Surplus Coercion

It wriggles under my skin, all these tiny parasites

Searching for comfort, as if, it were a panacea

Some sort of delusion, which bores deeper yet

I lose myself daily, usually when I set the alarm clock

For an hour in the future to trick myself again

Squeezing the surplus of my labor much tighter then they

Making me less of a fool, then my altruism does

How many layers of false consciousness cradle the real?

Forsaken into the happy of consent as coercion embraces

Apolitical Intellectuals

Apolitical Intellectuals

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with "the idea
of the nothing"
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.

They won't be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward's death.

They'll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.

On that day
the simple men will come.

Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they'll ask:

"What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?"

Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.

Your own misery
will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.

--Otto Rene Castillo

To Those Born After

To Those Born After
I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder 
That was ruled by hunger. 
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar 
And then I joined in their rebellion. 
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth. 

I ate my dinners between the battles, 
I lay down to sleep among the murderers, 
I didn't care for much for love 
And for nature's beauties I had little patience. 
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth. 

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time, 
My speech betrayed me to the butchers. 
I could do only little 
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped. 
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth. 

Our forces were slight and small, 
Our goal lay in the far distance 
Clearly in our sights, 
If for me myself beyond my reaching. 
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth. 

II

You who will come to the surface 
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all 
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness 
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries 
More often than shoes, 
Through the war of the classes despairing 
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised 
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, 
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. 
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness, 
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer 
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals, 
Look back on us with indulgence. 


~Brecht

Electric Wire Hustle "Again"

Electric Wire Hustle "Again" from Foxtree Studio on Vimeo.

Directed by Vibol Moeung

Produced by Vibol Moeung and David "Taay Ninnh" Wright

Filmed and Edited by Vibol Moeung

Graphic Design by David "Taay Ninnh" Wright

"Again" features on Electric Wire Hustle's self titled album
out now on BBE.

Ship of Despondency

Misplaced in this land

Garbed in our quintessence

In a space where

Everyone has

Too many names

An opulent place where

No one loves themselves

And everyone

Expects we know them

By their riddles and denigrations

Or perhaps their caprices

Merely, in the quickening

When all ships are adrift

Will one heed the

Hearing of their only name

Called out in despondency

Scarves for People Under the Sun

My words, 

are stitched into.

Each other, 

to make images.

However, you.

Do not understand, 

and like, words.

So, my depictions are mislaid.

All the needlework and toil.

From my fingertips.

Lay, mottled and wasting.

Alas, I continue, 

to weave thick scarves.

For the people, 

living under the sun.

Fallen, But Found

It is within our eyes,
where the people gather
Irises filled up with oppression and loss
Together we sit, and we remember
through our collective memories
Our pupils, a pathway to Osiris
Which leads to the hidden bones, 
Of the disappeared peoples
Who were our revolutionaries

Window Moths

Moths come to my window to bounce and flutter

I want nothing that reminds me of pandemonium

Mimicry, is the echoed call, which distracts the future

I understand black and white; so let the colors run away

Never needed any brilliance to mark my path

Someplace in the folds of a jacket near a crumpled paper

Is quartz, which I will not find, until I am elsewhere

Monster at my Nape

Only in the gilded lands,

does sometimes the idiot become wise

Then decide,

that wisdom is too heavy,

and recede away with the waves

Only within a life of comfort,

can the fickle, wax and wane

The self-imposed hardship,

teaches nothing, but delusions

To those who play destitution

as some hobby,

dancing happily with poverty

While the rest of us sleep,

with it’s rotten breath on our nape

Simply twirling with terror,

does not mean you know its name

Or the scrape of its claws on your chest

As it embraces you

Chasm: For Those Who Dreamt

We follow every rainbow nonsensically with alienated wonderment.  Our autistic faltering is mellifluously further then lovelorn murmurs radiant.  I am spellbound, by the somnolent twinkling of the last ersatz fairy, which sits beleaguered on the other side of the glass blinking, between my disfigured fingers.  My hand clutches the punctured, however nostalgic lid, as I turn the wheel of time forward, because only speculative abstracts learned to shadow me.  I never studied to care for the faux fairies, only cook vegetables, hug you back when you hug me, and seed the revolution.  I toe the edge of the

Chasm: For Those Who Dreamt,

a place where people reunite with bewildered obsessive compulsives severely deficient in lucid surreal. Everyone knows that one must forever fall to find a future that is not fickle.  Gravity reckons, that the only direction with loyalty is down.  My limbs are the tail, of the gigantic blue whale, hurtling into the vastness, diving too sincerely into the winking bluish chatoyant of denouement.  My erstwhile felicity buried deeply within the labyrinthine sun worn creases of vapid eyes.  The sweat surfeits slowly along frozen brows, deceiving our tongues, which licks at them as if they were tears.  My curious enchantment, which resembles travail, shimmers with trepidation, from brackish waters of diminutive mosquito infested swamps pooled in my palms.  The graft of solemn acrimony overwhelms my mouth; I beguile tepid retch into the void from my third mouth.  I smear away the vestiges of blood-flecked puke with a hand bearing self-made stigmata.