Just Back from the Peace Demons

Just back from the peace demonstration at Dag Hammerskold (sp?) Plaza where with a couple of hundred others stood in the 6-degree weather and listened to rousing speeches by members and affiliates of NOT IN OUR NAME. My impression was that I was part of a minority demographic there — most people seemed to be either twenty years older or twenty years younger than me. Understand that I say this speaking only from a very rough impression, and that everyone there was so thoroughly swaddled in coats and scarves that it was difficult to tell their ages. The people I saw on stage, however, with the exception of one man who was the leader of a group against racial profiling (and who very engagingly led us in a Sly Stone “War/huh/What is it Good For” chant), were definitely either much younger or much older than me. (Where were my poet-friends who work right around the block?) The older one was the far-left defense lawyer who was recently held for defending the privacy of her client (I’ve forgotten her name, but she’s much in the media). The younger ones were a coalition of articulate high school students, one I think a chapter leader of the RCYP, and a few others who took to the mike with much hip-hoppy gesticulation and empassioned exhortations. On the whole a tightly organized performative event (dare I say, it almost felt like MTV at moments), but as demonstrations go it felt a little awkward, probably because it was so cold. Hiphop afficianados, who did the Not in My Name song?

Earliest memory of a demonstration: Chicago, 1967 or so. At a park — Hyde Park? Everyone clapping. I clapped too. A tall man (but then, when you are three, all men seem tall) turned to me (I think I was on someone’s shoulders) and asked,” Do you know what you’re clapping for? You should always know what you’re clapping for before you clap.” I have been very judicious about my applause since then.

Meanwhile the women of the poetic left are tearing each other up like Oscar Wilde characters over on Brian’s site. What’s to be done?

Nuncupative catfight

harshes out pores,

in gleaming codes of hostile

similarities…

Kali is Calliope (Cruella)

in the vicious circling

of protective similars

copping grownup voices

in the internecine mist…

Friendly fire…

rallying cries

of infants

in the glow…

The dissolution…

of the left… a glass of Listerine…

where’s…

the party… ?

To silently manipulate

a mood… or populate…

a demonstration…

what is…

all this populism???

Objects appear

and disappear, making plans

for our annihilation… like Marsh Arabs

winging to Mars…

No end in sight… of the crux

of matter… asteroids… four-winged…

dinosaurs… uterine… cringing…

A population

explosion.

“I don’t really like… HYPOCRISY”

(or the total annihilation of innocents…)

Populism ( a sandy fiction)

beaks an utterance.

The butter runs clear

into the bank of guns,

burnishing their cocks…

In that moment,

when I am more genuinely a charlatan

than all the other charlatans…

when I come to you with love again —

my hands saying “namaste”

my eyes saying “cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo”…

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New issue of How2 up online. Why doesn’t it compel me?

I can’t deal with preciousness, people. I just can’t fucking deal with it.

Especially now.

…………………………………………………

Nick’s torrent of nostalgia for obsolete technologies triggered a big wave of a nostalgia (for Japan) I feel continuously, almost like post-nasal drip…

and it gets more intense the more horrible this country’s policy, for which I am infinitesimally responsible, becomes…

not that Japan is beyond reproach… hardly… but at least living there I was able to detach… I like… fantasyland… this horrible… ambivalence…

Each American is forced, or privileged, to carry a globe (not THE globe — A globe — of responsibility) like so many Atlases… the only problem… is that those globes, for all their heaviness, are fake, hollow, and useless — all for show… the giant shadow puppet’s… got the whole shadow world… in his shadow hand… and his shadow puppeteer…filing his shadow nails… couldn’t care less…

but I don’t want to talk about my BAD ideology and my BAD faith (not to mention my BAD writing) anymore, because I know it’s wrong, and that’s why I went out today in the freezing day… to stand there fighting my lack of conviction and hoping…

a new bright orange badge reading NO WAR ON IRAQ…

would lift me out of that mire…

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