The next time they blame you
remind them you’re not
the only one living in there
when they show their fury
assure them you’ll be leaving soon
and that thing they call your body
is just a place you were visiting temporarily
and not by choice
when they call you a scoundrel
thank them with rose water
and pomegranate tea
tell them its all just a bad translation
from Arabic to English
when they call you hypocrite
insist your brain and heart
don’t talk to each other anymore
due to an irreconcilable past
and though your mouth
tends towards neutrality
you make this occasion
to assuage them
before you constrict your talons
around their necks
reasonable cause…
Matrimony
She held his hand
One more last breath he said
She waited
He smiled
In his last moments
He teased her with the ultimate
She smiled
She held his hand tighter
He teared up
It wasn’t like they thought this moment wouldn’t come
They just didn’t know how to imagine it
He held her hand, too
While he had his strength
One more last breath
She smiled
They both waited
Thinking of their struggles
Their children
The injustice
The sun
Realizing none of it mattered but the feeling
You have inside
Pence Threatens South Korea with Military Action After Being Served Gay Beef
by Jim Un
In a strange shift of political warmongering, Mike Pence threatened South Korea with military action after being served Gayme™ dumplings at the resident of South Korean President Moon. Apparently, it was a rebellious act by one of the Moon’s top chef’s who was offended by Pence’s position on homosexuality, gender equality, and his basic inherent contradictions wrapped up in his religious beliefs. After being told of the situation by a male staffer – who will later be accused of sexually assaulting one of Moon’s servers after which it will come out the he and Pence were having an affair – including fellatio in the oval office – and forced to resign or be disappeared or both, Pence threw a hissy fit.
The idea for gay beef (Gayme ™) came from scientist Marty Lion Allbright when he was an undergraduate student. “I was in bio class being taught about lesbian gulls and it hit me immediately that there must be gay steer and lesbian cows and chickens and fish and all that and we’ve probably all been eating gay meat our entire lives without realizing it. Now, I’m not gonna say you are what you eat and that eating gay meat, intentionally or otherwise, is what is making people gay; nothing of it. Rather, it was simply a business idea to market to other-than heterosexuals,” states Allbright. “After years of field testing, we collected a ‘flock’, if you will, of animals that appeared either willing or desirous to participate in acts of homosexuality and then slaughtered them and fed them to test subjects in a blind taste test,” Allbright added. Based on the studies, published in Nature Magazine, the gay meats took the cake: 4 out of 5 people preferred gay beef, chicken, fish, pork, and lamb over the heterosexual counter-parts.
While South Korea’s leader has not yet revealed that he is anything other than heterosexual, his head chef Keong Juan noticed that Moon had a particular liking for Gayme™. “When I heard of it I was first opposed to the idea. WTF are they doing forcing animals to be gay. Eventually, though, I decided to serve it to the President and on that day he specifically asked me about the change in animal proteins on the menu. I told him we had a new supplier. There was nothing untrue about that,” Jaun noted as if to defend himself. “When I heard Pence was coming here I didn’t even have to think about it. I immediately ordered my staff to prepare a variety of Gayme™ Mandoo (dumpings) to be served as a second course right after the sweet and sour soup made with transgender pork.”
One of Pence’s staff overheard the chefs laughing about something while he was molesting one of the waitstaff in a bathroom near the kitchen and, after a series of inquiries was ultimately informed that the soup was made with what on chef referred to as “Laughing Stock” and the dumplings had Beef Gayme™. This was immediately reported to Pence causing him to lurch up from his seat and decry South Korea as an enemy of God and the United States. “You have deeply insulted me and my Christian faith in which all people are considered sacred who follow god’s will. You have so tainted my pure soul with this outrageous act that it can be considered none other than an act of aggression against a foreign dignitary which is an act of war. Whoever is responsible for this shall pay for it or the entire Korean Peninsula will be subject to the collective punishment of the full force of the United States Military – something you all know quite well.”
The crowd responded with hilarity drowning out Pence’s childish tantrum and fundamentalist mutterings as they, and seemingly much of the rest of the civilized world, do not take Pence or the US, for that matter, seriously.
A Thousand Points of Darkness
by H. Gibrain
King said “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see … something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today… the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”
Well, as often occurs between opposing forces, oscillations take place much in the same way that the advantage shifts between the two teams in a tug of war until one side eventually overpowers the other through impulse or fatigue. The struggle between the people that want to be free and the prison guards keeping them in the enchanted prison – the struggle for justice and equality between civil societies and their elected-or-not leaders is a bit more complicated than a simple one dimensional tug of war, but ultimately it comes down to strength, endurance, knowing thy opponent and developing a formidable strategy to counter theirs.
It has gotten dark, so many stars came out. In fact, borrowing from Bush Jr., the thousand points of light turned out to be so many more than that since, as we dig beneath the structural farce of governments at the federal and state level, mired in corruption, we find communities, tribes and families; as we start to zoom in to local geographies we see so many points of light that we come to realize people like baby Bush, Netanyahu, Hitler, Stalin, Pot were nothing but a thousand points of darkness – like little black holes which, instead of excreting waste, accrue most of what crosses their event horizon.
King also talk about the moral arc of the universe being broad but bending toward justice. This is definitely true: we can see the evolution of the principles of human rights and self-determination to be a mostly universally agreed upon (thought hardly enforced when and where it counts) virtue so much so that after thousands of years of human intellectual philosophical, ontological discourse that such principles became enshrined in international law (again, though, hardly enforced when and where it counts).
Bush’s crafty writers artfully manipulated language to come off as a language of liberation by focusing our attention on the thousand points of local creativity and dialog, that he, somehow was responsible for, while obfuscating the fact that this notion was created from one of the points of darkness, representing all the other points of darkness in our little world since they are all connected and share the same intentions of domination wrought of racism – the typically colonialist mentality genetically engineered through inbreeding to possess a peculiarly strong sense of entitlement: its very root dug deep in an inferiority complex that stems way back to diaper days and a life of poor nutrition tied to violence.
King’s crafty writing artfully displays a language of liberation while it acknowledge an organic process of accretion around the central theme of human rights and self-determination. Human rights and self-determination are principles that are transcendent of any aspect of individual or collective identity centered around chauvinism, gender, race, religion and so on such that the words “gender,” “nationality,” “race,” “religion” and so one become unnecessary forms of distinguishing between groups since we all have a common human identity and all require the same basic needs to keep us safe, happy and healthy.
Riding along that moral arc of the universe, as we’ve seen – since King’s time – the struggles have changed in their nature and their frequency; if we turn away from those points of relative darkness that cloud that mediasphere, acknowledging that there is a sort of fabricated clash of civilizations taking place, we can acknowledge that, in the 21st century, people are rising up in greater numbers – shifting the balance of powers in the tug of war and forcing a response. We, the people, globally, are taking steps in the right direction (though some of them wrong steps in the right direction) and we must realize that every time we pull a little they will pull back that much harder the next time so with each oscillation in our direction we will need to build strength and endurance and, with resilience and steadfastness, engaging and enlisting people in the struggle for justice forever increasing our numbers to increase our strength. Strength alone will not do it, but there is a critical mass number floating about out there somewhere in the amourospere and we won’t reach it until we find our inspiration in the peoples of the cultures of this world and their ancestral struggles to bring us to this vantage point at which we now stand – witnessing the near infinite points of light beginning to finally overcome the thousand points of darkness who made their promises while they looted our livelihood.
Where have all the flowers gone?
By h. Gibrain
Not long ago I was standing in a veritable war zone amid the tear gas, rubber coated bullets and stun grenades looking at the little yellow flowers I was unfamiliar with and thinking about how the western main stream media portrays this particular conflict in the usual fairly unbalanced thought-bytes and the only lives that are ever considered are the human ones: some humans matter more than others but the rest of flora and fauna has, essentially, no representation in the media and apparently doesn’t matter at all.
We all know how important the environment is – ever since the word came to be in use – and, as a culture of refugees, colonialists, conquistadors and anything but the indigenous, we are indoctrinated in a culture of denial and disconnect from nature (the environment outside of your skin) and our minds and the language we think with does not contain the right sequences of words to express or question not only human rights and equality in the eyes of international law and human rights law (if that’s your thing), in the eyes of god (if that’s your thing), through a lens of your indigenous roots on Earth (regardless of where you’re from and all of the defining characteristics of your identity), but we never consider the impact of human conflict on the environment.
Trying to unravel the entangling alliances between state parties is as angrifying as actually understanding the often dubious relationships, based on economic and military power, which reak havoc on innocent people the world over. I’m specifically avoiding examples because there are so many to choose from I don’t want to single out one perpetrator over another and draw a chorus of “what about the others’ “. Besides that’s not my point. My point is that all of that is somewhat irrelevant – the behavior is basically universal in that people are making, selling, buying, and using weapons to kill innocent people and it’s generally not sanctioned by the respective civil societies of the nation-states doing the killing. The underlying issue, which gains absolutely no attention in the press, in social media, from political pundits and the politicians themselves, is the simple set of questions everyone should be asking themselves with their morning coffee, afternoon cocktail, dinner and a joint, is “Who is making all of these weapons? Who is selling all of these weapons? Who is using all of these weapons? And why are they being made, sold, bought, used and not regulated in any consistent fashion, let alone produced at all – when they have only one purpose?”
I’m not gonna answer that simple set of questions. I have my own thoughts and beliefs about why this is taking place. The once in a while that I can bear to think about it I just ask myself “why isn’t everyone talking about this and trying to do something about the way these forms of commerce take place?”
Generally, energy flows where attention goes so let us all put some form of attention to this issue. It can be in the form of prayer, mediation, poetry, music, dance, food, letters and phone calls and general lobbying of government officials and weapons manufacturers, letters to editors, peace journalists can participate in focusing their attention on this matter as well. Of course, there are more than one hundred and ninety-eight methods of non-violent armed resistance according to one Gene Sharp (If you’re reading this you know how to use a search engine). I can’t do all 198, but I try a few here and there in a way that doesn’t interfere too much with my white male American middle aged middle classed privilege. I’m asking you do something too. Few are guilty, all are responsible.