The Bones of Us
The Mud-painted tribe slithers between tall blades
Making ripples on the surface of a sea of grass.
The elder moves forward, quiet in the breeze.
Painted men follow his path.
Bare feet on stone,
Bare feet squeezing the feces of their prey between thick, calloused toes.
The elder raises a hand, the world stops to watch him.
His hand strikes down, the tribe moves as one body
Of water flowing forward, gathering speed
Bare feet pounding the stones, pounding dung,
Pounding the drum that summons food.
Their prey lifts brown eyes and studies the breeze
As the stench of mud painted flesh reaches its nostrils,
The prey bolts as one with its leaping cousins.
Painted men attack, throwing spears and stones
Their prey leaps and flies wild above the reeds
Mayhem ensues
The drums of the hunt are beat by bare feet and hooves.
But 2 feet are deadlier than 4 as
Gazelle after gazelle fall under the fatal thrusts of piercing spears,
Like ballerinas bowing to their final curtain.
Shrieks of joy now fill the air
Proud guttural cries of victory
Gratuitous grunts from hungry bellies
In anticipation of the feast of flesh that will stave starvation
Cheers and jeers float above the melee.
Mammalian blood paints the tundra red
Sounds of a Saturday Night Sports Bar,
A tribe-filled stadium jumps back in time to reunite with its origin,
One among them doesn’t slow his gallop
His eyes are fixed on his chosen prey, a swift 4 footed dancer.
He gains speed, closer and closer
His spear raised above his head
Poised to unleash the point of death.
He pulls back his arm for the moment of truth and stumbles.
He falls,
He falls through 10 million years
He falls, bone splintered in red agony.
His thick feet no longer propel him
He falls to the ground between reeds, dust and the dung that is his history
He screams white blinding pain, writhing in agony.
The mud-painted leader pauses to inhale the wind.
He looks to his feet where the warrior of mud twists in pain,
Holding his leg with both hands pressed to his chest.
The elder surveys the blood-soaked tundra.
He looks up at the sky and down at the earth.
Then a new thought flowers.
He looks again at his fallen compatriot
For the first time in his life, he feels his brother’s pain.
The unfolding blossom takes root is his brain.
The elder looks into the faces that are facing him.
He sees his tribe,
He sees his woman sleeping silently in the corner of his mind’s mud-thatched hut.
He sees sons that are yet to be born.
He sees himself, his tribe
He sees us all as we are.
The elder approaches the fallen, writhing man
He crouches on his haunches to view the blood-soaked fractured bone.
He looks up at the sky.
With two arms outreached, he brings his tribe closer to the fallen hunter.
This fallen man’s comrades stare into the elder’s eyes.
The moment stops, and now there is only the elder, the fallen, and the tribe.
Seen from a bird above
Cradled in mud, they are all as one,
Dirty, naked and submitting,
Surrendering beneath the sun’s eternal glare
The elder grasps dry blades of grass with both his hands and pulls.
He uproots weeds, shaking pellets of mud from their roots.
He twists the reeds into a malleable rope and twists it firmer and firmer.
Then scoops his hand into black mud.
Grasping moisture with his fists,
He spreads muck on the twisted grass.
Leaning over the fallen, who stares into his eyes.
Moving the man’s hands away from his wound
The elder wraps the grass rope round and round the broken bone.
He wraps it, then ties it into a helix, then rises, standing above the man.
The elder picks up a stone and with his hand strikes it against another-
A single glint of wisdom is born.
That sparks the kindling others have gathered.
Soon, a fire emerges like a newborn child.
The men nurture the flaming child with the pieces of wood they had gathered,
Soon there is a steady blue flame consuming dried grass, twig and wood.
Men cut the flesh from their slaughter
Thrusting bleeding flesh into the hungry fire
The sizzling smell of cooked meat fills the air.
The fallen chews the meat with his pain and rubs the grass rope that binds his fractured leg.
Under the steady gaze of his comrades, he comforts himself
Knowing that he will not be left behind.
With a stick in his hand, the elder scratches the shape of his thoughts in the dust.
The elder comprehends, we are all bound together like sticks of wood,
Twisted ropes of grass.
We are one bundle of wood.
We are one rope of grass.
In the dust between his feet, he scratches these symbols.
I translate for you here:
“We are all here in one place.
We are all one bundle of wood.
We are all one rope of grass
We are all stronger from our bond.
We are all one bundle of wood and a stick on the ground.”
Civilization is born.
Out of the mud and the shit,
Out of the sweat and the blood.
Out of the scratching of symbols in the dust,
Out of the twisted bond that heals the fallen among us.
Humanity is born.
HONEST QUESTIONS DESERVE HONEST ANSWERS
QUESTION:
“Igor, Why are you smoking and drinking your self to death?
Smoking, if you don’t inhale cigars, can still give you bladder cancer. Tell tale signs are blood in your urine, often after about forty years of smoking.”
Writes Michael Brett
michael, thanks for expressing your concern and I will answer your question as thoroughly and honestly as I can.
Well, for one thing, I don’t have blood in my urine. Every body is different and reacts differently to different things. For example, my body does not respond well to cannabis although people are constantly praising its health virtues and persuading me to replace it for my consumption of alcohol and tobacco.
Maybe it works for them but not for me. I used to smoke cannabis, a lot of it. But if I smoke even a hit now, I lose focus for days. I become lethargic. I feel demotivated and lack self certainty.
I smoke strong chemical free cigarettes and high end Cuban cigars for. one main reason: The nicotine increases my focus. It also relieves the stress of coping with the seemingly endless stream of idiocies and obstacles that people and their bureaucracies hurl at me. If human beings weren’t so maliciously stupid, needlessly cruel, deliberately ignorant and undermining, I probably wouldn’t smoke at all!
Likewise alcohol, I now drink nearly every day, but only after I’ve finished working, so around 5 or 6 pm. I start work at 5-6 am each and every morning. 7 days a week. God took Sunday off which explains why the world is broken. Repairing the world is a 7/7 day a week vocation.
I drink only the best wine, tequila I can afford and only when I’m in Britain or Germany do I drink beer. British real ale and German Pilsners are living nutrients; unpasteurized and nourishing to the body as much as the soul.
I drink exceedingly but seldom get drunk and even more rarely suffer hangovers. The latter is down to the premium quality of the alcohol I consume. All natural, no additives. And yes, more expensive.
I drink for two equally valid reasons:
1. I’m in pretty constant pain in my extremities, mainly my legs and mainly my right leg. I was diagnosed with lymphedema last October. The American medical system has failed miserably in getting me even a lymphedema specialist. It also hasn’t provided a proper treatment for my condition. Nor even effective pain relief.
American medicine is only about money and the doctors, nurses and health practitioners care about little else than you insurance coverage. It is a disgusting, mercenary, greed-fueled system that should be scorch-earth, burnt to the ground and built from scratch based on a nationalized health model.
But money breeds greed which necessarily breeds incompetence. Beware getting ill or needing any kind of mental or physical health help in America.
You won’t get it unless you’re rich and even then, there’s no guarantees when it comes to American health care, None at all!
So I drink as much as I do as a means of self medication. When I find decent medical treatment for my condition in Europe, I will probably reduce, but not eliminate my alcohol intake.
In spite of my excessive drinking and smoking, my last physical in November, 2024 was according to my nurse practitioner, a 4 star ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ result!
Blood, urine, stool test all came up trumps (and I don’t mean Dumb-Hitler). Blood pressure a little elevated but within normal parameters, cholesterol down, liver super fit, lung capacity excellent, could lose about 15 pounds of excess wait but I apparently have the body of a 35 year old.
That’s what having the right genes from a mixed racial parentage and background gets you!
2. The second equally valid reason I have for drinking in excess is that I’m lonely. My last girlfriend, a Mexican beauty and mother of 2 from Jalisco dumped me because I wasn’t rich and had no intention of getting rich. We were still trying to be friends but I think she more recently decided that the time she spent with me was time she was losing finding a millionaire. She’s not greedy as she’s looking for a millionaire not a billionaire. But as with everything in America, money lies coiled at the roots of all value, even Love.
I am desperate for feminine companionship. Not overtly, but inwardly desperate. I prefer the company of women to men. I think that women in general, are better human beings than men are. I was raised by a strong, intelligent and independent mother and I am passionately attracted to the same type.
I loved my baby sister, Natasha, now deceased, am on warm speaking terms with my ex wife and love my 25 year old daughter Olivia, more than my own life.
I treat women with respect, with consideration, with affection and when they are open to it, passion.
However, this has proved no formula for success.
This is partly due to culture and geography. Being trapped in Southern California for the past 8 years has been an emotional and sexual nightmare.
California women are by nature, defensive, suspicious to the point of paranoia (much of which is justified, considering mentality of Californian men!), spiteful, callous, cruel and rarely know what they want romantically, socially and most certainly sexually.
It is akin to a pandemic level neurosis. I’m sure it is caused by the dominance of excessive consumption capitalism. America is a Nation run amok with Hungry Ghosts wandering aimlessly in constant hunger for commodities that never satisfy. So that the sad ghosts are compelled to consume more and more and more. As well as waste resources, energy and everything around them; including other people and even themselves.
I detect this neurosis most in women, because I am not physically attracted to men and therefore expose my self to more slings and arrows of overpriced fortune from women. Beautiful women; inwardly and outwardly. I say this because what underlines all the female Hungry Ghosts is money. An insatiable desire for money and the companionship of men who can provide it.
My experience and impression is that without money, the Californian branch of the human tree would wither and die from lack of procreation.
I’m not calling Californian women prostitutes. No, they’re far worse than that: they only give of themselves, their love, their affection, their emotional investment to the IMPRESSION of wealth and money.
Actual prostitutes are more transactional. California women are constantly playing games, with themselves as much as others. They live in a cacophony of mixed messages, confusion, self-loathing and passive aggressive spite.
Many appear to both fear and despise men at the same time. But rather than just leave us alone, they like to play cat and mouse games of allure and refusal as a means of compensating for a sublimated sense of power.
I am not the only man who thinks and feels this; btw, before you start hurling more misogyny cards in my hat. Men, especially foreign born men, confess the exact same conclusions about Californian women when there aren’t any women around to overhear.
Even feminist women, who I admire and prefer, have great difficulties expressing what they want and Don’t want from a man. There’s deep insecurity at the heart of the west coast female that more often than not, manifests as passive aggression and occasional overt aggression.
For evidence of this just read the comments from women that will inevitably follow in reaction to this post.
I will find a lover eventually, if not a partner, somewhere in Europe or possibly north Africa, soon enough. Of that I have no lack of self certainty! I was happily married to an English woman for some 18 years.
I have a great deal to offer the “right” woman: intellect, humor, tenderness, insight and genuine affection. I have never been told that I am other than a passionate and satisfying love who gives more than he takes. Whose greatest pleasure is to give pleasure to the point of repeated climax. I am a gourmet chef for whom the greatest act of love (apart from the very act of love) is to cook a favourite meal for a friend for my family, for my lover.
I am very industrious, ambitious and am well on my way to making my career as that of a best selling author and successful poet.
But most of all I am kind.
I do not suffer fools gladly and I state the truth no matter how critical the truth is or how easily offended the recipient.
I feed and house the homeless when I can. I enjoy talking to young people both young men and young women who I speak the truth to regardless of what their elders or authorities think.
I am a critical thinker in the tradition and spirit of Socrates.
I question authority.
ALL authority.
I try my best to alleviate the suffering of others.
I regularly meditate.
I adore the arts and all forms of music (apart from breakfast cereal jingles).
I am the best Poet I have ever been in my life and my life is far from over!
I have very close ‘girlfriends’ and “admirers” in Holland, the UK, France and Algeria. Some are with partners and therefore our relations are Platonic for the time being. Others have issues of faith that prevent them from acting on their attractions and some. I just haven’t met…yet.
But I am actively looking, just not in California or the US, ever again. So for both health and romantic reasons, to quote Robert Hunter “I’m going where the weather suits my clothes”!
Thank you and goodnight!
There is No “god”, Silly!
In Episode 6 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: Masks of Eternity, Moyers and Campbell discuss the common experience of God.
This is the absolute truth. No one comes closer to identifying it. It is what pedestrian minds refer to as ‘god’. And yes, I do know better than believers because I’ve spent my entire life contemplating this concept. Not ‘God’ but Being.
My earliest conscious memories began when I was 5 or 6 years old. I wanted to know what THIS was all about. What was the explanation, the reason for existence? Why THIS and not something else. I demanded an explanation.
At 9 I asked by father, a distinguished academic with 2 PHds (in Anthropology and Sociology), if he existed.
“Of course I exist”, my bemused daddy answered as he drove his Ford Cortina, his family in tow, to La Jolla Shores.
“But Daddy, how do you know you exist?”, I countered.
My father gave me a sideways glance to determine whether or not I was teasing or serious.
I was serious, deadly serious.
My father knew everything. He should be able to tell me how he knew that he existed. From there, I could derive some conclusion about the nature of all existence.
That’s what parents are for.
My dad smiled. He said, “I know I exist because I can feel my skin. I feel the breeze on my skin and my breath.”
“Yes”, I interrupted, “But how do you know that this is all real and not a dream? How do we know if anything’s really real? How do we know if we exist or not?”
I was 9 years old.
I was deadly serious.
My life’s work is to answer my own question.
I owe it to myself, my 9 year old self, my every age self and to every other self.
What is the true nature of existence?
What is Being?
“God” is no answer, “God” is just a vanity reflected in a fractured mirror. What THERE IS, what is really going on is much bigger. It is much deeper and much grander than any silly sky-daddy can answer.
MY BELIEF is that asking that question ‘What is Being?’ is the only human activity, the only human mental cognition worth bothering with.
The only person who has nearly answered this question satisfactorily is the German Existentialist Martin Heidegger. It is the premise of his opus Being and Time.
He asks the question on the first page and by the time you are through he answers:
“What is the true nature of existence?
What is Being?”
Answer : “Who is asking?”·
In Episode 6 of Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers: Masks of Eternity, Moyers and Campbell discuss the common experience of God. They explore how this experience spans across cultures. Campbell provides challenging insights into the concepts of God, religion, and eternity. These insights are revealed in Christian teachings and the beliefs of Buddhists, Navajo Indians, Schopenhauer, Jung, and others.
The Journey of The Broken Star
His schedule is as follows:
Flying to London to see his lovely daughter Olivia Melanie Goldkind-Brooks who he hasn’t seen in nearly 3 years!
A week with her and then a train to Alicante, Spain to visit the British Mad Dog Richard Torres for a little while and check out Alicante as my probable new home as of August next year. Then catching a leisurely train (or boat) to Athens to meet up with the musical genius, composer, producer Gilad Atzmon to record
the new album of my poetry from FACING THE WAVES onto a down load, CD and Vinyl
I’m hoping the working title THE BROKEN STAR will become the actual title, reflecting my moral stance against the current state of Israel in its present non secular form. To reiterate, I am convinced that the only road to peace in the Middle East is if and when Israel reform its Constitution and reconstitutes itself as a non religious, secular state as well as provide haven for ALL refugees seeking oppression, not just the European Jews post WWII. Only then can Israel establish is true heroic nature d assert its true Jewish values of Compassion, Generosity, Equality and the upholding of Human Rights.
The Jewish people of Israel more than anyone else in the world must uphold the values of life and liberty freedom from bigotry and persecution because and in honor of the very memory of the Jews of the 20th century who were persecuted, murdered and then subjected genocide because of their ethnicity and non white European. We cannot let them impose the same bigotry, discrimination, murder and genocide upon the Arab peoples, not matter the excuse or justification.
Perhaps THE BROKEN STAR will shed light for at least a few who cannot yet see that imperative
| Thu, Dec 26 — San Diego to LondonTotal Travel Time 15h:05min |
 Flight UA1827Economy Flight duration: 5h 16min San Diego, SAN Lindbergh Intl Arpt United States Terminal: 20 7:15 AM Dec 26, 2024 Thu New York, Newark Intl Arpt United States Terminal: A03:31 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu Meal options: FOOD_TO_PURCHASE2h 29min layover in New York |
| Flight UA110 Premium Economy Flight duration: 7h 20min New York, EWR Newark Intl Arpt United States Terminal: C06:00 PM Dec 26, 2024 Thu London, LHR Heathrow Arpt United Kingdom Terminal: 206:20 AM Dec 27, 2024 Fri Meal options: MEA |
| Tue, Jan 28 — Athens to Los AngelesTotal Travel Time 16h:30min |
 Flight LH1285Airline confirmation: 2R23XI Economy Flight duration: 3h 15min Athens, ATH Eleftherios Venizelos Intl Arpt Greece 06:35 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 10. 8:50 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL_AT_COST1h 35min layover in Frankfurt |
| Flight LH456 Premium Economy Flight duration: 11h 40min Frankfurt, FRA Frankfurt Intl Arpt Germany Terminal: 110:25 AM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Los Angeles, LAX Los Angeles Intl Arpt United States Terminal: B 01:05 PM Jan 28, 2025 Tue Meal options: REFRESHMENTS/MEAL In LA Our hero hopes to meet with his new IT director, his nephew Francisco Hudson the budding film maker and his production team on The Mission monthly publication my good friends Amie and Jesse Horsting Then it’s back to San Diego to move and being teaching poetry through the library system. |
The Vocation of Art: Reflecting on Samuel Beckett
MY Uncle Sam!
I swear listening in to this documentary it sounds exactly like my autobiography! Arrogance aside, I have yet to achieve anything even approaching the pinnacle of aesthetic mastery over the English language that Beckett achieved in his life time, but my aspiration and formative years in Paris are very similar.
In my humble opinion, Samuel Beckett was the greatest, most profound and impactful writer of the 20th century; if there could even be such a thing as a number one.
Like him, I too eventually skewed formal academia as too limited to reach the pinnacles of knowledge I wish to scale. I’ve always found academia to be a poor substitute for a real education and scholarly pursuit.
Too rigid and locked into its own political circus of bought credentials and peer review, where in your competitors get to judge your work and inevitably detract from it. Higher education is only available to those who can afford to pay for one and that in itself limits its virtues to privilege and social class.
Like Sam, I too have turned to art (first though the publishing industry), as embodying the best education a self-motivated scholar can pursue. There is no one to judge your work but the public who will either accept it by buying it or give you the feedback of ignoring both the work and you.
This is what the market is for: faceless, anonymous judges cloaked in long dark robes who sit in final judgement merely by virtue of their attention span.
They either get you or they don’t and if they don’t, it’s one’s own self that bears the blame.
The vocation of art is a noble one.
A lonely one, it is true.
It takes literally decades to get anywhere near the mastery of ones craft.
The living, selling, successful artist is a figure of endurance, one who has persisted beyond an ocean of failures to the remotest of islands where a little sun may some day shine down on him/her.
Where nourishment is reduced to whatever fish one happens on, in the sea. Perhaps some berries or figs or a coconut or two.
The only sustenance a career in art can bring is the nutrition present in the work itself. Be it writing, be it visualization, music, dance, theatre, media or another medium I can’t even imagine.
It is true of all art.
True art serves its own purpose; it is for itself and nothing else. Like a tree or a river or a boulder in the middle of the desert, it has no purpose apart from the expression of its own Being. Any “art” that is for something, e.g. illustration, decoration, entertainment is no longer art. It may be “artistic” in the language and meaning it conveys but it is not strictly speaking, real art.
Real art is lie a tree, a stone, a pebble, a cloud, a sand dune, a mountain, a river, an ocean or a new born child.
It is the work and the doing of the work that is the vocation.
Fame is for John Lennon and David Bowie to sing about.
It has no place in an artist’s cramped quarters, there’s barely enough room for love and respect.
Like my intellectual idol Sam Beckett, I have made great sacrifices to perfect my craft; and yet I am still lightyears from my goals. Socially, personally, emotionally and certainly financially impoverished, I have nearly lost my daughter on art’s sacrificial altar.
I am ultimately a Poet, a writer, a producer because there is nothing else I really know how to do. I am pretty good at making money for other people, but for myself, not so much.
I don’t take orders that I don’t understand.
I refuse to be treated as a machine and I generally question any authority that attempts to assert its will on me.
I am a free man, an outlaw and a warrior.
I have no choice but to pursue the vocation I was born to do.
Which I will pursue until I am dead.
I will emulate Da Vinci on his deathbed who legend recounts his last words to be “But I’m not finished yet! I haven’t finished!”
Nature is far more super than supernatural.
So when I am dead and buried (or burnt or lying at the bottom of the sea), my words, my projects will still be with and in the world. I will be immortal without having to endure the boredom of being awake for eternity!
Lucky, lucky me!
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
Don’t Let Them Dick Your Soul Around
Well, some say yes,
some say no
Some say hey man,
I just don’t know
I say man, he’s going to be-lieving you hanging from a tree
So whatever people’s saying
Don’t you let them dick your soul around
Cuz we’re rolling into Memphis
And got no time to fuck around.
Well I get up,
And you get down.
Both of us here,
just dancing around
No matter what you do,
don’t let them dick your soul around.
Cuz we’re rolling into Memphis
And got no time to fuck around.
Hey, some go fast,
Some go slow,
Some folk don’t have no place to go.
But Lord Jesus,
don’t let them dick your soul around.
Cuz we’re rolling into Memphis
And you got no time to fuck around.
Some say God,
Some say Not,
Some say money’s all they got.
But it don’t matter what you worship,
Cuz its only plastic idols laying around.
And with change in your pockets, you’ll get home just fine,
Long as you don’t skip this line.
But whatever you do baby, don’t let them dick your soul around
Cuz we’re rolling into Memphis
And got no time to fuck around.
Some say this
Some say that
Some want you to wear some kinda hat.
But that ain’t nothing but a lid,
To keep inside, what’s in your head
So don’t be raising no rabbits up there
Whatever you choose to be, wear:
Don’t let them dick your soul around
Cuz we’re rolling into Memphis
Ands got no time to fuck around.
I’m telling you, sweetheart,
You can’t let them fuck you around.
Igor Goldkind© 2024
October 20, 1024
Edited by Miles Krogfus
Don’t You Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down!
Once again, I have been slurred by a coward.
Someone, remaining anonymous, has warned a dear friend of mine to beware of me as I exhibit the behavior of a “Dangerous Narcissist”.
My friend is too cowed to tell me who it is or what they said exactly but once again I am confronted with the innate back stabbing cowardice that too often typifies southern California character; or lack thereof.
To quote Kamala Harris, “if you have something to say, say it to my face”!
But I am fascinated as to how the over–therapized California resident has misappropriated actual medical vocabulary to use to further their personal spiteful agendas.
Narcissism, from the greek myth of Narcissus, is a specific mental health condition that has to do with a fixation on the self at the expense of other “healthy” relationships. As any qualified therapist would tell you, as with most mental conditions, everyone exists on a spectrum. It’s not a black or white proposition. You’re not either a Narcissist or NOT a Narcissist; but rather we all exhibit Narcissistic tendancies. The diagnosis comes about when the tendency becomes so intense or acute that the individual is impaired in their otherwise “normal” social relationships.
In my instance specifically, it took me decades of meditation and self reflection to come to a point where I could admit to loving and caring for and about my Self. Having been tormented as a child, often times violently so, for my Russian heritage name of Igor, I had assimilated a strong impulse towards self loathing. In actually believing that the reason I was such an object of derision and hostility from my peers was somehow, ‘my fault’ and due to a failure on my part.
Two factors remedied this.
One was to leave the country.
As soon as I moved to Europe and a Gallic centered society. My name did not change but it’s social value did. Instead of being endlessly teased as a “monster” out of a horror film or later out of Mel Brook’s comedic interpretation of Frankenstein, (great film, btw), instead people identified me for what my name really meant: an indication of my Russian heritage.
Both my father’s parents immigrated from Poland and Russia in the early part of the 20th century. My mother named me Igor in tribute to my heritage, that of refugees escaping pogroms and anti semitic prejudice.
In Europe, my name has a good currency value. The second change from self loathing and self doubt to self acceptance was my readings into Buddhism, particularly the work of the Japanese scholar and translator, DT Suzuki and his 3 volume opus on Zen Buddhism. Alan Watts and Christian Humphries also helped. When I took my book learnt knowledge and applied it and actually started to regularly meditate, the toxic social poisons I had inadvertently assimilated began to dissipate.
Ultimately it was poetry that brought me to my senses between pariah and ‘attractor of beautiful European women’. Walt Whitman taught me to love and celebrate myself, my body, spirit and mind in his seminal Leaves of Grass. To anyone who has ever suffered from the imposed self loathing that comes with attempting to conform to an oppressive, Protestant mediocrity, I suggest re-reading I Sing the Body Electric.
In this celebratory prayer to self love and the celebration of the self, Whitman touches us with an eternal universal truth: that we are all not just worthy of Love but are the very source of Love.
Our bodies ARE Electric, super charged with the beauty of Being.
We are already super heroes, capable of extraordinary acts of heroic kindness.
My self love is not a superior love. On the contrary, I love myself simply and precisely because I am not better than anyone else. Because of the fact that we are all equally beautiful as the bright, shining magical creatures that human beings are.
Upon my return to my native land, I carried this self certainty with me as well as try to share the self realization with others. Unfortunately, my taunters of childhood are still here and their self limitations makes them target me as arrogant, self aggrandizing and yes, Narcissistic.
I remind myself that these are their failings, not mine.
A social, shared neurosis.
However, the hostility and down right abusive treatment persists and I must stand firm in the gail of human avarice, clutching my self–worth to my breast and holding my head up in the self-knowledge that to love myself is not to love anyone else less, and is tribute to a very human humility, not superiority.
In fact, to love yourself is not Narcissism, it is a state of humility of awe and wonderment at the nature, the body and the spirit each of us actually are and too often forget to recollect to our competitive lives.
And that, my friends, is the rest of my story.
To quote Eric Bibb:
Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down
Full Lyrics:
You might slip, you might slide, you might
Stumble and fall by the road side
But don’t you ever let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walking up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you around
Walk with the rich, walk with the poor
Learn from everyone, that’s what life is for
And don’t you let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walking up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you around
Well I might say things that sound strange to you
And I might preach the gospel, I believe it’s true
I won’t let nobody drag my spirit down
Yes, I’m walking up to heaven
Won’t let nobody turn me around
You might slip, you might slide, you might
Stumble and fall by the road side
But don’t you ever let nobody drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walking up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you around
Dropping Out to Drop In
A Facebook Dialogue with Rebecca Behar
My art is also poetry and short “fiction”. And I am head on confronting this very issue every day of my working life. I turned my back on academia where you can get paid to regurgitate curriculum while you do your real work.
Why?
Because ultimately academia is a crutch that consumes your mind and soul after a while if you’re trying to be an artist. I call academia the artist’s meth. It feels great while you’re smoking it; status, paycheck, the admiration of the young….but ultimately your artist’s teeth fall out, you get uglier from compromise, and the admiration of youth makes you psychotic when you start actually believing it.
So I decided 6 years ago to starve to death.
No, let me tell you the truth.
I determined that the undervaluing of poetry by the mainstream (commercial) was a social malaise, a symptom of a wider social problem compounded by the monetization of popular culture.
I looked at who was actually reading and writing poetry first by hitting the poetry readings circuit. There I found the old clutching at reminiscences and the young clutching at life and strait jackets.
The number of young people 16-26 earnestly writing and writing confessional poetry struck me. Especially young women. They were confessing their angst and being young, about being raped, about being molested, about living in a world weighed down by the gravity of the male gaze. There were also cocky young men, rapping and slamming their hearts away.
So I started writing for them.
The same age group that suffers from historic levels of suicide, anxiety and depression, gave me fodder for my writing.
I wrote and read to them in public and my piece Suicide Note gained an audience of lonely girls who would approach me after my reading to highlight how that poem in particular struck them as they didn’t realize that other people felt as they did.
I also began carrying copies of my modestly selling my author copy books with me everywhere I went, signing and selling copies by hand at readings. But also if I met someone new in a cafe or party and the conversation got to the “and what do you do”? part, I’d answer, “let me show you” and pull out a copy of my latest.
“I’m a poet, would you like to hear a poem?”
IOW, regardless of the market, I decided to take my professional seriously and not try and disguise the thrust of what I do. I always have enough author copies of my books within reach so that when someone asks where they can buy one of my books, I list the usual Amazon, Barnes&Nobel, bookshops local to me and then I add “or you can buy a copy from me and I’ll sign it for you”.
At this point, I am ahead of the market because I have numerous direct contacts with my buyers. I talk to them. I find out who they are and why they read and what they need from an author.
Laborious, yes. Low yielding revenue, yes. Time consuming, yes. But I would match my market research on my audience against any data crunching publisher, any day of the week.
I am determined to make poetry pay.
Not a lot, but enough to make a bare boned living at.
I stopped buying things.
I stopped trying to be middle class.
I live in a meager apartment.
I collect food stamps and any other government assistance I can talk my way into and I have absolutely no shame. The government is paying me to be a poet, a writer and an educator.
That’s my government subsidized job, in the long standing, centuries old tradition of the patronized arts.
There is never any shame in survival.
How many fast food jobs did Socrates work? Or Ovid or Homer. Did Dante pack groceries at Trader Joe’s in one of his circles of hell?
I teach independent poetry workshops at libraries for non mandatory donations. I lecture on poetry. I do readings and signings. I collaborate with a music producer in Stockholm, Frederic Iriarte who records my readings to mix with his music and publishes them on line as albums for download streaming. Do they make any money? No. Barely enough to justify the effort.
But I am getting paid to write and read poetry, just not very well.
I love my work and the place it puts me mentally and spiritually to labor through, more than the comforts of middle class continuous consumption I have had to leave behind.
I am totally dedicated to improving upon and perfecting my work for the sake of an unseen audience. For the sake of readers I haven’t even met yet.
I am not unemployed, although I collect unemployment.
I write and teach poetry and writing.
That’s my job.
Here I am: http//igorgoldkind.com
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much harder to be an artist than a businessman. But over 6 years, I have built an audience. I have 5,000 FB followers, nearly a thousand subscribers on other media, including my blog.
I now run into people both on and off line who knows someone who bought one of my books. I also get anonymous phone death threats, obscene emails and am persona non grata among my local amateur poetry community.
But these are small prices to pay for being to hold up my head and answer “Poet” when someone asks me what I do for a living.
I like to add “But I’m only in it for the money”.
Rebecca Behar:
“Igor Goldkind You are just describing the life of dropouts who succeeded, why not – my best friend was like this, but she went to Italia. Depends on the place. Also in some countries you cannot do anything directly with a bookshop or a library – the distribution is perfectly controled, no freelance accepted.
But it does not matter, I belong to this underground and we did wonders, and now slam and spoken word are still great. So I agree that it is very difficult to kill poetry – like weed. But just compare with Victor Hugo – not only his poetry paid for a big house in Guernessey, but for his expensive way of life. And anyway he believed that he was a kind of prophet. But there is something else which is what ppl can accept and understand, called “reception” in general. I think that a real poet provocative and misunderstood by definition.
About an audience and ppl reacting, this became quite easy with internet, but again all these video kids are relying on marketing. My concern is that written, hermetic, creative poetry is obviously confidential. PS – I just visited an exhibition on surrealism, this is exactly what is missing : a big bang, a scandal, a movement breaking all this business & technology boredom. I think that it is happening in Iran, with the movement “women, life, freedom”.”
Rebecca Behar, look at the life and lifestyle of Stephan Mallarme, at a time in Paris where Poets were rock stars. He didn’t compromise his art for the sake of his acquired wealth and fame. The Roll of the Dice, his last work was perhaps his greatest masterpiece inspiring CharlesOlsen and the Black Mountain Poets, as well as my first book, Is She Available?
Rimbaud was a great poet too, but died poor in Africa. And Charles Baudelaire lived off of his mother’s money his entire life. This didn’t qualify his genius nor the fact that he gave world our Edgar Allen Poe; who without Baudelaire’s promotion would have been buried in obscurity.
The general point being is that financial reward and market value has very little to do with art and nothing to do with talent.
It’s funny that you would refer to my naked confessional as “Dropping Out”. I worked decades at corporates, in publishing in academia as a professor at the University of Liverpool. I always earned good money for marketing and publishing other people’s work. (Ever heard of the “Graphic Novel”? I coined the term in the mid 1980s and made publishers billions!)
And earned steady income teaching students how to be artists.
But I never had the balls to walk the line myself and it does take balls (or the equivalent female genitalia). And I was never completely happy with my life, having had wanted to write for a living since I was a child.
Now some 45 years later, I get to do this.
And I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. Because now regardless of my food stamps, I know that every working hour I live is dedicated to my authentic being, to the truth of my experience.
(I also live 4 blocks from the beach and go there a lot to swim and stare at the horizon).
So no, I haven’t dropped out; I was a drop out, I’ve dropped in.
I’ve dropped out of the ‘real world’ of stable salary, constant consumption, obeying the dictates of fools and being happy chattel for human crushing machine Ginsberg named the demon Mollock, in Howl.
And I’ve dropped into the actual world, behind the real world, where poetry and art connect me intimately with 10,000 years of my compatriots from all over the world.
I’ve dropped into the world where me and Rumi can share a bottle of wine while watching the sunset.
You can call me a drop out if you want; but in my experience, I had to drop out to drop in.
I would like your permission to republish this dialogue on my blog. Igorgoldkind.com
Death Becomes You
Thought for the day:
An old middle school friend’s father died yesterday morning.
So he called.
We’d been talking about the passing of his parent for a few weeks now…a drawn out disease where death has grown comfortable in the waiting room is no slow cruise. It is interminable waiting. It is placing your life on hold while the greater forces of life and death intervene in your routine.
This is death up close and centered. He’s in the waiting room sifting through the magazines. Death never entered the room. He’s always been there. Patient with our ignorance of his presence. He doesn’t care if we ignore or write poems to him. He does what he does, which is to attend and to await to present the final gift, the present life brings each one of us,
Wrapped in delicate personal memories; tied with a silver bow of faint regret.
I listen to my friend.
I listen to the scene he recounts in my head of an over eager hospice nurse, of a fatal dose of morphine.
He doesn’t want to sue, he wants me to write something,
to tell people what happened to his father.
Perhaps there is a story there to be heard but there’s the story that my friend is ignoring. The passing, the death of his beloved father, his parent, the man who held and protected him when he was helpless. Who first guided his clumsy thinking, his testing of the world. The source of advice, the font of all wisdom:
Pater meus a patre. Vos estis qui de caelo cadit, sicut pluviam et omnem animam in maius et luminare minus idem. Qui dedit nobis sitim extinguere pluvia rationem in radicibus excoquendi in sole.
Those of us who have lost a parent, both parents feel the shadow of our mortality move closer to us. It is not a selfish observation but a crucial one.
A glimpse into the truth of our own existence: short, meagre and thin.
The death of a loved one is tragedy but a necessary one. It is necessary to be reminded of the life we are living and the world that we are actually in. To wake up from the amnesia of wishes we have been distracting ourselves with, is to literally smell-the-coffee.
It’s bitter, it’s scalding and it’s blunt metal real.
Urgently real.
There is no solace for loss, just the empty space left behind by the one who is no longer there. Which is where you are, holding that space in your mind for them as someday, your loved ones will hold a similar space for you.
Maybe that’s where heaven is: the space your loved ones hold for you in their minds long after your body has left with death, the waiting room.
Riding Johnny’s Train
I’m on your train,
Riding through the lower melodies like
Cars crashing through steel
Leaving twisted steel in our wake.
It’s momentum builds mass.
The faster we think the thicker we get,
The heavier gravity’s pull.
Can we escape our bodies?
Why can’t we just take our bodies with us?
Eternity surly has enough room
Our bodies are vinyl cartwheels spinning after us,
The tails of burning meteors.
We burn atmospheres so fast and hot
We don’t even know we’ve arrived
Until after we’re long gone.
And now that we’ve arrived, we’re much too early
For supper.
For the show to begin.
Unless of course, it’s already ended and we missed it again.
Pandemic: The Cure for Panic in the Face of Uncertainty
What if we thought of this uncertainty
as the Jews consider our Sabbath—
As a sacred space in time?
Stop travelling
Stop buying and selling.
Stop working.
Give up for now,
trying to make the world
better than it is.
Instead, Sing. Dance. Pray.
Write songs and read poetry.
Paint the pictures from your eyes.
Walk amongst the leaves and the stars.
Touch only those to whom you have commited your life.
Sit down.
And when your mind and body have become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected in ways that are both terrifying and beautiful.
No one can deny that now.
Do not reach out with your hands.
Reach out with your heart.
Reach out with your words.
Reach out with all the curled tendrils
of compassion that connect us invisibly,
where we cannot touch each other.
Promise this world your love
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
For as long as we all shall live
In this time of mass uncertainty.
Poetry Therapy
Everyone wants to be free.
ven from the things that once gave us comfort.
We are like children who swap our blankets
For softer ground.
So why do you wait to be free
When the keys to your cage
Are hanging right outside your front door?
Reach through the bars with your hand
Stretch your fingers far and bend your will around the bars.
Your mind is your best friend, your best teacher, your best doctor,
Whether you believe it or not.
In spite of everything you’ve done to yourself,
Your mind really does care about you and often thinks of you, quite fondly.
Just let your mind mend itself
Heal yourself with a few choice words.
Your own words.
When you say:
The truth is not a cold tombstone
The truth is not a judgement
The truth is a flowering realisation inside your own living mind.
Pulling you outwards, & forwards, enraptured by Time.
When my breath and
My will are as one,
The universe swallows me
Whole.
The Stars
There are few shreds of dignity left
When you drown face down in your own back street gutter.
You can cry out as loud as an archangel’s horn, if you like.
It won’t do you any good, or any harm either.
You still can’t silence the wind or turn back the tide.
Fate is nothing personal.
It’s just the universe catching up and then passing you by.
Your dream of yourself evaporates,
Forming clouds that obscure the night’s sky.
The stars are leaving you now, blinking out one by one.
This is the last moment of your own
self-awareness.
Your last chance to figure out what the fuck’s been going on.
It’s very much like the moment you first awoke
Although your mother’s smile is nowhere to be found
All that remains of her unlimited love is your fast fading memory
The sound of her voice calling out to you to come home now,
In the far distance,
From where the stars have gone to mourn your passing.
Our Lady
You are our lady
And now your dress
Is flames.
The beauty of your sunken dome from a drone
Is a poem in itself.
Written by us and
Destroyed by chaos.
This is what we do that rivals the stature of the gods:
To astound ourselves and each other,
With the wonder of
Pure enduring creation.
The sacrifice we all make to our better selves
Who gave buildings wings and
Lay the foundation stones of
Our own perfecting.
Epiphany is not found in the act of worship
It is found in the insight gained by a gratitude for the world.
Exactly the way we built it.
Exactly the way we know it to be.
Whispered prayers are but poetry
That none other than you will listen to.
It is good to talk to yourself,
To sing in harmony with all the selves who are listening,
Wearing
Not false, but true masks
Revealing the kind of truth that can only be told with a lie.
The subtler architecture that carves heavens into the spaces on this earth.
Reconstructing what can be seen behind your faces,
Behind all the saints who guard you,
Behind the divine grace of your stature.
The sensuousness of your catastrophe is breathtaking.
© Igor Goldkind 2019
Confetti
There’s an emptiness at the heart of any space:
The air that escapes a room; an unanswered echo, a vacant womb.
There’s an emptiness in my heart
That reminds me
All of my ideas are empty.
Floating leaves from a fumbled folder.
Coloured streams falling from the sky.
This emptiness reminds me
How slight my desires really are
How gently they fall from the sky
A confetti of mercy and discarded emotions,
They are in the end,
Compared to nothing,
Merely the litter from an emptied mind.
5 Submissions of My Latest Work
Life is Always Replaceable
Being is Becoming Still
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Insomniac Awareness
The Last Halo of Hope.
Pebbles
The Halo of a Hope
Hope is mortal, not eternal.
Though it may feel like eternity
Sitting in a chair by the window.
Gazing up and down the path that leads
Up the hill and down to the canyon on your doorstep.
Every morning, every evening, every day.
Waiting for an answer to your prayer for hope to be restored.
Resilience rewarded
Patience still burning brightly
Under your old photograph on the wall where you live now.
I’m not sad.
No, sadness is just passing rain to irrigate the eyes.
Instead, I’m a new planet
Ringed by the last halo of hope
The one wrapped tightly around my head.
Being is Becoming Still
Existence is a limitless screen of emptiness,
Jubilant celebration
And gratitude for the joyous exhaustion in the rolling of a boulder up a steep hill.
Tripping over our thoughts like loosened cobblestones,
The truth is a truce we struck with uncertainty ages ago.
After losing our desperate struggle…
To cling to some kind of hope buried deep at the root of our own awareness
I am fearful of fully failing myself.
But I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.
Secure and supported by this very clarity.
Your Soul
So who is this Soul that you sing of?
This silent witness
Who counts the leaves off of trees
Instead of gathering them?
And raking them into a funerary pile,
Into the giant pile that your better self will set afire and then fall from,
Or jump into.
Up to your eyeballs,
Up to your own personal crown of thorns.
igorgoldkind
Pre-Order FACING the WAVES: Art & Music Edition by Award Winning Poet Igor Goldkind
The Mass market digital edition is out in April, but I’m only signing the $54.95 limited edition. $34.95 for the cheap, print on demand edition out in April, 2025
Original cover by Norwegian Surrealist Painter
Katarina Anderssen
(Also available as a fine art print, signed and numbered by Katarina )
Original music and spoken word album composed by the magnificent Israeli Jazz composer Gilad Atzmon available in March for download, CD and Vinyl entitled The Broken Star, a musical and poetic indictment of the current state of Israel.
Album cover design by the designer, illustrator, comics artist, visual god Dave McKean. (Arkham Asylum, Sandman, Cages).
International signing and performance tour of Spoken Word and Live Music coming in the Spring of ’25
This is Art.
Sample the Stone Soup:
Rumi’s Mirror
the reflection of a reflection is your reflection.
upon the mirrored surface of a pool,
that is being slowly filled
by the very source of the life
you reflect upon
Now jump in the pool!
Modern Haiku
A boy goes to school
And tears his schoolmates apart
With metal piercing bullets.
This is normal now.
Facing the Waves
Waves are your faces
Crashing in real time,
Raising the tide
Against your complacent shore.
Waves are your faces
Curved towards you:
White-bearded men,
Relentlessly knocking on your front door
Reality, an unknown intruder
Upon your inner core,
Beats rhythmically, poetically,
Drowning you in what you do not know.
Waves are your faces
Melting into one and the other;
Beating, imploring you,
To open your locked front door
Waves are your faces
Beating on your front door
Eroding your discomforts
Seeking to drown your inner core.
Beating senselessly, endlessly
Against locked doors,
Waves are abandoned faces
Beating on your front door.
(Email info@themissionarts.com
To be added to our pre-order list.
order in January for a 99.50% discount!!)
Look for it sweetheart, you ain’t seen anything like this before!
(Email: igor@themissionarts.com
To be added to our pre-order list order in January 2025 for a 99.50% discount!!)
Hey, No one does math the way we do!
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December 18, 2024 | Categories: art, beat, book launch, books, bubbles, comments about poetry, death, Depression, Emptyness, Existentialism, Faith, Gilad Atzmon, Healing, Igor Goldkind, jazz, La Jolla, literature, Math, Meaning of Existence, Meditations, mental health, Mindfulness, new poetry, physics, poetry, Poetry as therapy, Poetry Therapy, politics, Self-Therapy, sex, spoken word, story-telling, Suicide, Therapy, Transmedia, world jazz music, Zen | Tags: Anti Fascist Poetry, Award Winning Poetry, Contemporary, Contemporary American Poet, Contemporary Poetry, Modern America Poetry, Modern Poetry, New Poetry, Social Activism, Social Activist Poetry | 5 Comments