Birthers, Tea Baggers and all you other loons...I can not believe so many people are willing to make fools of themselves in public and for what? Were you promised a klondike bar or something?
What else are you willing to do in order to please your corporate masters? Shout down people, burn effigies, bully and harass, be ignorant for the sake of being ignorant? Makes me wonder what you good citizens are like at home. Do you react irrationally on a regular basis? Are you really this pig headed or are you feigning ignorance just to be contrary? Children will do that, you know.
Perhaps the reason why those puppet masters of yours want you to disrupt and step on the rights of others is because they don't want you actually hearing anything that might be considered detrimental to their fiscal health. Hell, most of you don't even know the basics like where your Medicare/Medicaid comes from! I know it's hard to admit when you are wrong, but you don't have to be wrong and stupid. Wrong and stupid is no way to live your life...
Remember how disappointed Ralphie was when he got his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring only to find out it was nothing more than a marketing tool for Ovaltine? Are you seeing similarities yet? No?
I used to write poetry - well, what I called poetry - all the time.
Then I got into college and took writing courses and realized that I pretty much sucked at poetry. My prose were just slightly better and my scripts were a little above the prose - but all in all I was not going to make a living with words.
I started this poem in the mid 80's. My father had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and death was sort of hanging around the house. He recovered fully after a chunk of lung was removed. The lung cancer never came back, although later in life he dealt with prostate cancer. But that didn't kill him either.
The original poem was a lament about how I didn't really know my father - even though he was right there in the house and we passed each other several times a day. Who was this guy and If he should die on that operating table, what would we have left to represent him? An old car, a chipped ashtray, a couple of Sheafer's six packs in the shed and a garden that neither my mother or myself gave a care about until the squash was ripe...
It has always been hard for me to imagine my father as a little boy, running and playing and just going wild. His upbringing was harsh, I'm not sure how much time he had for play. Having said that, my father could be one childish SOB. Arguing with him was like arguing with an 8 year old.
The final draft of this poem has pretty much nothing to do with my father. It's a case of a piece of art starting out one way and ending up something completely different. As faulty as this poem may be from a professional's view - it is the best poem I have ever written. For me, this is as good as it gets, folks.
The Boys I Watch
written in mid 80’s - finished 1997
edited 4/29/98
The boys I watch are truly boys
Shirtless
Shoeless
Over stone beaded driveways
And August scorched grass ways
Running
Tangling up the willow tree branches
Linking up fists
Kicking up dust
With black bottomed feet.
Thirty four shades of summer have passed me
Always at odds with the seasonal shift
Watching the boys I feel so archaic
Presence of mind has replaced the gift
of scurry and scramble without an intention
without the worry of getting things done
But I have done nothing to balance this greatness
in my thirty four years of snowfall and sun.
Feeling the panic brought on by September
Sensing the newness the air of death brings
It seems even now the memory aches me
Concerns of a lunch box and a desk for my things
Beyond this I moved
importance accomplished
Yet I scurry and scramble as if running wild
Having done nothing to balance this greatness
or surpass the glory of being a child.
The boys have gone savage in the trees
Capturing twilight in dawn tinted lungs
Shrieking
Shouting
Frantic for daylight
As if eating the dusk might make them become
Something
Less than human
Before
Voices call from behind rusty screen doors
And beckon
Come in from the night.
