SINCE 1980
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
EMPIRE NOT THE STATED INTENTION
Empire not the stated intention
But democracy of rational individuals
Democracy restrained while rationality is cultivated
Rationality defined by its promulgators
Does our elite hold this distrust only toward the outside?
Do they not act this way toward their own voters, as well?
Empire not the stated intention
But the disempowering of fanatics
Fanatics, those who resort to violence for their causes
Unless the violence is blessed by Washington or Tel Aviv
Why pretend they want to disempower only the guerillas?
Is this not their will toward sovereign states that won’t bow to them, too?
Empire not the stated intention
But neutralizing the threats from foreign powers
Even unto our access to other lands’ resources
Sovereignty only applies to those we choose not to defame
Do other countries have the right to preach overthrow here?
Our calls for overthrow stretch to the other side of the globe
Empire not the stated intention
But national unity in a time of peril
Unpatriotic to denounce a war we are fighting
Even when our own government led us into it with lies
Does our license to lie run only to other nations?
How do we treat the truth-telling “traitor” within?
Empire not the stated intention
But indignation at violations of human rights
Our model, those civil liberties we are so used to at home
With police powers restrained, government transparent
Why, then, when we target tyrants abroad
Do the state’s actions seem darker here at home?
Empire not the stated intention
For decades, we’ve thought ruling too involved a thing
Easier just to pry for our companies’ access
Get the goods the way we know, without bothering being king
Why, then, when we are closer to giving direct orders
Do we mask more benevolent, and act surprised when the freed won’t sing?
Empire not the stated intention
But, given the trend, whom do we deceive?
We do not trust the intentions of those not within our power
While, the goodness of our own intentions, we trust all can perceive
As we manufacture explanations of any venal injustice
We ourselves commit, while fighting against ones we pronounce worse
We, the strong, must make the decision to act or not to act
Trading decency for world control, deluded we can keep both
Honored to be the most fit of our age
To receive the imperial curse
PARTING PATH
1980 is wearing on. I’ve thought about revolution. I think I’ve thought it out. Social power comes from acquiescence.
Why fight for anarchy? Anarchy is the basic truth. Authority is a theater of persuasion.
Why liberate the masses? Do I want what the masses would want? Do I really think that glory would result?
Would we free nobilities, or the very appetites so well suited to the exploiters already here?
When wanting to impact mankind’s path, why do we turn to the chorus, which may sing songs neither ours nor theirs?
What do we want out of mankind, that we think that the highest might emerge from fighting for everyone getting their fair shares?
Why do we want to undo their preference for the theater of persuasion just because we ourselves have seen through it?
Can intelligent people escape the compellers and also escape the masses? Is revolution not truly the birth of the new kind?
And why would the masses favor the radical departures of those who burn to become something beyond?
Better to be sharp and severe
Better to measure up to the hard
Better to be victor in ones own quest
Better to stop dreaming away
Better to wake up to the day
Better to try to make the effort pay
Disciplined, and at my own frontier
With every effort to make the hardest truths clear
I’ll stake myself on myself, though the cost be dear
. . . . . . . . . .
2005 has come, and I have come to see how little I knew about how much the masters could push forward when the masses lost the revolutionaries’ heart. Our seemingly ineffectual role based on weaponless cerebralism kept the winners’ conscience tactically vigilant, lest our words pierce the veil of their social treason.
The masses, today, though more explicitly pushed toward poverty, are less inclined to resist the establishment’s goals, since they have lost the deftness of our carping critique, the honesty of our eyes, the indicting sound of our voice.
A quarter century on, what have we achieved, we redefiners of the revolution as the crafting of ourselves? If we still don’t know what we want of course of our world, what have we managed to do with ourselves?
Since we have started upon the parting path, we have gained neither the virtue nor the power. Forlorness beckons as we spread out across the open plains. We nod to those now potent while seeking our own ways.
We dropped out of the brainwashing, then we dropped out of the rebellion. The theater of persuasion then filled the empty spaces, with our own wills in disarray.
We had burned to become the ones who turned it right
The ones to release the hidden magic, to open the world
We made good and bad discoveries as our path unfurled
Then we lost our feeling for the masses
They were not as we dreamed, so we let them be
As they were, there was no hope for solidarity
We burned still to become something beyond. The flame still pushed us to become the new kind. There was no guidance left, just a world half left behind, and the prospect having to bootstrap an essence. Realism and ambition attempted to fuse. The greatness within pushed for manifestation, and told us to embrace the unfavorable condition, be stronger than despair, and better wrong than ambiguous.
The realistic story never promised to be kind. Lack of realism, though, was sporting signposts of disaster. So we stand realistic, in the evolution of our world, deserted by the progress of our own dynamic.
THIRSTING FOR THE SUNSET
Thirsting for the sunset
Thirsting for the west
Thirsting for the story’s end to
Put the overlay to rest
To run across in darkness
To run across in faith
The world where our answers lose their art
And our souls are again unsafe
The unsafeties our stories have glossed over
Lie pregnant in the open night
Together, we await the unwording
Seeking the evening of the light
Thirsting for the sunset
Toward a different type of certainty
Seeking a deeper explanation
After the day’s last-minute honesty
Resuming the soul’s ancient path
Breaking with the civil tradition’s way
Breaking with the social insistence
That ensnares us in the projects of the day
Thirsting for the sunset
For a more internal trust
Away from beliefs they seek to bind me to
Which I believe only because I must
Only because I can’t find my way out of them
Under some narcotic, hypnotic telling
Where the well-explained failings of people and the world
Make my own allegiances seem less compelling
Thirsting for the sunset
Thirsting for the truth
Thirsting for the wisdom
Thirsting for the proof
For an eye to look into mine
Knowing all I know
With a grasp of implications
That refuses to let go
Awakening to the night
Awakening to the gleaming
Awakening from the self-belief
Of our energetic day-dreaming
Returning to our very souls
Returning to the earth
Returning to the starlit sky
And the matrix of our birth
THOUGH THE STATUE STILL STANDS
The working class ideal became a magician’s cape
Which twirled to reveal a police state
The order of which was not glory, but dissent driven down
And the well-being that the state could not provide
Was explained away at the point of a gun
In modernist pride, the stagnation denied
The East was in shackles, which we wouldn’t accept
We were frightened by the power; the callousness appalled
So the West rode Moscow hard
And Moscow made itself fit for any Western war
But, staked on theory and will and disregard
It let the people’s larder empty, which the tanks could not restore
The reds needed the Kremlin because they needed the power
It was the Czar, not his methods, that had stood in the way
No weak, liberal thought infected their intentions for the classes
They sought Pravda through the will, not through perception
Sought to achieve great things, to triumph through the masses
The reward lay not in relief, but in the collective conception
Twisted, cramped human longing
Contradicted at the highest, at the lowest suppressed
Might develop quiet courage, or glare out and despise
Unfree air is barely air worth breathing
We could only hope the spirits of the wrongly compromised
When freed, would still have intentions worth retrieving
We hailed the end of totalitarian rule
May it never come again
The dynamic of a cause, and its outspoken grace
Gets things done, and launches careers
Once the opposition is silenced, in prison or in place
Comes a day even the dynamic of the victor disappears
YOUNG ADULTHOOD
When you sought to be just and kind
You held your ego in suspicion
But when the world treated you with unconcern
You settled into your personal ambition
When you wanted to give your part
You expected a trade of gratitude
But when the world didn’t answer your heart
You embraced a more demanding attitude
When you heard of the unclaimed tribes
Their drugs and visions gave you mental fire
But when the crises of your world cut off your escape
You tended to your interest and began to aspire
When their competitive promptings didn’t suit your taste
You resisted the schools’ push to secure yourself faster
But when you tried to live in the social waste
You said “If master or victim, then better master”
When you bought into futurism
You felt an affirmation of spirit and soul
But when events made you question your optimism
You demanded less trend and more control
When you were high on idealism
The world-worn seemed not so much practical as ill
But when you assaulted yourself with realism
You did it in the strength, not the weakness, of your will
When you launched on the project of self
You felt a mystical overtone
But when you followed through with harsh sobriety
Reality came to carry all the soul that you own
When you opened up to the world
The world was rich, the players were at hand
When you closed down to your will
It stayed with you, muted by what you had planned
THAMES EXTROSPECTION SUBTEXT
Wanting to understand
Wanting to have it all
In my mind and in my hand
Wanting to understand
The competitive lies
Prejudice and bend
Everything outside the home ground
I am allied to anything
Unpoisoned by that
No matter where it is found
I trust in evolution
I present my intelligence to the world
I’m ready for every fusion
I trust in evolution
My country supports
My open mind
And my willingness to question
Open to the risk
Open to the change
That might be called for by allowed perception
I want to reach the crest
I want to become the all
Let the ages and the lands invest
I want to reach the crest
Our greatest thrill
Is the awakening
Sad, that the orthodox refuse
When the human mind
And the universe
Can pivot, to expand the views
Fulfill, fulfill the mind
Give it union with eternity
To the precious chance, be kind
Fulfill the mind
Fulfill the mind
IN THE ABSENCE OF A TRIBE
In the absence of a tribe
We fixed history into the written pages
We sowed the insights of research
We gleaned the evolution of the ages
In the absence of a tribe
Did we become more of less free?
Less connected within a greater mass
With a more precarious individuality
In the absence of a tribe
We built the university
Where geology and astronomy and archeology reveal
The shallowness of what we used to think of history
In the absence of a tribe
We learned all the lands across the earth
We learned about the stories and superstitions
And a way to weigh what the claims were worth
In the absence of a tribe
We demystified that which makes matter act
We gained confidence in our own crafts and planning
We cast out shadow spirits with a rapid train of fact
In the absence of a tribe
We invented photography
In which our increasing thirst for the literal
Met an unexampled virtuosity
In the absence of a tribe
We learned to transform iron into steel
We learned the deeper secrets of the substances
And to alloy our way unto substances ideal
In the absence of a tribe
We built the strongest weapons ever known
We built a corps, many, facing each other
Pressing against the reaches where foreign power had grown
In the absence of a tribe
We created units of ever greater size
We developed ideas of how to manage masses
And became, as mankind, the rulers’ greatest prize
In the absence of a tribe
Each one of us reckons how to survive
Reckons, without much leeway
Despairing of partnership in the hive
In the absence of a tribe
We, the ruled, bit the rope in frustration
Thrashed against the loss, wrestled with escaping
Outward, where freedom offered no restoration
In the absence of a tribe
Our own kind can be an enemy
No harm to them to do a harm to us
In our success, no profit they can see
In the absence of a tribe
We form internal cliques
For security, not for the shared project
Not for self-rule, only for a fix
In the absence of a tribe
Authority drew hard lines on the land
Where we hoped to piece out permanent claims
Where we owned, alone, we could freely stand
In the absence of a tribe
We answered in strange fashion to the state
That shared no experience of our lives
Yet presumed by its rules it could justly allocate
In the absence of a tribe
We built many temples in the city
Some called hard to the goddesses
Offering treasonous complicity
In the absence of a tribe
Thoughts of rebellion find their way around
The theft from above is never fully concealed
The retheft from below never lacks for ground