I’ll let you know when I’m dead

Since I haven’t heard from you in a while

Busy, as you are, with your newfound love

Riding high on your accomplishments

And your fat pockets

How can you forget that

I imagine you’re too busy to notice

Other

Me, well

Almost everything around

Is rubble bones and blood

I’ll be joining the pile soon

To be sure

Nourished in heaven with manna

Not available to collective me

Here while alive

I thought about calling you

To see how you are

I’m not the only one suffering

Everyone in their own way

Silent or otherwise

Bombs or no bombs

Food or no food

Love or no love

To be true

Because my heart is bigger than yours

And I can only feel

sorrow  for your shallow

But  can not justify

You your

Ignorant violence

So we live together

In silence

They destroyed everything.
Our homes
Our hospitals
Our place of prayer
Holy Places
They murdered our children
Our Children

My mother lies
In part, in parts
Most of her hot vapor sprayed
Against the wall
Updating paintings
Soaking into the soft cushions

I’m in a tent
On vacation
Plenty of food
Like “Victory”
It’s within reach
A few more meters
A few more deaths

You’re in a tent
You say to me
Rent-free
I should be happy
And quiet
For the privilege I endure

Before  you go into battle

Learn thy enemy

Sneak into their home

When they are pillaging elsewhere

Play their musical instruments

Eat from the sauce jar in the fridge

Maybe date their wives and/or husbands

Take their children to the park

Let them go on the rides their parents’ won’t

You will be their hero

As you go into battle

Study thy enemy

Learn their

Idiosyncratic Behavior Patterns

So you can mirror them

To point out the only truth

Anyone ever needs to know

Practice their tone and inflection

So they can identify themselves

In you

While they are bashing in your skull

From afar

When you are in battle

Be thy enemy

Invite them into your camp

To sip tea and

Elucidate strategies of

How you will meticulously

Rip each other to pieces

Limb by limb

Smoke a few cigarettes

While you take walks together along the trenches

Share pastries that define your heritage

Before you eat out each other’s mouths

Tell yourselves how

The families are

You’ve enjoyed in each other’s absence

Much earlier in the long day passing

Recount the same memories you’ve never shared

Till you realize the only war you’re in

Is your struggle with time

And how to live and  love correctly

Kiss each other goodbye

And turn out the lights

by h. Gibrain

At my first suiciding

I wanted to show my comrades

that death is a fine art

nothing to be wasted

noting to be scattered in the wind

I set up a white canvas

to catch the Rorschach Pollock

of my body spatter

that life is not static

and my body in motion

when I ignite

in dervish

my skirt splayed open

flowering umbel

my arms alight

my particulate nature

on display

like food wiped from the face

of the privileged obese obtuse

that life should be lived

not for love

not in fear

but in the name of art

and in the art of death

when you release that button

the harrowing screams

shattering bones

splattering fluids of babies bodies

the village animals

and a little ahway al araby

mingle in flight

a soup of sorts

simmering in free space

painting your  face

with the food

that was other peoples lives

to put on display

the relationship between

love of art

art of life

the living death of stolen moments

razed lands of decimated cultures

once upon a time surviving on

bear invocations of rain igniting crop

crow mythos of the wonkum mikitchia

darkening the horizon

for centuries

cleansing the terrestrial palette

for the next sun child

and the age of Aquarius

dreams of deer

that make all plants flower

all wind blow

give essence to gravity

manipulate tides

and ultimately

determine my scatter plot fantasy

of exploding in the sky

and drizzling the mist of my life

a condiment on your sloven plate

that you could taste the disaster

and wait for god in her serviette chariot

to dab the corners of your face

well

there is food in death

and death is art

too many people screaming about injustice

when maybe

we should be eating more of the dead

imbibing the blood drenched tales

of death’s survival in the midst of thriving lives

and how our children can lead

the suicide revolution

where each each city block is a canvas

where the ultimate expression of love and art

unite in blood and body part graffiti grafted

into murals

telling stories

of futile resistance

in the world of

racism writ large

the ultimate liberation comes

not from fighting

but from loving

and letting go

of the skin which keeps apart

The results of this lack of engagement were devastating – for the entire world. The neo-conservative agenda went into full swing. As outlined in the document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, the Project for the New American Century articulated their intentions to undermine the US Constitution and declare endless war putting into motion their version of the Clash of Civilizations (a manufactured ideology that they can say, arguably, came to pass (of course they engineered it as such). So, while they were at work, most of the disengaged were unaware of their intentions (though it was available for anyone to read): undermine the sole authority of the US Congress to declare war and restore it to the Executive branch (realize that this was a primary reason for establishing a democratic republic with separation of powers); gain control of the purse strings for military spending (again, a fundamental principle of a democratic republic -keeping the executive from controlling the decision to go to war and how to appropriate the peoples funds for it); to dismantle the relationship between corporation and government and, in essence, making the weapons manufacturers, arms dealers and the government one in the same – now with the power to declare war endless war and spend the peoples money).

You can imagine the results of this; you live in it: the gross unequal distribution of wealth within the US and between the Global North and the Global South (as it is called); regime change by hook or by crook in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt and so on; those endless wars in some of the aforementioned states, the Orwellian rise of terrorism to sustain the endless wars via the creation of ISIS and company in the very same and dubious way that the US organized the Base (Al Qaeda) to undermine the USSR in Afghanistan to establish their place on the Grand Chessboard… and so on.

The thing about megalomaniacal psycho-sociopaths is that they are, in fact and by definition, unaware of how they affect those around them and, similarly, disconnected from how those they are affecting feel about them. They can get away with their behavior for a little while, especially with the idealistic, well-intentioned and/or naive among us. Eventually people get hip to their game and their behavior becomes unsustainable. This can be expressed in a lot of ways but I think it is most importantly, for our sake, exemplified by the fact that few military engagements since the end of the Second World War have been successful; the ultimate outcomes of such incursions was that the moral legitimacy of the indigenous peoples percolates to create some version of non-violent “armed” resistance and finally revolution: think Rose, Orange, Jasmine, Crimson, Denim revolution, think Gandhi and King and Arab Spring. For all of the successes and the relative failures what is taking place may be described, in part, as the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, that after a long train of abuses people get smart and organize and take it upon themselves to change their situation. That was the very nature of the US revolution as much as it is the nature of the armed resistance in Palestine.

What we are witnessing today in the US Presidential Circus is a complete shift of Karl Rove’s prediction from a period of disengagement (engineered or otherwise) to a period where they thoroughly underestimated – thanks to their disconnect from civil society – the power and potential of a disenfranchised, organized peoples who were sick of the status quo (the rich stealing from the poor: the government stealing from its citizens) to stand up to the power elite, essentially spit in their face while they use every tactic in the book and even invent some new one’s, to try to shut democracy down.

If there were not a leader, Bernie Sanders, who appears to be resonating with a YUGE contingency of the American electorate, we would probably not be organically converging to Sanders’ camp. It’s good that he’s here now and whether he wins the election or not we should remember the oscillation between the “no 60′s style revolution” Rove predicted (the sleeping sheople) and the invigorated engagement we seem to be witnessing and a part of now. WE have to remember that there is a very powerful force that is always engaged in its sole purpose: to use the tools of this democratic republic to actually undermine democracy. From a Newtonian frame of reference, if we want to keep the system from slipping deeper/back into tyranny, we are going to have to be as organized and powerful a force as the establishment. If we are going to get it to move towards justice we’re going to have to organize, strategize, and work harder than they do. Their are so few of them and so many of us. Sander’s has shown, through the financial and social support he gets, that if we each contribute a little money, a little love, a little blood, sweat and tears, we can easily over power those who are working so desperately to keep us locked in the enchanted prison and likely, with the right attitude and intention, send them to the asylum where they belong.

Without a leader we may have to organize and act on our own into the future.