Good afternoon friends

I was asked to come here by my comrade in words to discuss conflict resolution since I just finished a formal discipline in the course of peace studies and conflict resolution at what is essentially the opposite of a military academy.

What I learned there reinforced what I already knew – that there is a preponderance of peace in the world and their has been a radical, revolutionary shift in both action and consciousness of the entire human race in a very short amount of time. These do seem like troubled times – and they are – but that is only because this solution is teeming with energy and seeking resolve, there is a lot of chemistry going on so the solution is hot, but let us not be confused or deterred by what is really taking place here – in an historical, moral, philosophical, spiritual, intellectual, legal, practical and realistic sense.

What is going on here is that the awareness of the struggle for liberation of the individual, the liberation of the species, the liberation of all species, and an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life and the systems upon which life relies, are all coming to a head. The signs of seeming chaos teeming in social, political, moral, philosophical, artistic, scientific and environmental endeavors is a clear indication of the voluminous amounts of activity going on in the world. It has been said that “all creation comes from sub – lethal trauma” and we can take this trauma induced by change to be a sign of a creative process as well as a sign of the destructive process.

However, we have to differentiate the two. We have to sort out what is destruction and what is creation. In situation we can observe that there are a great number of conflicts going on in the world. The nature of these conflicts is complex and the origin of these conflicts is often dubious and generated by external forces seeking to manipulate and gain control of “American interests abroad” for military strategic hegemony, economic hegemony and all the other wonderful things that the scumbags of the world are trying to manipulate. And, of course, the media broadcasts a strong message of conflict and the ensuing global disaster. And, please, don’t get me wrong, I am not about to suggest that globall climate change is not a pending disaster on the threshold waiting to take us all down, that the neocons and liberal hawks are not blood thirsty sorcerers who thrive, somehow, in the sick and sadisticdestructionn of innocent lives, children, their mothers, and the extant flora and fauna of the beautiful web of life. No, I don’t intend to suggest that at all.

Yet, it is very important for those of us who are trying to turn this mother ship around – to steer clear of the impending cataclysm, the apocalypse now – to note that there is a simultaneous event going on where we can draw our energy from, where we can find solidarity so that we can harness and cultivate the energy we need to stay strong, organized and vigilant in our cause of change for a world of virtues rather than a world in which we have to fight for what is inherent and inalienable to our very existence.

The alternative facts to the fear, conflict and trauma that we are all so well endowed with is that the long, disturbing, struggle for equality justice and a lasting peace have made incredible gains in the last century. All of the struggles for self-determination, all of the wars, all of the conflicts, have so rapidly advanced the establishment of an international order, a new world order, to elucidate and protect, at least in intention, all persons rights to self-determine.

Think about it, for a few thousand years since the agricultural revolution, people were dispossessed of their land and subjugated to patriarchs, oligarchs, dictators, and essentially criminal oppressors at the highest levels of authority in government, religious and educational institutions and only in the last hundred or so years did a preponderance of philosophical inquiry and discourse into history, morality, and the nature of existence take place so that, since the end of the 19^th century did an international body form to prevent war, to protect civil society, to construct a system of order to protect and defend inalienable rights and codes of conduct between countries to settle disputes. Of course, by mentioning this I am not intending to imply that this international system of order for goodliness is effective. It is far from effective, but that is not the issue of our inquiry. We are simply noting that there has been an incredible and, what I consider to be beautiful and overwhelming acknowledgment and manifestation that we all have the inherent inalienable right to self -determine. These rights are enshrined in the charters, conventions, declarations, protocols and the like on human rights, womens rights, childrens rights, indigenous rights, environmental rights and so on. So while we can clearly see things are a bit fucked up in Africa, the middle east, south America, north America, Europe and the entire fucking mother ship, we can also see that there is a global convergence of heart, mind, and spirit and a recognition that we all are equal in the eyes of a common morality developed in a state of seeming dormancy and flowering, magnificently in the last century. So the principles are in place. Now we have to master the practices of peace so that we can align our actions with the outcome we seek… with our intentions.

The other aspect that is critical to understand and from which we can draw strength and solidarity is that while it is clear and certain that there are quite a number of severe conflicts going on on the mother ship, there is also a preponderance of peace. If you were to map out the conflicts in the world you would note that they are scattered and few compared to the zones of peace and relative tranquility. Most of the world is in a state of relative peace.

Further, in the last say 40 years, 20 years, 10 years and yesterday, most of the struggles for liberation from oppression took place peacefully: the orange revolution, the crimson revolution, the rose revolution, the bulldozer revolution, the velvet revolution, the cedar revolution, the carnation revolution, the Arab spring, and so on. There is in fact a long list of non-violent revolutions that have occurred that we are not informed of, lest we should realize the power in organizing according to the principles of non-violent revolution so that we might implement these powerful techniques. Needless to say, there have been many bloody and violent revolutions and oppressive military incursions which tend to get more media attention and tend to find there way into history books that find their way into our educational prison systems. So we do have to do a little searching and, on occasion, go to school at a peace academy to learn about the real struggles, the real heroes, the real conquests of head heart and spirit that brought us to this critical juncture in history where, in fact, everything is in place for a global revolution to once and for all finally dismantle the pillars of injustice and construct the pillars of peace. To this end I highly recommend people get a hold of any work by Gene Sharp – a great starting point to lead you to all of histories heroes – and there are many, and we can count ourselves among them, who have pushed, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, but always paving the way for the grand unification and the grand liberation towards self – determination and then, as a species we can deal with the more impending tasks such as climate change and equality of resource acquisition and distribution.

So, and again, when you’re looking at how fucked up the world might seem, remember how far we have come in the past century and look at how much relative peace there is in the world. There you may find your strength so that we can all continue the struggle for a one-ness of spirit and intention as stewards of this entire planet of life and the environment.

This, then, is the greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well

- Paolo Freire [Pedagogy of the Oppressed]

let it be, then, that 100 million dead poets for spare change be the voice of reason, be the prana of change breathing, conducting the winds of time, the wings of change, heralded by this beautiful disaster we’re all witnessing, that we are all unwitting participants in somehow of unknown origin and unknown destiny looking for meaning searching for a reason that makes sense or, better yet – and here’s the change people, creating meaning by guiding the great spirit with words as incantations to show our love, to show that we are responsible, to show we can handle the situation, to show our power, based in ordained responsibility, sourced in all of the virtues, intentions to steer clear of the path of the vicious, the unwise, the greedy, the oppressor, who somehow was born with a tremendous karmic debt to pay off because of the injustices served them their ancestry and their life’s mission became an orchestration of retribution instead of reconciliation, violence instead of planning and executing the foundation for the establishment of the pillars of peace, a strategic meticulous teleological trajectory of manipulation towards personal gain rather than cultivating and nurturing all of the children of this world – that would be you and I, dearies.

How do we go about liberating the oppressor?

First, of course, we find the love in our selves – through an understanding that we are all co-existing on common ground – that would be the earth, people – subjects of a collective history of trauma and conflict the source of which is, indeed, gone with the wind, but recorded in our DNA, a collective human DNA, a human genome that, somehow, functions together as one big organism conducted by little crystals of genetic material whose origins are, quite literally, a complex coalescence of light waves transformed into particles and organized into something really quite amazing that could be a source of infinite inspiration, that must become a source of infinite inspiration, rather than a vortex for disaster, abuse, violations of one’s personal integrity, a dismantling of humanity and a resultant destruction of the great mother?

Loving ourselves takes patience and humility. Developing patience and humility requires patience and humility so how do we source it? How do we source it when our collective history is one of dispossession. An expropriation creating a planet of the apes, a planet of refugees, a planet of slaves, a planet of victims and perpetrators. How do we source our humility and patience to cultivate humility and patience – perhaps the progenitors of all of the virtues? Well, this is an area in which we are all fortunate to be well endowed in, endowed with. We are poets? We are the agents of change? Somewhere, somehow, somewhy, sometime, we have been cursed with the blessing of insight and introspection into the exploration of our identity with the realization that there is a vast overlap of what might be our personal identity with a common human identity and that, not only do we somehow have the instructions to construct the pillars of peace but we also have the wisdom, skills and personal qualities to plan their execution and map out the intended location for their erection.

Poets, that would be you, and I, and anyone, as it turns out, who happens to be breathing, circulating the air between us. 7 billion poets strong we all have, recorded in our DNA, enshrined in our human genome, the tools to build these pillars of peace piece by piece. But we, the elders, are charged with the task of rebuilding our human identity, reconstructing the future, reconciling the past, repairingg the present, repaying ourkarmic debt to restore the principles and practices of the rituals of love transforming hatred fear, anger and occupation to a passionate exercise in co-habitating this asylum of Eden in a state of mutual beneficence, love, respect and fascination. Strangely, perhaps ironically, the source of all of our emotions and actions is the same, I conjecture and it is simply that we are trained to be scared of the unknown, trained to self-deprecate into despondence or elevate to arrogance, trained by those who inherited a power structure based in power over instead of power with. Somehow we learned to pick up the gun under the orders of the gun by people inculcated into a world of despair instead of picking up the violin and the spatula and filling the air with sweet sounds and savory smells. Well, enough of them have undergone an inculcation and indoctrination into this culture of occupation.

But we poets have in our constitution, somehow, somewhy, sometime, by the good graces of the great spirit, the rightt combination of ingredients in our identity from which emerges an transformative ability to create breaths with sounds with meanings that change peoples thoughts and emotions and, quite literally, changes their course of existence, manipulates their trajectory and changes their DNA thereby changing the human genome and, conducting it, quite literally, towards a place where you can begin to hear the full splendor of the human orchestra, taste the fullness of millenia of human cultures diversity of sustenance and medicine for the soul, witness the unfurling human identity in all its potential as a resource for a globalreconciliationn of all past injustices and, therein, thereby and therefor constructing the pillars of peace.

What are these pillars of peace?

The ingredients, dear poet, are utterances of air pushed through your vocal chords coordinated into sounds most people, including the paragon of flora and fauna, understand and resonate with. Yes, that is right, the ingredients for the pillars of peace are nothing but words. Simply, they just have to be constructed in the right shape and laid down in the proper sequence to erect these pillars of peace.

And what are these pillars of peace, dear friends, you’ve been asking yourselves and perhaps waiting for me to enunciate? Fortunately they are few and fortuitously simple: these pillars of peace are equality. The pillar of peace is only one thing – It is equality. It is seeing self as other and that we all have the exact same human rights and human needs. So clearly these rights and needs have been elucidated and enshrined in all of the worlds religions, in all moral philosophical discourse and inquiry, and in the charters, treatises, conventions, protocols, declarations and constitutions of those coalescent bodies of light invoked and established to conduct this infinite interplay of waves of sounds and ideas of words to establish the common ground of our humanity to inspire us towards some ideal notion of global village where, once again, we all recognize that we are the indigenous inhabitants of one world and our proud histories as individuals belonging to divergent cultures, languages, religions, attitudes,behaviors and contradictions, wills desires and expectations, sounds of songs smells of sustenance, and the full rich organismal orchestration becomes our convergent common identity wrapt in our common origin cultivating of commonomon destiny with all of the virtues as our emergent behavior and all of the vices set off to the side and referenced only to mind and maintain those pillars of peace we’ve worked so hard to put in place.

So, my friend sister brother, this then is the greatest historical and humanistic task that we, 100000 poets are charged with, we are the the voice of reason, the voice of revolution, the culture bearers of an entire race of beings for whom we are charged, somehow, somewhy, someway, to be the stewards of the creative prowess of human endeavor, to offer instructions to the children of mind and heart to find themselves according to the clear and concise messages we get from nature, the messages we get from our dreams, the messages we get from the great spirit who guide us to use our power responsibly so that we may seemingly violate certain conservation principles in that we proliferate all of the virtues, leaving the vices to decay and dissipate as some cruel joke of history in which we listened, somehow, somewhy and someway to the prison guard, the preacher, the law and the teacher. Now, we are the ones who will have spoken the voice of reason and we will cultivate this maelstrom into the perfect storm protecting, teaching, and empowering the children, our little orchards of electricity who collectively will bring us back to the garden.

Poem Delivered at 100,000[,000 Dead] Poets for [Spare] Change: Denver – Oriental Theater September 28, 2013:

We all have a common origin
nascent coalescence mosaic of light
straight from the source
waves dancing waves into particulars
you, me, our adversaries and lovers
nothing but light waves
dancing our roots of nothingness into
the outskirts of the infinite

we all have a common ancestry
incandescent crystalline matrix
straight from the source
self emergent, self sustaining, self regulating, self replicating
interwoven generations scaling the conflict helix
transcendent towards our higher purpose

we all have a common morality
espoused wisdoms prosaic divine
straight from the source
thoughts sprouted from the mouths
of seven billion poets enshrined
in declarations, treatises, charters protocols conventions
the constitutions of earths nations and tribes
testament
truth in fundament of the ties that bind
inseparable we have no choice

we all have a common destiny
cosmic descent radiant dispersal
straight to the source
deliverance self, divergent other – ness
other words of other worlds hitherto unknown
we find solidarity on the playground of our commonalities

where

we all have a common identity
underneath the psychic raveling
revealing the source
through a global reconciliation of
admissions, apologies, reparations
a restoration of the co-mingled
orchestrations of unity
reveling in diversity
relishing the subtleties of local languages
that through time and space diverge
into the vast neural network of brains
connected through words
conducting electricity
from mind this hive
generating all that is in this world

words are the magic of this world
words are the progenitors of emotion
in this world words are the conductors
of the Pow Wau
words are illicitor
of the great spirit’s dream
the poet the blue conduit of truth
whose words are balls

her words are balls of electricity
his breath infinite induction of
fields inducing fields
creating the vast neural network of brains
a coordinated conjunction of minds
nascent coalescent mosaic of light
calculated incantations eliciting
oppressed and oppressor towards liberation
articulated enunciations transforming our wiring
unraveling the psychic coiled chaotic matrix DNA
intrepid
vigilant
inexorable

without tongue
your words become cosmic whispers
bulging out through your lips

without lips
your whispers become a mantric om
written into the retina of your I

without eyes
your om becomes a tantric vision
sculpting the musculature of your face

without face
your vision becomes the ecstatic dream
scriptures of a liberation theology

without words
your breath becomes the incantation of your purest intention
transforming trauma to prana

with courage
you face all adversity
to ensure equality
restore justice
and establish a lasting peace

with patience
you transform your attitude
to cultivate a mutually beneficent behavior
overcoming the inherent contradictions
transmitted in the mixed messages
of those internal and external forces
keeping us from our core temperament
transcending the occupation of our identity
so we may once again be co-habitants
indigenous to this land

with humility
we transcend the distorted projections
through imperfect lenses
of our own subjective dispositions
quelling desire and expectation
aligning our will toward
unbound respect, appreciation, love and affection
guiding our intention to become
stewards of self, the paragon of animals, and all life on earth

with empathy
we blur the distinction between self and other
invoking a new world order
whose firmament is trust
whose power is responsibility to nurture
procure invoke and cultivate
all of the virtues

with love
we heal our ancestry
through a dialogical conscientization
rebuilding our individual, communal and collective identities
so, as adults, we can focus on what really matters
the children
whose breath is an orchard of electricity
our offering
a manifest dream of a past that never happened according to plan
our instructions
imparting the wisdom, skills and qualities
grand unification
liberation of the next 7 generations
so their words will become
the balls of electricity
breaking down the walls
of this enchanted prison
garden asylum Eden

this, then, habibi
is our greatest historical and humanistic task
to liberate our oppressors
so we can liberate ourselves