For Ricci Lee Jones
Preamble: The blessing of an aching heart is that the music its beat makes conjures Poetry
Ricci!
You make my heart sing!
That down-beat beatnik mad bongo love that makes my feet pump
Makes my stomach sway.
That pretty girl with golden curls is smiling at me!
She likes my looks and digs my poetry!
She’s the apple core of my eyes, the seeds in my pockets,
The eternal sunrise.
She’s the love I’ve never known
But always yearned and ached for
She’s the girl in the window checking her make up
On her way to break up
With me again and again and again
She’s the girl going up that up escalator
Passing me by
While I’m going down, down, down.
All the way, sigh.
Now she’s out of sight
And out of her mind.
I couldn’t love her into loving me
Not with these words
Not with my poetry
Not with my heart spread out on a rusty platter
Pumping my blood to her music
Dancing to that crazy down beat, beatnik
Mad bongo love.
No, I couldn’t love her into loving me
Not with my heart,
Not with my soul
Not with my poetry.
Igor Goldkind, November 26, 2024
At 5 in the morning
What else can I be doing?
I Want to Be Your Alternative Dictator !
All Power Shall Be Mine!!!!
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Socio-paths of all ages. I am proud to formally announce my candidacy for America’s Alternative Dictator. If selected by the electoral college, I promise to be a dictator from day one and forever onwards.
Here is my 35 point initial plan which I promise to enact within my first week of assuming control over the governance of this fair land.
First…
1. We will be rounding up the MAGA supporters as domestic terrorists, arrest most of the Supreme Court and declare the Republican controlled Congress and Senate to be unConstitutional.
2-3. Haven’t figured out all the foreign policy details as of yet, but there will be an immediate cessation of military aid to Israel and most of the Middle East. The Ukraine will have an expedited entry into NATO and all NATO nations will draw a line for Russia not to cross. If Putin persists NATO will invade Russia, arrest Putin and immediately hand power back to the Russian people and their duly elected officials.
4. Oh yeah, the federal government will then seize all uninhabited mansions and third homes for immediate habitation by the homeless. Owners will be compensated at a fixed national emergency housing rate.
5. The defence department will be given a 3 month time frame in which to reduce their military budgets by 33% in the first year and 66% in the two years following.
6. All health insurance companies will be nationalized and be subject to the legislative restrictions and regulation of the newly formed National Health Service. Prescription drugs will be capped at the manufacturing and distribution price with no profits to be taken.
7. All student loans will be forgiven and Universities and other institutions of higher learning will have to provide new, non profit budgets so as to rationalize entry level fees for anyone seeing higher education.
8. The newly established National Department of the Arts will be granted a 60 Billion dollar a year budget to allocate to the promotion and teaching of the arts. It will also organize state and local arts festivals for the public, free of charge. All artists, dancers, performers, writers and other expressive artists will receive negotiated salaries to produce their work full time for the benefit of the general public.
9. The NDoA will be administered from the nation’s capital which will set up State Arts Centers in every state of the union as adjunct offices within the state’s main arts museums. Contracted artists will be hired and either present projects, individually or collaboratively or be assigned to individual or collaborative projects by the state SACs. The DoA will be able to be peitioned in the case of grievances and be empowered to over rule the decisions of the local SACs.
10-11. Suicide education will be mandatory in all secondary schools. Peer to peer counselling will also be taught and meditation will replace the pledge of allegience in every school classroom in the country, every morning.
12. The national curriculum will be revised by educators and lay teachers. No parents will be permitted to participate.
13-14. All existing treaties with tribal people’s will be reinstated and the entire nation will issue a ceremonial apology to past and present indigenous Americans who will now be referred to as the First Americans. First Americans and African Americans will be entitled to special citizenship benefits including free health care for life, free higher education and access to all federal records concerning individual’s origins including records of slave purchases going as far back as historically possible.
15. African Americans and First Americans will be paid restitution as a symbolic apology for the suffering they have endured at the hands of the US government.
16. The USA will be renamed The United Peoples of America.
17. And everyone will get hot cocoa before bed time on cold evenings. Hot days, they can get chocolate milk shakes.
18. It will become a federal offence to harm, torture or brutalize animals. Hunting for food. (NOT sport) will be regulated by a government licensing bureau which will issue limited numbers of animal licence tags for hunters to kill and eat unthreatened species. But not people.
19. The work week will be reduced to a mandatory 25 hour week cap and parents will be required to spend more time with under 18 children. After 18, they can tell them to go jump in the lake.
20. The minimum wage will be increased to $45 an hour for all manual labor and reduced to no more than $100 an hour for ALL professional service providers including doctors, lawyers, plastic surgeons. All workers will be required to sign up with a union as part of their employment contract, with any union and collective bargaining will become standard labor policy.
21. All currently residing immigrants will be granted 2 year residencies in which time they are to apply for employment or petition for special consideration. During their 2 year residency they will be granted all the basic rights assigned UPA citizens, albeit for a two year period which can then be renewed upon application. The commission of crimes will disqualify the entrant from seeking renewal.
22. All UPA citizens will be encouraged to learn at least Spanish and one other language through free community colleges, libraries and ‘language centers’. Spanish will become a elementary school requirement on the curriculum plus one other elective language.
23. But not Klingon.
24. Federal legislation will require that all women be paid exactly the same as their
male counterparts.
25. Paid maternity and paternity leaves will be extended up to 12 months and further upon application and reduction of salary by 80%
26. All workplaces that employ more than 6 full time employees wil be required to provide federally subsidized day care from the first hour to the last hour of work every day of the working week, in the same building as the parents are working.
27. This will all be funded by the diversion of the military budget to public works and programs dedicated to enhancing and maintaining the public good, as detailed in the Constitution.
28. The breaking of the any amendment of the Constitution will become not just an enforced federal crime but an imprisonable crime, without exception.
29. A new federal crime of Political Corruption will be introduced to make such corruption a prisonable offence. All prisons will be nationalized and reformed by new federal standards of non punitive rehabilitation and education.
30. All police in every city and state of the UPA will be fired.
31-32. All police will all be presented with new employment contracts and not have to miss a day or work or a paycheck. However, they will have to re-qualify for their positions and in some cases take time off to finish college. The new national police contracts will be enshrined in a national data base of all law enforcement officials including military, coast guard and park ranger officers.
Criterion for requalification will include not have be a member of or ever been associated with a White Supremacist or racist club, militia or organization. Those that have will not be rehired and be dismissed. Anyone who has ever done violence to a partner or a woman will be dismissed from the force they served in and from any other police or authoritative force in the entire country.
Any officer or person in authority who has been ever accused of using excessive force or coercion against a citizen will be disqualified from reinstatement.
33-34. Any office ever accused of corruption will be disqualified from serving however they will be able to appeal to a courtroom in which they can present evidence that the charges were false and present witnesses as to their character.
All law enforcement officials will be required to submit to a mandatory psychological screening every six months and be offered free counselling if they so desire it.
35. From day one, anyone can be whatever sex or ethnicity they want to be and be legally recognized as such. I myself an African American as I can trace my genetic ancestry back to Australopitecus in Southern Africa some 200,000 years ago. Also, nobody should have the time to care what gender you dientify with, what clothes you choose to wear or who you choose to love or sleep with.
We should all have more important things to do and worry about than messing in other people’s personal lives. Anyone who worries about sexual grooming or being brainwashed about gender in schools has obviously never tried to get a ten year old to clean up their bedrooms. Get real!
I promise to be a benevolent dictator and as soon as these reforms are instituted, I will be handing over my powers to a 303 member tribunal of unpaid representatives who will serve on a rotating basis of 2 year renewable terms, with no one member serving more than 3 consecutive terms. I will hand pick my tribunal initially and then each will nominate their successor for their position at the end of their term to be voted approval on by the other 332 members.
That is all, citizens of the newly established United Peoples of America.
Well, at least the bare bones of it.
The rest I’ll cover after dinner.
So vote for me, or appoint me (it doesn’t matter which anymore, really), your alternative dictator.
You know it makes sense.
And if it doesn’t make sense now, it will make a lot more than good sense after your mandatory rehabilitation.
After the revolution we shall all eat strawberries and cream!
But what if you don’t like strawberries with cream?
After the revolution we shall all eat strawberries and cream and like it! ~Actual Bolshevik Joke
The Cultural Marxist Revolutionary Circus is Coming to YOUR Town. Resistance is Futile!
Just a quick update to tell you developing news in the world of my crusade to take over the world and change it into a world of poetry, art and aesthetic convictions. Once we have infiltrated the power structure, we will enact our cultural Marxist conspiracy by getting key political figures to at first become more concerned about the color of their hair, their wardrobe, office furishings and back ground decor during their press conferences. 
This represents phase one which we call
the iron fist of Fashio-nismo.
As key political leaders become obsessed with the arrangements of flowers in their vases, the subject matter and artists of their wall hangings. Shoe color and accessories will become crucial, time consuming judgement issues.
The next phase we called Confused Identity Syndrome is when we get our targets to actually begin to question whether they truly exist, or not. Based largely on the exemplary work of our previous agents Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Andre Breton, CIS will start with leaving copies of the Japanese Poet-Monk-Warrior Hakuin Ekakaku’s essays and aphorisms lying around on coffee tables and near water coolers within the White House, Pentagon and Congressional offices
.
Boredom, while waiting for meetings to begin, will inevitably lead to bureaucrats and functionaries glance at the works of Hakuin and soon become immersed in a Zen literature that will render them confused and uncertain of even their own existence in reality. They will begin to doubt if anything they’ve ever known or believed to be true is in fact, real. Their sense of Self will be rendered void.
They will gasp for breath in the vacuum of their own Being!
Finally, left sprawling and crawling on carpeted floors, tears streaming down their faces, our targets will be rendered inoperative as they crawl on the floors laughing uncontrollably while muttering incoherently, ‘there is no self, there is no self, there can be no Self, there is no Self!”
This is when we may our move.
Our crack team of Ninja Seals, Jewelry Makers and Dolphins will strike from their underground locations at the very heart of the power structure. They will be armed with books and art prints, tarot decks and astrology charts, prepared to bring the new order of Poetry Workshops, Expressive Arts seminars and forced aesthetic training into play. The targets will be interrogated with impossibly vague questions for which there are no answers.
The questioning itself will be the answer.
Targets will be constrained and forced to watch reruns of Gilligan’s Island and My Mother the Car. William Burroughs reading his work in an endless, monotonous, tape loop will become our background training will sound, never ending day in day out.
Poetry will be read to them over and over and over again until they shriek, beg for mercy and break down. We will show no mercy. What does not kill us makes us strong.
When they are broken we will rebuild them into better beings. Mainly with water color, clay sculpture and improv classes. They will please for mercy (or death), at first but then thanks to us, once the Macrame and knitting regimes are introduced, they will become pacified.
We will force them to wear outlandish fashion trends, force the men to dress in drag and wear makeup (which we will teach them how to apply), and make the women dress in appropriate formal evening and day casual wear that does not accent their breasts or rear ends. Girls will be taught how to run not like a girl, but like a human being. Boys will be taught how to cry in public, or else!
Finally the once effective political operatives, business lobbyists, generals and high placed bureaucrats will be assigned new roles as poets, philosophers, tarot card readers, astrologers, day care workers and after school program directors.
Once the revolution is achieved, peace will return to our nation and to all nations. The earth will resume its spin and stars will fill the sky in splendor and celebration at the return of the human species to its natural sanity. 
May SHE (who is not perfect but tries very hard indeed and deserves a thank you card now and again), look down on us from her cosmic kitchen table and bless us with the good fortune to overcome our enemies.
I submit to you, my dear comrades and circus clowns, our plan.
Choose which side of the barricades you will be on.
Pack up your water color brushes and acrylics and tarot decks and prepare for Revolution!
btw, I’m shutting down my X (Twit) account because Elon Mollusk is a traitor to America, an Afrikaner racist and an enabler of fascism. But I don’t like what he looks like either and he fucked Amber when Johnny Depp was filming, so fuck him!
Find me: https://mastodon.social/invite/nhjRLzbQ
& @igorgoldkind.bsky.social
Welcome: To a Journey of Connection and Reflection
This is my welcome to you.
You are new here.
So am I.
I probably only recently met you somewhere on the street, in a bookshop or at the Circus. Either in the ring, just outside the ring or somewhere in the upper bleachers.
(If I met you behind the bleachers, I’m not going to mention what we did there.)
I may have read you a poem or recited one of mine from memory. (Who does that ?!?)
I did so mainly so that you would buy one of my books.
But I also did that because I wanted to connect with you.
For no other reason than that we’re both human beings sharing a scattered array of moments on this spinning blue marble we call home.
We connected because that’s what we’re here to do.
So please read what I’ve written here.
You may not like what I have to say.
Or hopefully, you may find something worth reading and repeating.
Who’s to say, until you step through my door?
Open your mind and your heart and you may find yourself thinking and feeling.
Or laughing, or crying or maybe even just a wee bit less on-your-own in your solitary inner thoughts.
In your sense of Self.
The great Samurai instructor and Zen Monk Hakuin, once answered his favourite student upon being asked why in a world of seeming perfection there could be so much human suffering…
“That’s easy. The reason there is so much human suffering in a world of perfection is that humans spend most of our time worrying about our Self. We think about our past Self, we worry about our present Self, we anticipate our future Self. We are preoccupied with our Self to the point of obsession.
We always worry about our Self when in fact,
There is None”.
With that note, I leave you to explore, peruse and hopefully comment, if the mood strikes you or perhaps you might strike the mood.
If you want to return here or be advised of my newest contribution, please Subscribe and be part of this.
And please stop worrying about your Self, when you really, truly know that…..
There is None.
The Mission is Back!
San Diego’s first Literary Journal in over 50 years is set to launch on April 1st, 2025; No Fooling! 64 Pages of original poetry, comic strips, prose, arts features and social mayhem; monthly. Non profit. Only the artists, designers, editor and writers get paid!
Featuring original new work by Neil Gaiman, Liam Sharp, Miles Krogfus, Steve Cook, Amy Eyre, Igor Goldkind and many other names you haven’t heard of….YET!
Watch this space for news as it breaks.
I’m on Threads as @subversionfactory. Install the app to follow my threads and replies. https://www.threads.net/@subversionfactory?invite=0
better educated, brighter people here than Twitter/X; whereas Elon Musk is a lowlife scumbag.
An American Beast
There’s a pair of cowardly yellow eyes staring out of the heart of the darkness.
Staring up at the moon like a baleful werewolf,
Keeping to the shadows
Well away from the water lest he catch a glimpse of his own bestial reflection.
He licks his lips and drools his greed onto his matted stained hair
An American beast is hungry for the lives of our children
He only feasts on promises as the truth twists his stomach sick.
An American beast charms the habits off of nuns and desecrates their crucifixes to hang burning bodies from.
An American beast prowls the suburbs at night
Spilling the trash cans filled with hypocrisies all over their emerald sprinkler lawns
There is no midway between lies and facts.
There is no halfway between discourse and violence. There is no middle ground between democracy and fascism.
There is no soul beating within the American beast
There is no worth to the MAGA-beast!
igorgoldkind
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