
by Chet A. Oliver
time clocks
alarm clocks
clocks and camera
tick tock, bells ringing
staring down from their mechanical perch
pointing single hand mockery
laughing at your rueful obedience
of laws written in the will
of power
of consumerism
commercialism, materialism
industrialism
capitalism, conservatism
of executive orders, war, drone strikes
doom of inevitable coming conflict
that await our sons into
the maw of false tyranny in the name of god
reincarnation be damnation
damned be the nation to live
in the smug belly of the beast
who is belching crime after crime;
scandal after scandal
puking the years after too much blood
and Islam’s martyrs; the war-torn
children without arms to touch
legs to run
eyes to behold
lips and tongue to speak
angelic words to
weeping mothers
fighting fathers
the dead fill the holes in the street
Tommy form Oklahoma spits tobacco
on his dead enemy
he can kill a man from quarter a mile away
air-raids drown the screams of those
who have no place to hide
the christian hell is lived on
earth everyday by faces we never know
faces that we don’t care to know
those faces don’t pay the bills
this is America
gently dreaming in another time
another age
an age of moving back
progress is for the rich and famous
the rest are just the filthy masses
bedbug ridden sheep
but, Obama is eating graciously
with his fellow Americans
as towns with names and history
are obliterated in the name of Democracy
and freedom among men
and yet ourselves waking up on Thomas Jefferson’s cold sidewalks…
tell me America
do you think we will
reach this waning light
of freedom
or fall frail at the feet
of kings to be?
do we have the courage
to deny their plot
against the free mans
consciousness by destroying
this calculated scepter of lies?
is there nothing we can do?
has the hope and resolve of this nation become extinct
like so many great living spirits that
held no more than a profit in the eyes
of these vague masters
how long can it last?
this plasticity, this mundane grinding through it?
the accepting of a dwindling fate?
the creme de la creme has already risen
and we simply must accept it all with a drunken
shrug of the shoulders in a dusky lonely dusk bar room?
soaked in self pity, drowning in self-induced sorrow of not
having enough sand to stand on your own two feet;
the cowards bowing like the pure white flags
that Finger the breeze of no revolution in sight
but our keys
the poets keys
keys to jeweled kingdoms of
mastery of soul and thought
on this painted keyboard are like mortar fire
like nuclear strike, like four horsemen
like blasphemous brimstone
truth falling down on the heads of demigod democrat
king republican as they finally shudder in fear
still, through words and wisdom,
we find a comfortable place to love
a dream, a soft, sacred serenity
in the third eye, the Chakra, the center
where the mind opens to the world
the world we have only absently witnessed
in the realms of
Salvia Divinorum, the Psilocybin Mushroom,
DMT, LSD
Ibogaine,
Mescaline from the sacred Peyote –
hunting humming vespers and whispers in the starlit shade
where poets and lovers are illuminated
through freedom and experience
where we are all secretly listening
to the soft moan and baring witness
the silken ashen glow of the moon
the goat god smiles pleasantly at the plebeian plight
where they have turned magic into miracles
water to wine, truth to lies, thrills to crimes
…and the dawn pushes up against me with a blue shoulder
as I fall into the dream of what I want to be
only to awake to what I am
and find solace that they are the same