
into some dean’s wide receiving hands,

For distribution among the professions
who share in the plentiful spoils
of gridiron wars, who design the tools

Of actual wars, the ones against others
and the one against nature herself,
who knows only a daughter and son.

Dave Read

* Outlined against a blue-gray October sky the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as famine, pestilence, destruction and death. These are only aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below. – Grantland Rice, New York Herald Tribune, October 18, 1924

Perpetual children, Americans await
father’s return from war, but war has
a mind of its own.

War has its own dependents, in the
bloody trades and professions
of the donor class,

Who feed fodder to generals, who
huddle under brassy hats, to aim
cannon and gun,

This way and that, everyday,
since Common Sense was ridden
out of town on a rail.

Dave Read

Readers and writers write and read our way
clear through to the start of the next thing
sent to quake the ground beneath our feet,

Sent to wake us from our nightmare sleep –
sent here to ease us, to please us, and
refresh the dream of the grassroots republic

We designed to push good ideas up
the food chain to the c-suite where
donors meet our Barbies and Kens,

Sent from central casting, who promise
to pull us up to c-suites and landscapes
that overflow with milk and honey.

Writers and readers come together
to flip the script and overturn
the upsidedown cake that keeps

Us awake with nightmare lies
that blame Moses for slavery,
and send Christians to war,

Because donors feed on blood
made to flow by bullets made
and sold in the U.S. of A.

Readers and writers neither
write nor read, now that we
have microsoftened our brains

and allowed Gates, Jobs,
Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, at al.
to steal our thunder and make dollars

Reign the way aristocrats did before
the guillotine made blood flow like
water across the old world desert,

Where all states ruled top down,
and fed king and crony first,
reader and writer last.

Dave Read

Anno domini numbers years
since Jesus Christ appeared,
with the gift of hope for us of good will.

Good will frees us from the fear,
that unless their dead outnumber our’s,
forever, we’re their slaves.

No gun shoots as far as good ideas go –
they go through walls, and leave them whole.
Wherever bullets go, holes appear.

Whoever speaks with bullets,
knows only holes
and flows of blood –

O dear, from young and old,
from good and bad,
flows blood from war, a wasting flood.

Another Dylan song would be timely,
if this time, instead of telling us
the answers all are blowing in the wind,

Bob says which wind, the one that carries
warmth from west, rain from east, snow from north,
or fear, as once grew on plantations, in our south.

Dave Read

Behold partisans in America, who groom their children
with gifts of grand theft auto, and guns for boys,

So that they will become cannon fodder, for the elect
and their donors, the fat cats and fatheads who cannot

Prove, through reason, the virtue of their foreign affairs.
Partisanship feeds on family – war eats girls and boys.

Dave Read

Prayer proves the humility,
before the creator, of the prayer,

Even though some prayers are unaware

The answer always is yes, unless
the creator deems us insincere.

Dave Read

Know this sister and brother: gravity rules our lives.
It must be obeyed each step of the way, up ladders
and ramps, through all our days. Nature rules,
but begins with the award of life, our first prize.

Centripetal names another force, a law that keeps
us spinning through space without falling out of place
as we wait for the masters of laws lower than gravity
to grab the gavel and begin to make sense.

Centrifugal names the opposite force, a law that makes
things fly into space, which the center cannot hold. As said
by Yeats, an old world bard, the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Non sequitur, a thing so old it’s still dressed in Latin,
is not a natural, but a human law, so it may be ignored
at no greater cost than anyone decides to impose –
such as by wrinkling the brow, or a damning D plus.

Dave Read

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

By William Butler Yeats

“The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War[4] and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.” From wikipedia.