By C. A. Oliver
No music; dead men doing
The dreaded dead-end work
Coffin grinders, and morbidly dull
Ghost of the former human that
Roamed with proud, lofty chins
Are downtrodden and desperate
For change
Sunsets from the cage–false reasons
For staying–the music of my heart
Has now been the battlefield’s booming trumpet
Of no triumph…we do not sing together anymore
No rhyme, no time to sing through it
With dreams manifest, meaningless locust
Fields and factories full of the beautifully poor
Sullen, sunken eyes, like empty caves on an ancient Oregon
Pacific coastline
Echoing the truth of stories untold
O, Risen moon; the reflection of her blood, running
Black down tormented eyes–infants starving wail in the night
It is the sad symphony of this calculated cruel world
That is falling like brimstone on an addicted planet
As the unbroken chain leaves eerie forever shadows
on ancient walls as in Hiroshima
We will never understand these dawns in our waking worlds
When the broken heart betrays whom it serves in sordid waves
And breathing alleys, coughing in cold rooms vomiting
The crimson wine of last night’s crippled season and
Men no longer need reasons to kill other men
Vicious Vipers in suit and tie have repeatedly bitten our freedom
and infected our human consciousness with a potent venom
Of Fear and Loathing; doubt and disparity
Race and politics; Left or right
Financial woe, and the whims of the oligarchy
And dying, with dry mouths and broken spirits we let out one last
gasp…GONZO–the heart is still beating
And the Great Patriot is birthed in the name of freedom
Truth
Love
Words and music assemble
In the vast hall
And broken corridors of
Magic manifestation
Of a possible reality worth living
Outlaws and madmen
Getting there hands dirty again
As history listens to it’s own echo
And leans neither left nor right but toward truth, love, and beauty
Booming from the core of the very earth herself–
He is beating bullets and maelstroms, and all
Furious winds, whipping eyes and flesh
At a 100 mph on that evil BSA, werewolf chrome
Mad machine for the madman
Cocaine fueled bouts of strange and terrible rantings
Visions as the vortex of Mescalin or LSD
Flow up and down the spine
Through and out again
From toes to brain, to soul and back
And he asks, “What’s next?”
Until the heart is purified
A screaming banshee draped in red, white, and blue
Billy the kid was back, Chivas guns
And sticks of fine tea brought o’er seas
By a rolling stone
But now the music
Has waned a bit, ruefully in some pale
Wind of oppression, and no more Constitution
It fled with the blast
That escape into the unseen eternity
As Hunter S. Thompson left our 9/11 world
With his own big bang theory
And was jettisoned into the same universe
That guided him through this failing home
That we have left slip through ideas
And finger tips melting into cellular phones
So utterly alone
News lies, and the politicians are polluting our youths minds
With swift and efficient distraction
Wry dreams or no dreams at all–
Porcine swine, raping the earth
Stealing our time
And denying us the fruits
Of the rotting vine
That was promised by our ancients
Who staggered in empty skulls
A thousand moons ago
As brightly feathered shamans with
Goats eyes
I can see the naked earth before us
And I can see the dust before us
And I can see the diamond of creation in the eyes
Of my loves, and in quiet waves on an empty midnight beach
And I see…a red fist high in the air
It has two thumbs, and at its center
The key to the inner self;
to immortality
But…only with the right kind of eyes
