Category Archives: occupytogether.org

House of Mirrors

From the El Paso County Jail. There may be glitches while i learn WordPress. http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2014/07/of-mirrors-june-2014-el-paso-county.html

WEDNESDAY, JULY 23, 2014

House of Mirrors

House of Mirrors

26 June 2014

El Paso County Jail

Don’t freak out now, anyone. I’m still out of jail, pending appeal, as of today, 23 July 2014.

Sorry, no footnotes in the blogger. You can get them here
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1umk-RPyxoiQTPSS84Cp4sR80UAXFzsVRpuiRBVzrdNA/edit?usp=sharing

Pogo couldn’t have known the heft and resonance of his words: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

I wrote a screed a while back, (Today’s Tom Sawyer), excoriating shitty Christian behavior. There’s still plenty to say about all that, and maybe some of it will come out here, but it’s not the point of this one. During that earlier rant, i promised to harp, eventually, about bad behavior on the part of pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, and some of my other natural affinity groups as well.

That isn’t it either. Or maybe it is. But not really. Not quite. I promised to write about the Fear, too, and nor is it that, though the Fear runs through it all. This is about a war.

Many members of of various of the groups on that funny little list i jotted just now recognize and will now openly state that there’s a war looming. They’re wrong about that much anyhow–the looming is all done and the fight is on. Right now. It’s been on for decades, (or maybe forever). I’m here “jotting” because that’s what one does in the county jail, where i am a political prisoner–a POW, really, though i prefer to think of myself as a prisoner of conscience–but maybe it’s a digression to say so. Or maybe not. Let’s explore this amalgam of notions a bit, and see if we can find out.

Here at the county jail one finds a  peculiarly refined microcosm of the way the dynamics of the variously conflicting groups involved in this bizarre  war interact, cleared of much of the dross of false civility that ordinarily circumvents the fight out on the sidewalk, at least here in the U.S.A.

I know Europeans here that want to skedaddle from this place and others afraid to come here because many of them can see the shitstorm brewing and it scares them. They often seem to see it more clearly than we Americans are able to do at least in part because our access to real news is barely over nil, of maybe because as outside observers they aren’t saddled with the cognitive dissonance we sorry brainwashed frogs that live in this hot-ass boiling lake must so often suffer. I don’t know. I hope they realize this pond holds us all.

Oddly enough, while the interactions at the county jail display some of the finer points of conflict in out absurdly labeled free society, they also show some reasons for hope. There are still lights burning.

“Fuck the Police!”

I don’t know how many times i’ve heard that phrase from some of my dearest friends. I’ve uttered them myself. Often. Sometimes at the top of my lungs. Sometimes it was far more personal: “Fuck you! That’s right, you, personally, whomever you may be in your opposition to me, my pursuits, my people. Maybe i should refer to the less common; “Fuck the Pigs,’ because the police are only a fractional representation of one segment, one camp of that particular overarching social entity the hippies were talking about when they began to disparage swine so badly as to label their opposition thusly in this odd existential war from whence the flesh and blood scrap derives.

“Battle lines are being drawn,” went the line from the Buffalo Springfield some fifty-ish years back. They’re pretty well drawn, now, though they resemble lines a three-year-old might scribble. The shit’s on. People are fighting. The skirmishes often feel like some kind of kids’ game though too, involving blindfolds and billyclubs. Maybe i can’t deny swinging a stick around myself, sometimes. Maybe that’swhat this is–a chance for me to look in the mirror a little, Maybe it’s because it’s hard to sit the game out when i keep getting hit in the head. Whatever. Let’s keep on through the maze and just hope we don’t smash too many mirrors.

During the Occupation we intrepids staged a few years back, (and some of us still engage–viva la revolución and all), my son and i traveled to Denver for the final push when the cops razed the encampment there. The scene that October of 2011 there in Denver was some shit this country hadn’t seen in over forty years maybe, where armored brigades of soldiers–not cops at all but stormtroopers–rolled on a huge, disparate group of unarmed citizens. It was tragic. And beautiful. Versions of the same scene played out all around the world that fall.

There at Civic Center Park, across the avenue from the State Capitol building, the Boy and i stood in the thick of it as those battle lines sharpened, and then blew apart as the whole outhouse hit the fan.

Some thousands of us had marched boisterously through Denver’s business district, pausing for a special visit at the Federal Reserve. After completing a wide loop around downtown we mounted the Capitol steps for whatever confrontation the Denver planners had planned. They, (to claim a thing–we), had been warned explicitly beforehand to stay off that particular edifice, so the moment we took the steps and began railing through one of our ubiquitous bullhorns, the shock teams appeared, as if the bearded-Spock Enterprise had beamed them to the scene.

Honestly, i was pretty fucking nervous at that point. It’s not as though i’d never been beaten up by the cops before, but that stuff is kind of a young man’s sport, and i was never really all that much a fan anyhow. Besides, those had always been cops, not armored sci-fi gladiators. But the main thing was the Boy. He was fifteen then and down for plenty, but he looked pretty worried too, and, (the mainthing, actually), i knew i’d never live through my next conversation with his mother if i allowed him to be beaten and busted by the police. I suggested we pull back to the park and we did, but i felt pretty spineless for having done it, really.

The Boy and i had a quick consult: “You see what this is going to be, right?” “Yeah.” “Are you down, or not?” Nervous but firm, “Yeah.” “Fuck it then…God damn it; your mom is gonna kill me. Let’s get some lunch.”

The park itself  was packed with crowds of Occupiers, some having returned with us from the march and probably harboring thoughts similar to mine. The encampment had been there for a good while by then, and the Black Flag Anarchists’ Free Kitchen was in full flight. It had already been dismantled more than once as a special preparatory project for the cops–kind of a warm-up. Knowing well what was coming, the no-nonsense scrappy men’n’women in black behind the table were all assholes with elbows, flying around in a frenzy with grim serious joy in their eyes as they did their level best to sling as much great tasting free food as possible before the inevitable hammer fell. Those guys were freaking awesome sauce with motherfuckin’ cherries on top!

Rather than spark an actual and possibly justifiable war on the Capitol steps, even the most radical and adrenaline-blinded of the group holding that position chose to retreat and quickly joined us at the park. The scene was oddly festive, with tents and art projects and folks dressed for carnival. The mid-autumn day was one of those beautiful Colorado Indian summer affairs with pristine blue skies through which flitted happy and blissfully oblivious birdies merrily on the lookout for delectable kitchen scraps. But wait! What the hey!!? The second the steps were abandoned and that contingent joined those meeker souls at the park, the rest of the cops in the danged known universe materialized in a huff and began setting up for some sort of paramilitary invasion. No shit–we all saw pretty quickly what the Denver PD had in mind for all those fun military vehicles and equipment they’d been collecting.

The scene changed dramatically there on the sidewalk where the Anarchists’ Kitchen was set up. There was plenty of action before then, but the top-gun radicals had been at the Capitol along with most of the cops. Now a phalanx quickly formed four deep with armored, shielded, armed, dangerous, implacable, and apparently stoically unflappable police stretching all around, up and down–all over the fucking place. Where the Boy and i stood a few sidewalk squares south of the Kitchen the scene was still like a carnival spreading away and outward into the park in every direction save the east, buy more like something Ray Bradbury or John Clifford might have dreamt up. Moving east to west one would have passed through four rows of cops in a formation that i’d only seen before in movies about Fascist  takeovers where American patriots saved the day by vanquishing some identically clad and positioned foe as we occupiers faced that day, armored only with our damn-the-torpedoes ethical certitude. Stepping by the entrenched police if one were to dare it, one would have passed a modest tree lawn, an ordinary sidewalk crowded with dark festival-goers, and could then step up to the folding table that served as the Anarchists’ ordering counter and serving table set up facing east from the immediate western line of the sidewalk across from the antiMayberry lines facing the stubbornly unaltered scene in the Kitchen.

The cops just stood there for what seems to memory like hours, but it couldn’t have been all afternoon or anything. Maybe so. The Boy and i milled around a bit getting a look at the overall scene and scoping out the various sections of the park. Behind the Kitchen to the west were the bulk of the tents, say a hundred or more, though others were scattered about. Further  west a concrete round with maybe a fountain or something hosted a bunch of info tables, some artsy hippies working on various projects, a triage setup, some chanting Hare Krishnas. More cops surrounded the camp, even more moved to close off the farthest reaches of the west side, We all saw we were utterly circumscribed and our physical position was hopeless. There was plenty of Hope, mind you, but all of it founded on our spiritual position, see.

As we awaited  what everyone knew to be inexorable, not so many of us remained quiet, (by “us” i mean Occupiers here; the most visible government employees were silent). I did mostly, and so did the Boy, he for his reasons and i for mine. The whole scene produced its own racket, but the most noticeable volume arose from the collection of spirit-moved Occupiers working the lines of eerily insensate gendarmes. Each was moved by his or her own personal spirit, few of which were very friendly toward the collective juggernaut we faced. More than one strode frenetically up and down whichever line was convenient  hurling f-bombs and spittle with as much force as he could muster. You know: “Fuck the Police!!!” and,“Fuck Yoooou!!!” from distances as close as the collected officers’ gear would allow. The pointillistic rows of cops, each in his own world, stared into space, eyes forward and directed at some Unknown, refusing eye contact. Only God and each man in his solitude knew what blackness filled his vision, (and possibly anyone operating one of those guv’mint mind-reading gizmos, if you’re into that sort of thinking).

Sensibly, few of the “non-violent” protesters were mad–that is crazy–enough to attempt to get physical. Those that did were promptly stomped, smashed and removed from the game. Otherwise with many pushing the envelope right to its most extreme limit, the arms-down-and-rigid-face forward-inches-from-any-nearest-random-cop’s-shielded-face stance of extreme and barely checked agitation rapidly became familiar. I for one was amazed at the extraordinary and rather creepy restraint the beleaguered police were displaying, though few shield-screened eyes could keep from betraying internal turmoil. Virtually none of the cops would assent to eye contact.

As this scene played itself out, a few Occupiers attempted to convince their fellows to mellow. In the midst of the very front and most electrical line of all this, there in front of the aforementioned Kitchen, one lone Occupier was working the line of gear-laden men, moved by a different spirit indeed. He was preaching it, baby. Pleading. Begging. Beseeching. As near to tears as i am now as this scene spills its way from my fingertips, fluid in his expressive motion to and fro as any practiced Sunday morning crowd-pleaser can i get a amen. “Don’t you see it? You are us! We are you! Please, stop this! We are one–we must stop fighting!” And in some brilliant, divinely inspired voice, “Lay down your shields! Join us! Put down your clubs and have some lunch!”

And then …right there in front of the Boy and me…with the scene in the actual Kitchen production area behind the table unchanged from before the lines formed…one of them did exactly that.

There was actually a fat queue at the Kitchen counter that parted like the Red Sea, astonished, for this newborn brother of ours to step up and claim his serving. He ate his food in silence and retook his spot in that other line which remained unaltered as his fellows stood unmoved, apparently in both senses. The Boy and i collected our portion of genuinely bomb-ass risotto and began to  eat with more on our minds than i can possibly describe. Before we were half through our plates the order came and we found ourselves dining amidst a police riot, our rice flavored by tear gas. (I got off the hook before, when the story remained vague. I suppose his mom is going to kill me now, after all).

The rest of the action went down as one would expect, with ample blood, outrage, and pepper-bullet injury and indignity and tears and drama. It was all on the news, with much expansion available on YouTube. You can look it up. None of that is the point.

I heard that one cop was fired perfunctorily that night.

We were there. Right fucking there. It really happened. It was so surreal i almost have to ask the Boy if it actually wasn’t some kind of dream.

Those two guys, though. That cop! When we all do what he did, just maybe then the war will be over. He looked up  and noticed he was looking in the fucking mirror.

The thing about all this is that the crowd of Occupiers was a full-on quorum of average joes with representation across several spectra. There were Christians, pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, blue-collar Barney Rubbles, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, neo-hippies, and chanting, jangling Hare Krishnas, The cops were disguised as an invading foreign force but we all know they were really just a bunch of Christians, pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, blue-collar Barney Rubbles, Republicans, and Democrats. The only groups lacking representation really were the hippies and the chanting, jangling Hare Krishnas that stayed with the rest of us till late into the night serving free food as a replacement for the Anarchists who had been quite the hell shut down. Oh yeah–there likely weren’t too many Anarchists on the cops’ side of the lines. I’m pretty sure  those differences are significant. Maybe the cops would be better if they got some of those groups they were missing. The janglier the better.

Back here at the county jail where i’m still Occupying, there’s lots of conflict, though not nearly so boiling hot. The old standby, “Fuck the Police,” is scrawled or carved around and about and plenty of folks on either side of whatever line each has drawn are fully prepared to swing  clubs at one another. Many of the sheriff’s deputies and sad, paycheck-to paycheck “detention specialists” are happy to evoke a very dark spirit indeed in their efforts to control us inmates who represent Other to them. I have been struck by the observation that these obnoxious fucks are the respected  representatives of a society that so many of our deluded citizenry expect us of the criminal class to emulate.

Ha! I may be an asshole myself, but no thanks: I have no interest in joining your obnoxious and shitty club.

Meanwhile, virtually all of us prisoners, including myself sometimes, react…”Grumble grumble fuck the police why i oughtta etc. etc. ad nauseum” Various of us slink around and steal or fight among ourselves or in general practice a sort of blindfolded subservience to Self. (Marco! Polo!…Ouch! Motherfucker!!!). We’re fucking obnoxious. We want the cops and the guards and judges and bankers and presidents to act differently but…why would they want to join our obnoxious and shitty club? When they do we wind up with a spectacular clusterfuck like the found at the Denver county jail last month, where a dep was helping a banger sling dope and administer beat-downs. Happens all the time. In every kaleidoscopic variation you can imagine.

Pogo couldn’t have known the heft and resonance of his words: “ We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

I wrote a screed a while back, (Today’s Tom Sawyer), excoriating shitty Christian behavior. There’s still plenty to say about all that, and maybe some of it will come out here, but it’s not the point of this one. During that earlier rant, i promised to harp, eventually, about bad behavior on the part of pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, and some of my other natural affinity groups as well.

That isn’t it either. Or maybe it is. But not really. Not quite. I promised to write about the Fear, too, and nor is it that, though the Fear runs through it all. This is about a war.

Many members of of various of the groups on that funny little list i jotted just now recognize and will now openly state that there’s a war looming. They’re wrong about that much anyhow–the looming is all done and the fight is on. Right now. It’s been on for decades, (or maybe forever). I’m here “jotting” because that’s what one does in the county jail, where i am a political prisoner–a POW, really, though i prefer to think of myself as a prisoner of conscience–but maybe it’s a digression to say so. Or maybe not. Let’s explore this amalgam of notions a bit, and see if we can find out.

Here at the county jail one finds a  peculiarly refined microcosm of the way the dynamics of the variously conflicting groups involved in this bizarre  war interact, cleared of much of the dross of false civility that ordinarily circumvents the fight out on the sidewalk, at least here in the U.S.A.

I know Europeans here that want to skedaddle from this place and others afraid to come here because many of them can see the shitstorm brewing and it scares them. They often seem to see it more clearly than we Americans are able to do at least in part because our access to real news is barely over nil, of maybe because as outside observers they aren’t saddled with the cognitive dissonance we sorry brainwashed frogs that live in this hot-ass boiling lake must so often suffer. I don’t know. I hope they realize this pond holds us all.

Oddly enough, while the interactions at the county jail display some of the finer points of conflict in out absurdly labeled free society, they also show some reasons for hope. There are still lights burning.

“Fuck the Police!”

I don’t know how many times i’ve heard that phrase from some of my dearest friends. I’ve uttered them myself. Often. Sometimes at the top of my lungs. Sometimes it was far more personal: “Fuck you! That’s right, you, personally, whomever you may be in your opposition to me, my pursuits, my people. Maybe i should refer to the less common; “Fuck the Pigs,’ because the police are only a fractional representation of one segment, one camp of that particular overarching social entity the hippies were talking about when they began to disparage swine so badly as to label their opposition thusly in this odd existential war from whence the flesh and blood scrap derives.

“Battle lines are being drawn,” went the line from the Buffalo Springfield some fifty-ish years back. They’re pretty well drawn, now, though they resemble lines a three-year-old might scribble. The shit’s on. People are fighting. The skirmishes often feel like some kind of kids’ game though too, involving blindfolds and billyclubs. Maybe i can’t deny swinging a stick around myself, sometimes. Maybe that’swhat this is–a chance for me to look in the mirror a little, Maybe it’s because it’s hard to sit the game out when i keep getting hit in the head. Whatever. Let’s keep on through the maze and just hope we don’t smash too many mirrors.

During the Occupation we intrepids staged a few years back, (and some of us still engage–viva la revolución and all), my son and i traveled to Denver for the final push when the cops razed the encampment there. The scene that October of 2011 there in Denver was some shit this country hadn’t seen in over forty years maybe, where armored brigades of soldiers–not cops at all but stormtroopers–rolled on a huge, disparate group of unarmed citizens. It was tragic. And beautiful. Versions of the same scene played out all around the world that fall.

There at Civic Center Park, across the avenue from the State Capitol building, the Boy and i stood in the thick of it as those battle lines sharpened, and then blew apart as the whole outhouse hit the fan.

Some thousands of us had marched boisterously through Denver’s business district, pausing for a special visit at the Federal Reserve. After completing a wide loop around downtown we mounted the Capitol steps for whatever confrontation the Denver planners had planned. They, (to claim a thing–we), had been warned explicitly beforehand to stay off that particular edifice, so the moment we took the steps and began railing through one of our ubiquitous bullhorns, the shock teams appeared, as if the bearded-Spock Enterprise had beamed them to the scene.

Honestly, i was pretty fucking nervous at that point. It’s not as though i’d never been beaten up by the cops before, but that stuff is kind of a young man’s sport, and i was never really all that much a fan anyhow. Besides, those had always been cops, not armored sci-fi gladiators. But the main thing was the Boy. He was fifteen then and down for plenty, but he looked pretty worried too, and, (the mainthing, actually), i knew i’d never live through my next conversation with his mother if i allowed him to be beaten and busted by the police. I suggested we pull back to the park and we did, but i felt pretty spineless for having done it, really.

The Boy and i had a quick consult: “You see what this is going to be, right?” “Yeah.” “Are you down, or not?” Nervous but firm, “Yeah.” “Fuck it then…God damn it; your mom is gonna kill me. Let’s get some lunch.”

The park itself  was packed with crowds of Occupiers, some having returned with us from the march and probably harboring thoughts similar to mine. The encampment had been there for a good while by then, and the Black Flag Anarchists’ Free Kitchen was in full flight. It had already been dismantled more than once as a special preparatory project for the cops–kind of a warm-up. Knowing well what was coming, the no-nonsense scrappy men’n’women in black behind the table were all assholes with elbows, flying around in a frenzy with grim serious joy in their eyes as they did their level best to sling as much great tasting free food as possible before the inevitable hammer fell. Those guys were freaking awesome sauce with motherfuckin’ cherries on top!

Rather than spark an actual and possibly justifiable war on the Capitol steps, even the most radical and adrenaline-blinded of the group holding that position chose to retreat and quickly joined us at the park. The scene was oddly festive, with tents and art projects and folks dressed for carnival. The mid-autumn day was one of those beautiful Colorado Indian summer affairs with pristine blue skies through which flitted happy and blissfully oblivious birdies merrily on the lookout for delectable kitchen scraps. But wait! What the hey!!? The second the steps were abandoned and that contingent joined those meeker souls at the park, the rest of the cops in the danged known universe materialized in a huff and began setting up for some sort of paramilitary invasion. No shit–we all saw pretty quickly what the Denver PD had in mind for all those fun military vehicles and equipment they’d been collecting.

The scene changed dramatically there on the sidewalk where the Anarchists’ Kitchen was set up. There was plenty of action before then, but the top-gun radicals had been at the Capitol along with most of the cops. Now a phalanx quickly formed four deep with armored, shielded, armed, dangerous, implacable, and apparently stoically unflappable police stretching all around, up and down–all over the fucking place. Where the Boy and i stood a few sidewalk squares south of the Kitchen the scene was still like a carnival spreading away and outward into the park in every direction save the east, buy more like something Ray Bradbury or John Clifford might have dreamt up. Moving east to west one would have passed through four rows of cops in a formation that i’d only seen before in movies about Fascist  takeovers where American patriots saved the day by vanquishing some identically clad and positioned foe as we occupiers faced that day, armored only with our damn-the-torpedoes ethical certitude. Stepping by the entrenched police if one were to dare it, one would have passed a modest tree lawn, an ordinary sidewalk crowded with dark festival-goers, and could then step up to the folding table that served as the Anarchists’ ordering counter and serving table set up facing east from the immediate western line of the sidewalk across from the antiMayberry lines facing the stubbornly unaltered scene in the Kitchen.

The cops just stood there for what seems to memory like hours, but it couldn’t have been all afternoon or anything. Maybe so. The Boy and i milled around a bit getting a look at the overall scene and scoping out the various sections of the park. Behind the Kitchen to the west were the bulk of the tents, say a hundred or more, though others were scattered about. Further  west a concrete round with maybe a fountain or something hosted a bunch of info tables, some artsy hippies working on various projects, a triage setup, some chanting Hare Krishnas. More cops surrounded the camp, even more moved to close off the farthest reaches of the west side, We all saw we were utterly circumscribed and our physical position was hopeless. There was plenty of Hope, mind you, but all of it founded on our spiritual position, see.

As we awaited  what everyone knew to be inexorable, not so many of us remained quiet, (by “us” i mean Occupiers here; the most visible government employees were silent). I did mostly, and so did the Boy, he for his reasons and i for mine. The whole scene produced its own racket, but the most noticeable volume arose from the collection of spirit-moved Occupiers working the lines of eerily insensate gendarmes. Each was moved by his or her own personal spirit, few of which were very friendly toward the collective juggernaut we faced. More than one strode frenetically up and down whichever line was convenient  hurling f-bombs and spittle with as much force as he could muster. You know: “Fuck the Police!!!” and,“Fuck Yoooou!!!” from distances as close as the collected officers’ gear would allow. The pointillistic rows of cops, each in his own world, stared into space, eyes forward and directed at some Unknown, refusing eye contact. Only God and each man in his solitude knew what blackness filled his vision, (and possibly anyone operating one of those guv’mint mind-reading gizmos, if you’re into that sort of thinking).

Sensibly, few of the “non-violent” protesters were mad–that is crazy–enough to attempt to get physical. Those that did were promptly stomped, smashed and removed from the game. Otherwise with many pushing the envelope right to its most extreme limit, the arms-down-and-rigid-face forward-inches-from-any-nearest-random-cop’s-shielded-face stance of extreme and barely checked agitation rapidly became familiar. I for one was amazed at the extraordinary and rather creepy restraint the beleaguered police were displaying, though few shield-screened eyes could keep from betraying internal turmoil. Virtually none of the cops would assent to eye contact.

As this scene played itself out, a few Occupiers attempted to convince their fellows to mellow. In the midst of the very front and most electrical line of all this, there in front of the aforementioned Kitchen, one lone Occupier was working the line of gear-laden men, moved by a different spirit indeed. He was preaching it, baby. Pleading. Begging. Beseeching. As near to tears as i am now as this scene spills its way from my fingertips, fluid in his expressive motion to and fro as any practiced Sunday morning crowd-pleaser can i get a amen. “Don’t you see it? You are us! We are you! Please, stop this! We are one–we must stop fighting!” And in some brilliant, divinely inspired voice, “Lay down your shields! Join us! Put down your clubs and have some lunch!”

And then …right there in front of the Boy and me…with the scene in the actual Kitchen production area behind the table unchanged from before the lines formed…one of them did exactly that.

There was actually a fat queue at the Kitchen counter that parted like the Red Sea, astonished, for this newborn brother of ours to step up and claim his serving. He ate his food in silence and retook his spot in that other line which remained unaltered as his fellows stood unmoved, apparently in both senses. The Boy and i collected our portion of genuinely bomb-ass risotto and began to  eat with more on our minds than i can possibly describe. Before we were half through our plates the order came and we found ourselves dining amidst a police riot, our rice flavored by tear gas. (I got off the hook before, when the story remained vague. I suppose his mom is going to kill me now, after all).

The rest of the action went down as one would expect, with ample blood, outrage, and pepper-bullet injury and indignity and tears and drama. It was all on the news, with much expansion available on YouTube. You can look it up. None of that is the point.

I heard that one cop was fired perfunctorily that night.

We were there. Right fucking there. It really happened. It was so surreal i almost have to ask the Boy if it actually wasn’t some kind of dream.

Those two guys, though. That cop! When we all do what he did, just maybe then the war will be over. He looked up  and noticed he was looking in the fucking mirror.

The thing about all this is that the crowd of Occupiers was a full-on quorum of average joes with representation across several spectra. There were Christians, pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, blue-collar Barney Rubbles, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, neo-hippies, and chanting, jangling Hare Krishnas, The cops were disguised as an invading foreign force but we all know they were really just a bunch of Christians, pagans, dope fiends, felons, bikers, disgruntled employees, GIs, vets, blue-collar Barney Rubbles, Republicans, and Democrats. The only groups lacking representation really were the hippies and the chanting, jangling Hare Krishnas that stayed with the rest of us till late into the night serving free food as a replacement for the Anarchists who had been quite the hell shut down. Oh yeah–there likely weren’t too many Anarchists on the cops’ side of the lines. I’m pretty sure  those differences are significant. Maybe the cops would be better if they got some of those groups they were missing. The janglier the better.

Back here at the county jail where i’m still Occupying, there’s lots of conflict, though not nearly so boiling hot. The old standby, “Fuck the Police,” is scrawled or carved around and about and plenty of folks on either side of whatever line each has drawn are fully prepared to swing  clubs at one another. Many of the sheriff’s deputies and sad, paycheck-to paycheck “detention specialists” are happy to evoke a very dark spirit indeed in their efforts to control us inmates who represent Other to them. I have been struck by the observation that these obnoxious fucks are the respected  representatives of a society that so many of our deluded citizenry expect us of the criminal class to emulate.

Ha! I may be an asshole myself, but no thanks: I have no interest in joining your obnoxious and shitty club.

Meanwhile, virtually all of us prisoners, including myself sometimes, react…”Grumble grumble fuck the police why i oughtta etc. etc. ad nauseum” Various of us slink around and steal or fight among ourselves or in general practice a sort of blindfolded subservience to Self. (Marco! Polo!…Ouch! Motherfucker!!!). We’re fucking obnoxious. We want the cops and the guards and judges and bankers and presidents to act differently but…why would they want to join our obnoxious and shitty club? When they do we wind up with a spectacular clusterfuck like the found at the Denver county jail last month, where a dep was helping a banger sling dope and administer beat-downs. Happens all the time. In every kaleidoscopic variation you can imagine.

Sorry, reader; a glitch is preventing the end of this from displaying just now. I’ll fix it, but meanwhile, this link is better for the footnotes anyway. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1umk-RPyxoiQTPSS84Cp4sR80UAXFzsVRpuiRBVzrdNA/edit?usp=sharing

Although those of you that have read or will now read the other stuff here on hipgnosis will easily recognize the common ground that one may imagine stands to be found on the lawns inside the moats of our adjacent castles in a neighborhood full of loons, all built on air, i am deeply indebted to Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason for some of the truly fine and beautiful language i snatched more or less wholesale to help me build the last four paragraphs here. Even though their book,The Rule of Four is a best-seller of a popular genre, i highly recommend it as the best book i’ve read produced during the twenty-first century. I wish i had written it myself, (while noting the title of this piece). Everyone should read this book.

POSTED BY STEVE BASS AT 9:45 PM

Homeless Colorado Springs man emboldened by Occupy effort appeals jail time

from the Colorado Springs Gazette

http://gazette.com/article/1534440

By Jakob Rodgers Updated: July 28, 2014 at 2:07 pm

Nearly three years ago, Steven Bass’ tent led to a police ticket – a ticket that led to a trial, an appeal denied and 160-day sentence in El Paso County jail.

Bass, the first person cited under Colorado Springs’ camping ban, remains mired in a legal battle backed by a University of Denver assistant professor working for free.

He represents a small segment of the homeless issue – a man on a personal crusade against the camping ban emboldened by the Occupy Colorado Springs movement. His case is not emblematic of others who have been cited for camping on public property; rather, it is more of an outlier.

While people ticketed for camping typically include the chronically homeless – people whose only home is a tent, and who often rebuff police officers’ offers of secure housing – Bass wants to make a point.

Right now, he is free while appealing the jail time. Bass lives with a fellow veteran of the Occupy movement and blogs occasionally on what he sees as injustices in the world.

“I contend now that this thing has burgeoned well beyond the camping ban itself, and has now become a giant discussion of principle, and just what the hell we’re doing here in the United States of America, and the whole world,” Bass said.

Police issued the ticket in October 2011 when he pitched a tent on a sidewalk in Acacia Park, despite warnings from police that doing so would lead to a citation.

For Bass, the ticket and the Occupy gathering proved an opportune time for a stand against the city’s camping ban – an ordinance passed by the City Council in 2010 that outlawed camping on public land. He said he has volunteered at soup kitchens and for other homeless services for about 30 years, and he lives homeless – usually by couch surfing.

“Just because they don’t have any money, poof, they are made criminals,” Bass said of people affected by the ban.

Eleven tickets have been issued under the ban through June 5, with the majority coming in 2014, according to the Colorado Springs Police Department.

The ban came as camps swelled along Monument and Fountain creeks amid the Great Recession in 2009 and early 2010. So many people lived there that bystanders dropped off donated food and clothing along the creek beds – philanthropy that proved overwhelming to the point of concern, some homeless advocates say. Sanitation issues also arose.

City Council member Jan Martin said she voted for the ordinance for the safety of people using creekside trails, along with concerns about the image that such tent cities would create for the city, she said Friday. Proponents of the ban said it is a tool to get people into more stable housing.

“In my opinion, it’s not a matter of out of sight, out of mind,” Martin said. “It’s just trying to find resources that can help people get back on their feet.”

Because of Bass’ indigent status, a judge decided against a fine in favor of a 60-hour community service sentence for the citation.

Bass said he almost did it – he planned on helping Pikes Peak Habitat for Humanity – until a DU professor offered to help. With the pro bono advice of Christopher Lasch, who teaches at the university’s Criminal Defense Clinic, Bass appealed the case.

A district court judge upheld the municipal court’s decision – a blow to the notion that the ban is unjust.

A subsequent appeal to the Colorado Supreme Court was denied in March, said Rob McCallum, spokesman for the Colorado Judicial Branch.

Through it all, Bass contemplated his 60-hour of community service sentence. And in an April hearing before Municipal Judge Spottswood W. H. Williams, Bass said he will never complete the requirement.

Identifying himself as an Occupier, Bass wrote to Williams that the camping ordinance is “effectively status-based incarceration,” because forcing people into shelters could be another form of incarceration. He also said he already does community service but railed against the court forcing him to do so.

“Therefore, i (sic) am here in front of you forcing your hand,” he wrote. “You must now either acknowledge the ethical poverty of the ordinance, or prove my point.”

In June, Williams answered Bass’ statement with a 160-day jail sentence for contempt of court.

Bass is appealing that sentence with Lasch’s help after having served more than a month in El Paso County jail.

Lasch said the jail sentence was excessive because jail time for failing to pay a fine is usually half of what Bass has served.

Even if he serves all 160 days, Bass has no plans of completing the 60-hour community service order – a requirement that remains.

Lasch wants all of it thrown out.

“The fact that the government would go to such lengths to punish this activity certainly supports Steve’s position that this (ban) effectively punishes being homeless,” Lasch said.

“In this case, it certainly punished him for speaking out against the ban.”

Contact Jakob Rodgers: 476-1654

Twitter @JakobRodgers

Facebook: Jakob.Rodgers

Read more at http://gazette.com/homeless-colorado-springs-man-emboldened-by-occupy-effort-appeals-jail-time/article/1534440#TIqUcdEm4KE8udlJ.99

Tea Partying With the Freak Brothers By: Steve Bass

http://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/2012/01/tea-partying-with-freak-brothers.html

FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 2012

Tea Partying With the Freak Brothers

BY: Steve Bass

Whew! These Occupy posts are far more difficult to pry from myself than their predecessors; the hands-on mechanics of putting the earlier stuff into practice in the present world, amongst the isolated pools of individuated consciousness we humans represent, each with his or her own vision of the whole, has been at the very least disorienting. I’ve lately revived an old motto i swiped from the good people at Oat Willie’s down in Austin, Texas: Onward Through the Fog! How odd is it that i’ve recently connected with some folks that hark back to that place in ways that are deeply surreal. Oat Willie’s and Fat Freddie will seem to be completely out of place in this bit, in which i mean to address the notion of cooperation amongst disparate factions, but not permanently i hope. By the end of this post, i hope to connect Occupy, The Tea Party, disparate passions, and yes, Hippies. It will be necessary to engage in some relatively surreal thinking.Last night on a new Facebook page, “UNITE: OCCUPY,” (cap lock and all), i got into a conversation about this stuff started by a guy that asked whether anyone thought a joint event between Occupiers and Tea Partiers might be possible. Sure, i said, our Colorado Springs group had lots of Tea Partiers among its earliest enthusiasts, and although many have pulled away, there still exists a close association with many that veer sharply toward the Te Party camp, especially among Ron Paulsupporters. The common ground Occupy shares with the Tea Party, at least t a grass root level, is substantial. There can be no doubt of the equally substantial differences. I suspect that it would take some pretty serious ideological barnstorming to bring the two camps together, but nothing prevents the groups from at least tentative discussion to find commonalities.Tonight our Occupy group staged a talk by Tea Party stalwart, Constitutionalist Mike Holler. Mike seemed for all appearances to be an earnest and well-versed supporter of Constitutional “fundamentalism,” if you will. He peppered his talk with lots of my favorite quotes from my favorite founding fathers. He got a little testy about the revisionist history his kids bring home from college early on–perhaps indicative of one point of separation between Occupiers and Tea Partiers. Some of those are important. Occupy is international, where the Tea Party can display degrees of jingoism. I, personally, respect the earnest efforts of our Enlightenment founders, but recognize that they were flawed, and aver that their document was dated by racist, sexist, and elitist provisions and thinking that they might be excused from by noting their temporal milieu. We don’t have the same luxury. Occupy is legitimately grass root, supported by sweat and blood more than funded, where TP is, or at least became very quickly corporately funded “AstroTurf,” disingenuously proffering libertarian ideals as a smoke screen for corporate license to plunder. Occupiers are  in my experience far more diverse than Tea Partiers. Socialist and Anarchist Occupiers are common, as are assorted races, genders, orientations, and religious persuasions, where Tea Partiers seem to my limited observation to be relatively homogeneously white Christian capitalist patriots. Mike interjected that both groups had been misrepresented by the media, and that seems likely to be so given that mainstream media seems content to misrepresent ’bout anything they report in this country, but Fox news and the rabid right like the Tea Party so much i have to wonder if he’s fallen victim to a personal soft spot.Mike spoke eloquently enough in his effort to simplify the Constitution, focusing on issues of freedom, and state’s rights. He said very little with which i could find disagreement. He pointed out two major points of confluence between Occupy and the Tea Party–personal liberty, and a rally-cry, “No more Bailouts!” I suspect he fastidiously avoided some points he knew or at least feared might be contentious, like for example the ludicrous assertions i’ve heard often that environmental warnings from the scientific community stem from some kind of Satanic control scheme from the–well just whom is never too clear. The Vatican or something. Commies, i guess. That just maybe the best way for Tea Partiers and Occupiers to interact, though, for now, concentrating on the common aversion to what amounts to Fascism. Interacting from that perspective could exclude much conversation. It could put the Tea Party in the same position as the Occupy movement, after their Fascist sponsors withdraw in horror. Whatever. We Occupiers got on just fine with Tea Party Mike–“Mr. Constitution.”Mike largely expressed notions we Occupiers could embrace. I suppose he could have done a bit of research and tailored his speech toward that  end, but i think we just agree; he seemed a grassroot kind of guy, to me. He briefly alluded to schisms within the Tea Party, and there’s no sensible reason to avoid acknowledging the same within Occupy. Last night’s event was attended by Occupy people that have had such extreme altercations in their attempts to wrestle a semblance of ideological unity from a stubbornly liquid platform that it could easily enough have disintegrated into bedlam. I attended with my dear friend Thomas, with whom i often disagree. In fact, he and i often disagree so strongly that sometimes i feel like smacking him in back of the head. I expect he feels the same way about me at times. Maybe much of the time. Take note, war-mongers of the world: Thomas is a great guy, and even though we disagree with one another, sometimes strongly, neither of us has smacked the other in back of the head. Get it?So here we were last night, disparate Occupiers engaging a Tea Party mouthpiece in a room full of people that have all experienced the vagaries of human interaction under a fairly pressurized circumstance over the past few months. No butterflies fluttered around the room, but no one worked up a bickering session, either.  We worked together. All of us. One could recall the old adage that “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” but that would be devolution. I prefer to imagine that those with arguments present recognized the futility of scrapping amongst friends, if only below the radar of their Egos. Whether my nobler hopes for those pained souls in the room last night are valid or not, the assertions i made in these non-pages well before Occupy began remain true. The system we wrestle against is collapsing around our headsAnd the solution is spiritual, to a far greater extent than it is temporal.Fat Freddy is a comic book character that lives in Denver. Seriously. I met him a little while ago. (This only seems out of place, i promise.) Mr. Constitution Mike Holler expressed the opinion last night that our American republic, our constitutional federation of states, is in its final throes; that we are in a position where, ” it’s too late to save the country, but too early to start shooting.” Mike seemed tentative in expressing his hope that God might pull some kind of supernatural rabbit from his celestial hat to resolve our monumental national woes. I expect he feared perturbing the often non-Christian sensibilities of the Occupiers. He needn’t have worried quite so much–we may be largely skeptical of literal interpretations, but we’re pretty tolerant of that sort of thing. When i met Fat Freddy–an icon of counter-cultural activism important to me since childhood, an old-school Hippie with connection to the most famous and infamous of that crowd–he singled me out and pulled me aside to explain in some detail his expectation for a spiritual upheaval in coming days. Freddy’s taken up with the Urantia Book, a tomei’ve heard Christians disparage as devilish. I couldn’t see anything devilish about what he showed me. He earnestly explained his expectation for resolution. Soon.We had come to Denver to talk about foreclosures and bank jiggery-pokery with another guy, and pulled up at Freddy’s house without knowing it. It just happened that way. These old Hippies like Tea Party fave, Ron Paul. (Follow along, now, i know it’s weird, and yeah, i know a lot of Occupiers don’t like Paul; i’m not sure about him myself). Also in attendance at that meeting was a woman i had been conversing with on line for quite a while in the context of Occupy. It took me nearly through the whole meeting to recognize her, because i knew her to live down in the Four Corners neighborhood of Colorado. She lives at Freddy’s now. This juxtaposition is so weird that now i’m expecting the Mad Hatter, or Lewis Carroll himself to pop up at some meeting quoting from Jabberwocky. Mike Holler holds out for resolution to  the country’s woes in a traditional Christian context. My own suspicion, shared with J.B.S. Haldane,  is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. But somewhere in the mix i am convinced that some divineThing many of us think of as God is deeply interested in the little proceedings here on our little blue marble and that our interactions are subsequently and necessarily thus influenced.

We live right here. We have no choice but  to manage things on a coarse, physical level; but we also live, i think, on an overlapping and  less tangible plane, where we have more influence than we might ordinarily imagine. At the same time, things seem to occur there without our conscious direction. We’ll need to keep plugging away at things like grasping the Constitution, and taking on massive, quixotic quests like fighting banks and a world full of renegade, intransigent governments and power brokers, not to mention our own internal battles, as finely defined as within our own Souls. We’ll need to recognize the Truth in one another, even when it’s obscured by a bunch of worldly disagreement and fog. And so far as i can tell, were learning. Whatever that means.

POSTED BY AT 10:45 AM

“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg updated for the Occupation

Howl

Updated by Breezy Kiefair

For my friends, fans, and fiends

I

I saw the best minds of my generation valiantly struggling to destroy the madness, starving hysterical educated,

dragging themselves through the occupied streets at dawn looking for a fix to their righteous anger,

angelheaded hempsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating class warfare,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El train and saw First Nation spirit guides pale and staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with perscribed narcotic hazed eyes.. desperatley trying to conquer physical pain inside the dream of Ginsberg’s school whilst Debting Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war and peace,

whose doctors with the stroke of a pen excluded them from the academies for weak immune response & too many hospital visits and too much time off required…… and so retired to being a ghost in the machine publishing controversial essays on the benefits of cannabis therapy for the sick.

who cowered in rotten canvas tents in long dirty clothes, burning their resin, paying their land bills and heating canned goods on a candle in the absence of an indoor stove whilst listening to the Terror echoing still today and through the years,

who got busted for their sacramental pipes returning through Maine with a story of hope for Cleveland, Michigan and Colorado.

who grew fire out back of low end hotels in their RV or drank resin tincture on Paradise Mesa, dug in until death, conditions and the cold of hell in their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, cannabis and lack and endless wails,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Mexico and the whole prohibition world, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote spirits haunting the land of no halls, backyard green tree cemetery falls, canna-bliss blowing over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teapotparty joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusk’s of the valley, ashcan rantings and kind cannabis on compassion makes you light of mind,

who chained themselves to their occupation. for the endless ride from park to holy jail on love and hope until the noise of mace and sticks brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the fear light of the memory of the dead man from the Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of the capitol building and when riot police came floated out and sat through the stale beer/coffee house dawn in desolate 16th Street, reading the crack of doom scroll across their social media news feeds.

who posted information continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Twin Towers onto of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, gifts for the Sacred place just cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen horizon mirage above reality’s plane. leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of the beauty of the world.

Who found it better suffering sweats and bone-grindings and migraines of junk-withdrawal in an MMJ state’s bleak furnished room, with the comfort of a pipe in hand and the knowledge they could use as much of this as their pain required and not worry about an unintended death.

who wandered around and around at midnight in the occupied parks wondering where to go, and remained, leaving no broken hearts except for their own, and even it, scrawled across a bit of cardboard and peacefully expressed for all of the anger and stress madness within their breasts.

who lit hash filled cigarettes at truck-stops truck-stops truck-stops racketing through snow toward lonesome freedom Maine in grandfather night,

who studied St. Jude, astral projection, and bop kabbalah, Rastafarian, the Egyptian book of the dead, the epic of Gilgamesh, and more because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Nebraska.

who longed through the streets of Ohio seeking visionary First Nation guides who were visions themselves

who thought they were only mad when they have every right to be mad and their righteous indignation gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in pig cars on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight small-town blizzard Maine,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through ‘Mosa seeking meds or heat or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to the safety of the horse-lands,

who disappeared into the underground leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the rocks we gathered for the house and ash of my heart scattered on the land, self sustainable American dream in ashes because I cant fund it beyond the empty land, and even that is for sale for survival’s sake.

who reappeared on the East Coast investigating the medicinal cannabis programs in other states in purple pure gift scarf and with big pacifist eyes sexy in their pale skin passing out information and stories in exchange for housing like a true bard of old.

who cold turkey-ed cigarettes repeatedly protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism (and picked them back up again in PTSD coping mechanism to throw them back down again and again),

who screamed in favor of the Cannabis haze of capitalism…. who distributed Congressional Supercommittee petitions in Universal Online square weeping and exposing the secrets of their hearts while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the severe weather sirens also wailed,

who broke down crying in protest parks as if they had been left naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who used their whit to strike at detectives and shrieked with delight in police-cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and duty to protest.

who howled on their knees in the igloo and were dragged off the sidewalks waving signs and screaming valid points,

who let themselves be maced in the face, and screamed with joy for truth exposed,

who believed in equality for all, caresses and hints of unconditional love

who occupied in the morning and in the evenings and sent messages to delegation rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their opinions freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a public forum when a small & vulnerable woman came to hear their wailing song.

who lost their loves to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who shared themselves ecstatic and insatiable and fell off the net, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate hope and prosperity eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, and a lighting a fire of self sustainability desire

who sweetened the minds of a million hearts trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the image of the sunrise, flashing truths under sad eyes and naked in the soul,

who went out traveling through Colorado in myriad stolen rides, A.G. secret hero of these poems, poet and activist of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable fingers given to censoring conformists and cigarettes shared with corrupted youth in Naropa writing work shop breaktime day. I sing to you on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside debates & especially quiet help in dreams.

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden nightmare, and picked themselves up out of heart sore despair… not drunk yet hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Wall Street’s iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their souls full of dread on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the 1% to open to a room full of steamheat and and lack of worry,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appeasement of bankers of the Stock market under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build revolutions in their parks, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the acid rain skies surrounded by orange crates of theology wishing for wide open spaces,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, rambling and unpublishable without a proofreader’s eye

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for a banana,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next century,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were tortured alive in their innocent flannel suits on social security disability amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, your government docs say your too sick to work, your government says your life is worth $17.42 a day. Make that work you sick lady in the wild all on your own.

who were trapped on the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of the protests, not even one tagline

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the dream’s window, jumped in the filthy Greyhound, leaped on haters, cried all over the street, danced on broken glass pipes barefoot..

who polar bear-ed it across frozen mesa to prove a point to psychopathic husband…. smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz screamed it was 1929 again, finished the joint and still stumbled down the hall just in time for their disease to make them throw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal auditory sensitivity.

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch a widespread panic incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loaned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to the social media class,

who retired to MMJ state to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or France to teach medicine or Southern border to live cheaply or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the feds of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw Knowledge at political pundits and gave lectures on history to representatives and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous reversion to the constitution,

and who were given instead the concrete void of mainstream media, refused electricity, cold-water hydrotherapy long before the dawn, applications for protest trademark names, occupational therapy in the for of police brutality & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic table, resting briefly in catatonia as the peaceful prepare their souls for pain.

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the corruptions and small-town censorship of infanticide in the East,

Pueblo State’s mountain views and Excelsior’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with bio-family finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination— yet in the mind hope still remains

ah, working class, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

whose written dreams made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel citizen in Time, unknown, yet posting here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Howl

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

Breezy Kiefair

What Harpy of regulations bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Inequality! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Inequality! Moloch! Nightmare of Money! 1% the loveless! Mental Moloch! State controlled Media the heavy judge of men!

Class Warfare the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Super-Congress of sorrows! Wall Street whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Money for the stunned governments!

My country whose mind has become pure machinery! My Country whose blood is running money! My Country whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! My Country whose ear is an unknown and smoking tomb! My country who adopted me and is therefore my parent.

My parents whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! My parents whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! My parents whose factories dream and choke in the fog while paying down their carbon footprint as if the damage was undone! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities making my body ache!!

Moloch is My father whose love is endless oil and stone! My father whose soul is electricity and banks! My home whose poverty is the specter of genius! My home whose fate is an uncertain roller coaster based on regulations that keep shrinking my resources! Freedom’s only home now whose name is the Mind!

Moloch is My home in whom I sit lonely! My home in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Crazy Bitch in Moloch! Lacklove and friendless in My home!

Moloch who entered and attempted to own my soul early! My home, in your information superhighway I become am a consciousness not bound so much by a disabled body! My father who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! My parents I abandon! Wake up in my country! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! Corporate Persons! invincible house or representatives! granite senates! Corrupt lobbyists! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting their country to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American Dream river turned to flushing toilet!

Dreams! adoration! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of bill of rights constitutional BULLSHIT!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and revolutions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the the edge! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! Were the 99%! This is what martial law looks like! As they are beaten back but do not submit.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III
Breezy Kiefair
Occupy Together! I’m with you on Wall Street

where you’re louder than I am

I’m with you in Oakland

where you must feel strange

I’m with you in Saint Louis

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Michigan

where you’re brother murdered a baby so you covered up the archives and put him to work as an administrative assistant.

I’m with my regulars

who pick apart and you laugh at this invisible humor

I’m with you in Denver

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Colorado Springs

where your traveling protester’s condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in my heart

where the faculties of the skull admit the worms of the senses but only in shades of pain

I’m with you in Nederland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Indica

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you sell nugs with the bodies of your nurses

I’m with you in Facebookland

where I scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of actual chess of the abyss

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you bang on the catatonic newsfeed

What’s on my mind? “the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse”

I’m with you in Facebookland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we accuse our doctors of cruelty, insanity and plot the revolution against the bankers influence and unequal distribution of wealth..

I’m with you in Facebookland

where you will split the heavens and find the beauty where you are, resurrecting your living human freedoms from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Facebookland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the songs of their youth all saying there is hope and we rebel.

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and whose problems won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Facebookland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ chemtrails roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop censorship bombs the digital hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Facebookland

in my dreams you drive from the story of your-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night to build a life here with me away from such woe.

III

Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland

where you’re madder than I am

I’m with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I’m with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I’m with you in Rockland

where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries

I’m with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I’m with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I’m with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I’m with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I’m with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I’m with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I’m with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I’m with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I’m with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I’m with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we’re free

I’m with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Footnote To Howl by Allen Ginsberg

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an
angel!
The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!

“America” by Allen Ginsberg updated for the Occupation (with Ballad of the skeletons)

America” and “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg updated for the Occupation and “Ballad of the Skeletons” as he wrote it”

October 28, 2011

America

Breezy Kiefair

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America seventeen dollars and forty two cents October 28, 2011.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?

go fuck yourself with your atom bomb, homeland security and martial law.
Go fuck yourself with your patriot act oppressing true patriots.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till my muse gives me the words.
America when will you return and be angelic? This world I live in is like a twilight zone episode of America’s greatness of yore
When will you take the wool off of your eyes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?

When will you open your eyes to the sick and dying? When will you see that we have value too? When will you correct the stress that kills disabled and working class alike?
When will you be worthy of your 99%
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you transform your spending from defense of oil to your peoples survival?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the dispensaries and get the effective medication I chose over narcotic poison with the same money Uncle Sam is happy to spend on things that make me more ill & could kill me?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.

Your human histories made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
My husband has gone underground I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the wild horses let me in their circle, seems horses understand me better than people.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, I can’t afford the subscriptions and everyday somebody goes on trial for murder. It just reminds me of my murdered kid and justice miscarried..
America I feel sentimental about wildlife and national parks.
America I used to be an nerd when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. While reading the free library that is the internet and sharing it with the world.
When I go to town I get supplies and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me eating libraries.
My psychoanalyst thought my logic is perfectly sound and advised me to trust it.
I WILL say whatever prayer I feel like wherever I feel like saying it. Cannabis IS a religious sacrament and a valid use of my first amendment freedom of speech and religion America the constitution is beautiful with a built in process of beautiful change.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. I am not ashamed.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Grandpa John after he came home from ‘Nam

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by the mainstream media?
I’m obsessed by the mainstream media.
I read it every day.
Its pages stare at me every time I open my computer to get some human connection.
I read it in the homeless shelters, in the basement of the Tattered Cover Bookstore,

in the basement of the NYC Greyhound station,

in social clubs for the insane in Maine,

In the greyhound station of Cleveland,

in Michigan Libraries

and on back to Denver,

to Union Station.

And I read it still out here in the wild.

Surrounded by nature at the roof of the world where I feel a bit more safe..
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Bankers are serious. Businessmen are serious. Lobbyists are serious. Movie producers are serious. Comedians are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

My country is rising against me.
I haven’t got a unemployed person’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of minds
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
99%’ers occupying my the ground.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the medicines that don’t work for me, and the GMO foods are next to go..
My ambition is to contribute to society despite the doctors saying I’m too sick for anything..

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my thoughts are as individual as his
automobiles more so if we planted hemp and made hemp oil returning to his original engine design we could stop worrying about oil.
America I will sell you all that I have just to survive.
America free Marc Emery
America save the Medical Marijuana Community & legalize
America we execute innocent too often they must not die.
America I am the 99%.
America you don’t really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad terrorists
Them terrorists them terrorists and them North Koreans. And them Terrorists.
The al Queda wants to eat us alive. The Al Queda‘s power mad. They wants to take
our cars from out our garages.

Oh my precious oil, must protect the precious oil…

when we can grow an oil far better on the land that is ours & should be so free.

They wants to squash Denver. They needs a edu-ma-cation. Ther wants our
auto plants to go to Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh.. Uncle Sam need big strong workmen at a wage guaranteed to make you weak..
Hah. Them make us all work massive overtime with no overtime pay as I watched my friend get laid off today. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking at the net and social media posts of your people.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts in factories,

I tried factory work already, I’m nearsighted,chronically ill and psychologically unstable anyway.
America I’m putting my bisexual artists research obsessed shoulder to the wheel.

America

Allen Ginsberg

America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don’re really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


Ballad Of The Skeletons Lyrics by: Allen Ginsberg

Said the Presidential Skeleton 

I won’t sign the bill 

Said the Speaker skeleton 

Yes you will 

Said the Representative Skeleton 

I object 

Said the Supreme Court skeleton 

Whaddya expect 

Said the Miltary skeleton 

Buy Star Bombs 

Said the Upperclass Skeleton 

Starve unmarried moms 

Said the Yahoo Skeleton 

Stop dirty art 

Said the Right Wing skeleton 

Forget about yr heart 

Said the Gnostic Skeleton 

The Human Form’s divine 

Said the Moral Majority skeleton 

No it’s not it’s mine 

Said the Buddha Skeleton 

Compassion is wealth 

Said the Corporate skeleton 

It’s bad for your health 

Said the Old Christ skeleton 

Care for the Poor 

Said the Son of God skeleton 

AIDS needs cure 

Said the Homophobe skeleton 

Gay folk suck 

Said the Heritage Policy skeleton 

Blacks’re outa luck 

Said the Macho skeleton 

Women in their place 

Said the Fundamentalist skeleton 

Increase human race 

Said the Right-to-Life skeleton 

Foetus has a soul 

Said Pro Choice skeleton 

Shove it up your hole 

Said the Downsized skeleton 

Robots got my job 

Said the Tough-on-Crime skeleton 

Tear gas the mob 

Said the Governor skeleton 

Cut school lunch 

Said the Mayor skeleton 

Eat the budget crunch 

Said the Neo Conservative skeleton 

Homeless off the street! 

Said the Free Market skeleton 

Use ’em up for meat 

Said the Think Tank skeleton 

Free Market’s the way 

Said the Saving & Loan skeleton 

Make the State pay 

Said the Chrysler skeleton 

Pay for you & me 

Said the Nuke Power skeleton 

& me & me & me 

Said the Ecologic skeleton 

Keep Skies blue 

Said the Multinational skeleton 

What’s it worth to you? 

Said the NAFTA skeleton 

Get rich, Free Trade, 

Said the Maquiladora skeleton 

Sweat shops, low paid 

Said the rich GATT skeleton 

One world, high tech 

Said the Underclass skeleton 

Get it in the neck 

Said the World Bank skeleton 

Cut down your trees 

Said the I.M.F. skeleton 

Buy American cheese 

Said the Underdeveloped skeleton 

We want rice 

Said Developed Nations’ skeleton 

Sell your bones for dice 

Said the Ayatollah skeleton 

Die writer die 

Said Joe Stalin’s skeleton 

That’s no lie 

Said the Middle Kingdom skeleton 

We swallowed Tibet 

Said the Dalai Lama skeleton 

Indigestion’s whatcha get 

Said the World Chorus skeleton 

That’s their fate 

Said the U.S.A. skeleton 

Gotta save Kuwait 

Said the Petrochemical skeleton 

Roar Bombers roar! 

Said the Psychedelic skeleton 

Smoke a dinosaur 

Said Nancy’s skeleton 

Just say No 

Said the Rasta skeleton 

Blow Nancy Blow 

Said Demagogue skeleton 

Don’t smoke Pot 

Said Alcoholic skeleton 

Let your liver rot 

Said the Junkie skeleton 

Can’t we get a fix? 

Said the Big Brother skeleton 

Jail the dirty pricks 

Said the Mirror skeleton 

Hey good looking 

Said the Electric Chair skeleton 

Hey what’s cooking? 

Said the Talkshow skeleton 

Fuck you in the face 

Said the Family Values skeleton 

My family values mace 

Said the NY Times skeleton 

That’s not fit to print 

Said the CIA skeleton 

Cantcha take a hint? 

Said the Network skeleton 

Believe my lies 

Said the Advertising skeleton 

Don’t get wise! 

Said the Media skeleton 

Believe you me 

Said the Couch-potato skeleton 

What me worry? 

Said the TV skeleton 

Eat sound bites 

Said the Newscast skeleton 

That’s all Goodnight

 

The October 2011 Activism Activities of Breezy Kiefair

THIS BLOG TO REPLACE DELETED http://breezykiefair.wordpress.com/

Breezy deleted her old blog a few months ago. After several requests from friends for a new blog, and lots of activism news, I decided to bow to the request and open a new blog.

SO…. if you had been following http://breezykiefair.wordpress.com/

this: https://breedheenorilleykeefer.wordpress.com/

is your new source for content from the same source.

Below, you will find links to other online content.

Links for breezy’s involvement in the occupation in solidarity with OCCYPY WALL STREET

San Luis Valley Information
ALAMOSA OCCUPY TOGETHER meetup page

http://www.meetup.com/occupytogether/Alamosa-CO/

FB Planning Event
Time
Sunday, October 23 · 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Location

The Large Hospice Del Valle Meeting Room (Its a Potluck so please bring a something to share. Enter by the rear door of the building, off the parking lots behind the building. Feel free to bring friends)

More Info
SOLIDIFY WALL STREET
JOBS NOT CUTS – MAKE THEM PAY
 
PLANNING  MEETING  FOR  A  MAJOR DEMONSTRATION
Sunday, October 23, 2011
6:00 PM
It’s a pot luck, bring something to share.
 
Hospice Del Valle, 514 Main Street, Alamosa, CO 81101
Park in the lots behind the building.
Enter Hospice through the rear door.
Phone 719-227-9899 or email: VGail gforcevsa@yahoo.com
FB discussion group 
A MESSAGE FROM:

VGail  Vonderweidt
San Luis Valley Regional Organizer

I am VGail  Vonderweidt, Regional Organizer for Rebuild the American Dream, MoveOn.org. While we are strongly supporting the OWS movement it is important that you know that the Rebuild Movement strongly supports itself here in Alamosa and all across the country.
Early this past summer I attended a house meeting set up by MoveOn.org where hundreds of other house meetings across the country were gathering people together to develop a plan to fight the growing surge of the Republican and Tea Party to stall any actions of President Obama in restoring the economy. In fact, those groups are determined to destroy our country just to get this President out of office.
From those house meetings, many thousands of solutions were submitted to MoveOn.org who reached out to other peace loving organizations to refine all the submissions. The refinement ultimately resulted in the Contract for the American Dream. The ten solutions rang incredibly true for me. You can read all of these by typing in Google: Contract for the American Dream. And, I urge you to sign the Contract yourself. Over 300,000 Americans have already signed it.
I decided then that leaders were needed to generate interest and action by more and more people because it takes people like us to bring about change in our government. I have sent out a blanket request to the 84 members of our movement asking for someone to offer you a ride to the Sunday meeting.
Thank you for expressing an interest in the Rebuild the American Dream movement.

P R E S S  R E L E A S E

“SOLIDIFY OCCUPY WALL STREET” EVENT PLANNING MEETING
at Hospice Del Valle in Alamosa, Main Street, Alamosa
on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011, at 6:00 PM
Support the OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT across the country, MAKE WALL STREET PAY. The San Luis Valley Rebuild the American Dream Alamosa Council is holding a potluck EVENT PLANNING MEETING for an upcoming rally scheduled for November 5th, 2011. The NATIONAL ‘Rebuild the American Dream’ movement is working toward something bigger than last Friday’s JOBS NOT CUTS RALLY on Route 160!
      This Sunday’s meeting will be held on 10/23 and also on 10/26 if needed. Join us at 6:00 PM in the large Hospice Del Valle Meeting Room, located at 514 Main St., Alamosa CO 81101. Its a Potluck so please bring a something to share. Enter by the rear door of the building, off the parking lots behind the building. Feel free to bring friends. It was great fun last Friday and we’ll be planning more fun for November 5th. We are building momentum!
For more information telephone VGail Vonderweidt, 719-227-9899 or email her at gforcevsa@yahoo.com


VGail  Vonderweidt
San Luis Valley Regional Organizer
Rebuild the American Dream Movement
MoveOn.org
gforcevsa@yahoo.com
719-227-9899

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE54993C30203A992

Occupy Alamosa Video content from youtube at above link^^^^^^^^

Sample video from playlist:

******Note on the video playlists, I will update them as necessary to include new content. please email any links I missed to btokeefer@gmail.com or  denveroccupied@gmail.com ******

OCCUPY DENVER/DENVER OCCUPIED INFO
Police Brutality Inverview: https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/10-15-2011-occupy-denver-arrests-the-story-you-probably-werent-told

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9E91E44F59D6806E

Occupy Denver Video content from youtube at above link^^^^^^^^^^^

sample video from playlist

Map to Protest Location in denver
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=208166375239080501990.0004ae1710b88e0ce043d

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/occupy-denver-protest-pics

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/occupy-denver-videos

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/10-15-2011-occupy-denver-arrests-the-story-you-probably-werent-told

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/news-from-occupy-colorado-springs

https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home/contact-us

denver occupied email addy denveroccupied@gmail.com

denver occupied website
https://sites.google.com/site/denveroccupied/home
fb page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002962468730

links about Breezy Kiefair
Parts of old blog preserved here
http://misshightimes.com/users/breezykiefair
Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/Mr8MrsKiefAir?feature=mhsn

playlist of videos created by breezy kiefair:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDDE36959E6DC0055

sample videos from playlist:

~ Do all that you can to cultivate peace within yourself, that it might
shine out from you, and plant the seed of peace in other spirits, for them
to cultivate.~

{Remember… it is when we choose act on the issues that are in front of
our faces, when we choose to get involved instead of looking the other way
as our fellow man struggles, when we choose to take those small simple
little actions, working on righting little wrongs in our everyday lives that
really make change happen, those seemingly small actions are what really
make the world a better place and are a catalyst for greater social change.}
~Both quotes by Breedheen “Bree” O’Rilley Keefer~