Sonnet (‘It sure gets around’)

It sure gets around, our Western hubris.
We even thought the sonnet form was dead.
Whatever needed to be said on this,
Was said before in books we’ve never read.
Yet were there much less excitement to miss
On the air or screen, could we face the dread
That rises up in the silent withdraw,
And of our historical amnesia?
When fear of anarchy becomes instead
A mania for order that same hand
Which writes the law, magnifies the cobra
Of war and crime. It can only expand
What can’t be controlled, and through denial
Of the circle, makes a vicious cycle.



Qualia Control

Disclosures accrue like petty sediment,
Damning up streams of propaganda for what they pollute
Running about as clear as how their reeking to the stratosphere,
Fed with an iceberg of inverted truth.

Dare acknowledge this fleece however and soon
You proliferate gatekeepers at the doors of justice,
Occluding like an ideological quantum
Forces that dominate at the root
A perennial moment ensnared
Where technocracies lie.



Völkisch Tales

They thought the bread was contaminated,
Ergot poisoning at Pont-Saint-Esprit,
7 deaths by what illuminated
At the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Nearly 500 slipped into madness,
And it took over half a century
To show that mind control experiments
Were conducted there using LSD.

Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg wrote
Back in ‘65 that the CIA
Man, was the American Gestapo
And yet, who’s heard about The Fugs today?

Who knew the FBI was surveilling
Civil Rights leaders and peace activists
In the Sixties, like Martin Luther King
Who was pegged a dangerous extremist?

And targeted too was a dope-smoking
Ex-Beatle, by a government which saw
Natural allies in Black Panther fearing
Charles Manson and his Family, brainwashed

In specific ways that seem to mirror
The real objectives of MKULTRA,
Of dominating minds with drugs and fear
Under the guise of singing Kumbaya.

Sometimes the weirdest facts make perfect sense.
How many who’ve read Catcher in the Rye
Know that Salinger worked intelligence
And that Hemingway was a double spy?

Under a nationalistic pretense,
Top secret programs like COINTELPRO
Are greenlit for the purpose of Defense,
Which isn’t something people need to know.

Rather, let them eat cake, or watch TV
And learn the difference between movies
About Supermen and reality,
And that nothing exists beyond what’s seen;

Nothing beyond capitalist pizazz,
Fixed on Freedom’s lingering death, when in
Good time, American fascists are as
In vogue as that guy who shot John Lennon.



Sunrise on Sunset

Nobody save yourself does in the end
Nonexistent picnic in Laurel Canyon
Found nothing but sinister designs
Delineated truth on the side of obfuscation
Buried alive under layers on layers of deceit
No grand illumination received
Just profoundly damaged feet
Anachronistic curmudgeon
Tramping around Los Angeles
Mortified by the high grade propaganda
Driving materialist nails of ego
Deep into the skull of swankiest shells
Behind the wheel of our national bewitchment
Compulsively looking back on this trek
Towards Mulholland Drive with a bottle of Coke and a sandwich
One photograph of Houdini’s star on Hollywood Boulevard
None alive deserves ownership of these archetypal signs
Only thing worse than a god delusion
At the crossroads of the universe
Who knew was disbelief in signification
To discover in horror no path that leads to nowhere
But rather a Möbius strip of eternity manifest.



Blue Skies, Yellow Plains

Old Oregon Trail Road passes
smudgy Greyhound window
dream in yesterday’s clothes
on a pillow of dirty laundry. Freedom
doesn’t resonate with greed I think
America—exploiting our urge to be free—
delineator of what narrow scope of liberty!

Back