woensdag, september 28, 2005



Working Class Hero
John Lennon

As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,
A working class hero is something to be.
There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.
A working class hero is something to be.
If you want to be a hero well just follow me,
If you want to be a hero well just follow me.

donderdag, september 22, 2005




She Proved Me Wrong



No!
There are not little birds that sing,
they are begging.
They want a piece of that
Democracy.

No!
She tells me, don't fold
your clothes in a heap and
piss in the open space,

I need you,

she repeats, only this time louder
as though it were a different language
and saying it louder was the translator.

No!
I can't take it any more!
(or maybe just a little on the side.)
Gimme what I don't know that I want!

No!
They say, "you can't do that."
No?
Why not?

Because you will end up in prison,
that's why.
You might end up in prison with AIDs too.
You might end up in prison
Yeah and when you do, you dunno what
is possible.

No!
The mother says, this guy is no good,
I won't let my daughter...
yet
until
you give me some yourself.

No!
these are just the photographs,
not the memories.
I remember it better than being.

No,
she said it was fun.
And it was.

No,
not really.

maandag, september 19, 2005



The Line

It wasn't always a clever line.

How many hours did I polish it with beer?
How many faces did I come across
before I landed, there, before you
ready to recite?

Oh yeah, this was a line
I'd been working on for weeks
in front of mirrors, on the subway,
lying on the beach.

So when I arrived, blown in by direction
and two feet in front of another,
precariously, I arrived knowing
every line back and forth, upside down,
to and fro, left to right and right to left.

And you were already painted,
ready for war, blood on the lips,
expectant, one leg crossed over another,
toying with the straw in your drink.

I've got a line alright. Clever it is.

Just wait and see.

maandag, september 12, 2005

Weightlifting



Let me try to bench press 100 kilos
of hope.

I fucked it all up somehow.

Hope was too fucking heavy.

And so were all the people relying on it
who caused me grief because hope was
on the corner of Nowhere and Never
and carrying them all
on my back was heavier
than I'd imagined

Let me try a dumbell curl of 35 kilos
And while I strain, snakes come out of my hair,
blood bursts through my eyes, all
the little symbols
that I'm doing something wrong.

When I lift weights like love, the
knees buckle; I'm doing squats
of love
and the sweat is pouring out of me
and the strain is all but unbearable.
That could be 300 kilos
but that's too much woman to love.

Let me try a set of rowing 50 kilos
to my chest and back to my ankles and back
to my chest,
somehow not the same as sex,
weightless as it is.

The weight of the world is a feather.

The world is too big to contemplate,
not any heavier than an atom -
Adam, atom, too big to contemplate
in world as light and weighty as ours.

Let me try to lift peoples' spirits,
100 kilos at a time.
I max out, turn in, shut the eyes,
grimace as though I were really trying.

Yet nothing moves and maybe Sisyphus
is to be admired because he got
the rock rolling anyway.

The spirits are heavy.
Keeping them up is a struggle
no matter how many weights
I lifted on the way up.

*****

also want to take this opportunity to asking anyone reading this to have a look at another blog I find interesting:

Last Call.

Bits and bobs, baby. Bits and bobs.

zondag, september 11, 2005

4th Anniversary



Lorca - Part One of A Poet in New York - Dawn

Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.

Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those that go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in an impudent challenge to rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

*****

Seen Better Days



Charles Bukowski - Young In New Orleans

starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, mabye it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my small dark room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though:
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the lights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
]me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy mabye
is not so bad
if you can be
that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.



George Gordon, Lord Byron - The Destruction Of Sennacherib

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he pass'd,
And the eyes of the sleepers wax'd deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there roll'd not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpets unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

vrijdag, september 09, 2005

Kaboom!



FILL FULL

What we know of ourselves are fitted
weekly in spouses and children and jobs
meakly reflecting.

What I am, I can fit on a thumbprint.
The Government can tell you that

and almost everything about me
but who I am

wihout being fitted properly
into the scheme of things
or in the realm of knowing
THIS is the way to go,
not THAT.

*****

And when I relax, I tire like a cat.
If they let me out of the box
I will run fastest
for the cars.

*****

No wait, those are dogs.

*****

Lately, they begin to appreciate me.
They comment on my clothes:
"oh what a nice rack you have"
or,
"great ass, think you'll bring some home
for me?"

Yeah, I say.

There's a big ass in your face
and it's called America.
Come and fuck it.

*****

So when it's down to the chips
and the dreams are counting
down to reality; one two tick tock
I will be.

There for this little, tiny
shadow
when you and I
were playing for all the marbles.

*****

Kaboom!

dinsdag, september 06, 2005

Steve Bell

zondag, september 04, 2005

KATRINA

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

Hey!
I've got two gallons of water,
I've got a splendid set of ribs,
I've got a pair of balls,
lips.

Everything that desperation needs.

Let me remember for you
in case you forget
I am here to help you.

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

Let me stop you. Don't leave.
Don't even think about it.
I've already locked all the doors
and all the windows.
You stay what you are
and don't move.

Slowly, day by day,
you remember
I'm in charge.

Let me capitalise on the suffering
of other people who, well, suffer.

I like you people. You are
my story,
my living,
my bread on the table
to feed the mouths of my children
and fund their educations so they can
grow up just like me;

hungry for your suffering,
thirsty for your reality,
ready, always ready,
to report on your misery.

donderdag, september 01, 2005

Where's The Fats?



Of all the New Orleans stories, this one strikes me most: Fats Domino is missing.

Perspective: It's ironic in a way: how many civilians killed by terrorism from 2000-present versus how many civilians killed by mother nature from 2000-present.

Whose god should the world be fighting?

Hopefully, ole Fats is just off on a bender somewhere and out of harms way.

The City of New Orleans
by Steve Goodman

Riding on the City of New Orleans,
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders,
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail.
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields.
Passin' trains that have no names,
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.

CHORUS:
Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

CHORUS

Nighttime on The City of New Orleans,
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home, we'll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness
Rolling down to the sea.
And all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rails still ain't heard the news.
The conductor sings his song again,
The passengers will please refrain
This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

Good night, America, how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.