Love Undercover

We all have a choice,
To ignore the suffering or to stand in unison
To tan under the sun, or to stand to fight with voice and feet
The revolution and the anger
Does not make us, we were born as lovers
This toil will never break us, we love undercover
This battle for oil, has made so many suffer
Human arrogance obliterates the Earth system
This hate
Does not belong to us
The hopelessness in the lives we pursue
The racism and bigotry
This pain and frustration
Does not belong to us
The terror of war and fear of rape, the forsaken youth
The hungry and poor, the love draining into bloody pools
Does not belong to us
The screaming of people in agony is haunting me
Everyday more voices added to the cacophony
Why must the world hurt for our pleasure
Why do we allow everything to die
The warm misery spatters on our eyes
The death and the fixation on pain
My deepest recess is my only escape
A tiny room in the attic of my memory palace
I sit huddled and listen to the pain and terror of the people
The untouchable with no names, shivering along with the millions of cold
Surrounded by the smell of meat and the poisoning of the soil
And the dying stench of our putrid flesh
Gas in the air and the ignorance of your stare
No place to hide from the virus of capitalism
Its tendrils wisping into my psyche
Seducing me...
with infection....
while I sleep

I Remember Losing My Way

I Remember, 
I Remember
Losing 
Losing
My Way


I believed in peace and love
Laying underneath the universe that spins above
Touching the leaves lightly when I walked
The experimental words my mouth talked
Dancing in the rain, fingers streched to the sky
Pain was a strange thing and I didn't fear dying
Humming songs not yet written
Led by instincts and not indecision
And making art everywhere I existed
I remember when being soft was not sissy
Watching the ants and bees work
Asking everyone questions late into the day
With no concept of time or design
No understanding of the grind to be mine
Laughing until my cheeks hurt
I only knew better and had never met worse
Born a child of Babylon
Not sure, I got the strength to carry on
I did not suspect or protect myself from
The weight that awaited me, this hate has forsaken me
Our roots are deep, stop shaking the branches of the tree


I Remember, 
I Remember
Losing 
Losing
My Way

Send It On

CHORUS]

Send it up

Send it through

Send it right back to you

Send it up

Send it through

Send it right back to you

Your inner view to me is

Something that I do desire

Struggling to see a new something that I fantasize

So I'm sending

[CHORUS]

Send it up

Send it through

Send it right back to you

Send it up

Send it through

Send it right back to you

You can't disguise your emotions

You know that I see in your eyes

Your soul's me, your soul's something that I feel inside

Run, run, run, run if I run Lord only knows how far 

That I and I will fall behind

Gotta find a better place, gotta find a better space

So that I, so my life may be the reason why

Hold on be strong, for your own

Move on before long, you'll get home

If your feeling insecure

You can be sure

Even if it take forever and a day for me to do

I gotta send it on to you

Tell me what will I do

Send it right back to you

If You Forget Me

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine. 

Pablo Neruda

Totemed Names

My mind

is a storehouse

for totemed tomes

A place too obscure

for the

shadows

of alienated souls

Only those

with cricked necks

can remember my name

Gnash

My sinew, stretches, with a, sickening, sound
My mind, melts, mixing, minuscule, mistakes
My brow, beats, bitterly, back before, beckoned
My peace, pretends poverty, patiently, peculiar
My words, wither, whispers, when wanted

Towards a Walk in the Sun

TOWARDS A WALK IN THE SUN
by Keroapetse Kgositsile

The wind is caressing
the eve of a new dawn
a dream: the birth
of memory

Who are we? Who
were we? Things cannot go on much as
before. All night long we shall laugh 
behind Time's new masks. When the moment
hatches in Time's womb we shall not complain

Where oh where are the men
to matches the fuse to burn
to snow that freezes some
would-be skyward desire
You who swallowed your balls for a piece
of gold beautiful from afar but far from
beautiful because it is colored with the pus
from your brother's callouses. You who creep
lower than snake's belly because you swallowed
your conscience and sold your sister to soulless 
vipers. You who bleached the womb of your daughter's 
mind to bear pale-brained freaks. You who bleached
your son's genitals to slobber in the slime of missionary-
eyed fakery. You who hide behind the shadow of your master's 
institutionalized hypocrisy the knees of your soul numbed 
by endless kneeling to catch the crumbs from your master's table
before you run to poison your own mother. You too
deballed grin you who forever tell your masters
I have a glorious past I have rhythm I have this
I have that. Don't you know I know all your lies?
The only past I know is hunger unsatisfied
and a kick in the empty belly
from your fat-bellied master
And rhythm don't fill an empty stomach

Who are we? All night long
I listen to the dream soaring
like the tide. I yearn
to slit throats and color
the wave with the blood of the villain
to make a sacrifice to the gods. Yea,
there is pain in the coil around things.

Where are we? The memory...
and all these years all these lies!
You too over there misplaced nightmare
forever foaming at the mouth forever
proclaiming your anger … a mere
formality because your sight is colored
with snow. What does my hunger 
have to do with a gawdamm poem?

The wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk. The only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory

Recollections of Somethingness

Moored to anguish with twine made of hedonism

The most desired material thing dissolves in our palms

Too much is oppression, nothing left to rescue, but love

Lift this reality into the black space between the stars

Paint over the old piece with patience strokes of revolution

Every short breath exhales us closer to nothingness

Each dream unpeels the hopelessness of the wasteland

Heroes with murdered tongues, don’t even attempt to speak

Wretchedness protruding from wounded writhing bodies

The shrieks of urgency rendered dim by fleeting infatuations 

Hypnotizing us with titillations, to forget the reverberations of courage

Sneering Crow

I am lost in the quiet 
         before the storm
Woe to the 
     babbling damned who

meander the desolate

     woodland with the petrified trees

            My smile stolen

by the mannequin

      on the back of the crow

Who only visits

     to sneer

              at my crumbled hole

The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature

Nâzım Hikmet Ran, the "romantic Marxist"


The Blue-Eyed Giant, the Miniature


by Nâzım Hikmet Ran


He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman.
The woman's dream was of a miniature house
   with a garden where honeysuckle grows
       in a riot of colours
           that sort of house.


The giant loved like a giant,
and his hands were used to such big things
   that the giant could not
make the building,
   could not knock on the door
of the garden where the honeysuckle grows
    in a riot of colours
        at that house.


He was a blue-eyed giant,
He loved a miniature woman,
a mini miniature woman.
The woman was hungry for comfort
    and tired of the giant's long strides.
And bye bye off she went to the embraces of a rich dwarf
with a garden where the honeysuckle grows
   in a riot of colours
       that sort of house.


Now the blue-eyed giant realizes,
a giant isn't even a graveyard for love:
in the garden where the honeysuckle grows
    in a riot of colours
        that sort of house...

Sympath

I am the sympath,

I am the empath

Lithe planetary body

Tugging on all threads

Psychometric visions

Every suffering my observation

My tendrils tickle five dimensions

Born a worker, even my essence toils

Carrying the weight, bearing the load

My solidarity will always be with the masses

My toes touching the mighty world tree

Listening to the collective voice tremble

Pollen in the wind, overwhelmed

Becoming our worst enemy, our only enemy

Too scared, even to breathe

Helpless, to act in the face of oppression

However, capable of love, of sensation

Of joy and happiness, of laughter

Buried under a mountain of shame

For you, for the future, I will

Withdraw the depression, the self-hate

Imprison it within me, with all the rest

My cells become cells

Where your jailed humiliation screams

My bones incarcerate your injuries

My hair becomes the dungeon for all heartbreak

My nails confine your regret and misery 

Even while I sleep, my arms search for agony

Clawing deep into honeyed grief’s thickness

To collect your tears, to seize all your fears

Revolution is clearing the path for others

Teaching the world followship

Face the cliff, dance on the ledge

Don't be scared to fall

There is freedom down there

Look me in the eyes and leap

So I can see liberation

I am the sympath

I am the empath

Untitled Erasure

Your fingers are like pills,
I become sedate with just one touch
As the shafts of light that
Shatters in our room
comes as a witness to your finest felony
stealing the precession of my moves
Which folds in on themselves
Its a crime that can only be pulled off when one operates with
crippled instinct
and
all gravity and the seasons lead back to you.
This is where the weight of that gravity
bends each note of my heart stem

I can only hand this truth over to you

That the stars are still indifferent to us 

As they wait for no one behind the lights 

But their indifference is perfect 

Like the last pieces of a dying artist

Who you swore you were going to meet.

Their great 

Great heights

is always

The next stage 

For flaming monks 

In their silence 

smiling

Reaching the purist form of escape

From the tyranny of flesh. 

Like these stars

Some night when a rare black out falls over the city

And the glare recedes from view

I will look for you 

to find my way home. 

Tactical Conclusions

Actually, you don’t really exist, in a state of delusion

Political radical, but blissfully culturally confused son

Spending your capital like every other loser

Fashionably tactical, prattle forgone conclusions

Fearing communalism and any other kind of fusion

Fanatic individualism, like madness, fills your illusions

Frame our socialism like it’s a system of exclusion

Like we want to keep the body after blood transfusion

Like we don’t hate the state, like we want profusion

With the back of my hand I slap your face as a rule man

Just a sham, It’s all talk, your just one of the master’s tools

On the road to revolution, we don’t have time for fools

"Material Thing" Nneka

Single Tear of Madness

This madness feels like ecstasy

Confess, sanity never protected us

Pull the pointed psychosis deeply

The pain splinters into everyone

We all cry one fragile tear

Collectively wiping it away

Billions of simultaneous sadnesses

Stored in the darkness with the

Humiliation and heartbreak

The Grist of Dreams

Dreamt, each other into reality

Amalgamation, of everything 

We never knew, we wanted

Fingers intertwined, like vines 

As we plummet, into each others eyes

Screaming, through our skin, in anxiety

Petrified, one of us might not exist

Everything else, has been torn from our grasp

Shattered, ruined, lying at our feet, all the pasts 

Reminding us, we will, never control anything

Fighting, against these nightmares

Dreaming, ourselves into, different realms

To escape, the subconscious beast 

Running, through a billion singularities

Clutching, our essence, and lingering scents  

Embracing, whatever, as we spin into chaos

Maybe, we can no longer ever dream again

For fear, we will dream

Us back, into the nothingness

Or, do we only exist, in the ethereal

Trapped, in the unfolding universe

Fractured, into everything

Overwhelmed, by the infinite

Confused, someplace in the abyss

Lost, everything, except the truth

Which is, as I exist, so do you

Use Me

"Use Me"

'My friends feel it's their appointed duty
They keep trying to tell me
All you want to do is use me
But my answer, yeah to all that use me stuff
I want to spread the news
That if it feels this good getting used
You just keep on using me
Until you use me up
Until you use me up

My brother sit me right down and he talked to me
He told me that I ought not to let you just walk on me
And I'm sure he meant well
Yeah, but when our talk was through
I said, brother, if you only knew
You'd wish that you were in my shoes
You just keep on using me
Until you use me up
Until you use me up

Sometimes, it's true
You really do abuse me 
You get me in a crowd of high-class people
And then you act real rude to me
But, oh baby, baby, baby, baby,
When you love me, I can't get enough
I want to spread the news
That if it feels this good getting used
Girl, you just keep on using me
Until you use me up
Until you use me up
Talkin' 'bout you usin' people
It all depends on what you do
It ain't too bad the way you're usin' me
'Cause I sure am usin' you to do the things you do'
to do the things you do