Category: Audio Recordings

GRANOLA GRENADES FOR GANDHI

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GRANOLA GRENADES FOR GANDHI

“Even God himself dare not appear to a starving man,
except in the form of bread”
– Mahandas Gandhi

So many fellow women and men today
down at the corner of have and have not
asking for a little of what we’ve got

Flying cardboard signs that say
“I’m a hungry homeless vet”
or one I saw the other day
“the repo’d my Lear Jet”

Being a poet what I mostly have is words
but remembering the words of Gandhi
I decide instead of something to read
I’ll give them what they really need

It’s simple enough, just take an elastic band
and wrap three dollar bills around a bar
you can place them in their hand
or you can throw them pretty far

If monks balance the world with prayer
perhaps these souls balance it with pain

So if they don’t like granola, that’s OK by me
the carnivores can afford to attack a Big Mac
and the thirsty are half way to a six pack

BARBARIANS 2003 AD

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BARBARIANS 2003 AD

“We thought of ourselves as people of culture.
How long will it be till others see us that way again? “
Iraqi friend of poet Naomi Nye

The collected works of Hafiz
still outsell the Koran in Iran

Today in Baghdad bombs and fear
scattered lovers of Rumi and Kabir

Museum of modern man’s cradle
lost eighty centuries in a day

Book starved minds, educated thumbs
video game cowboys blew it all away

We thought ourselves people of culture
how long before we can look
at ourselves that way again

THANKSGIVING

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THANKSGIVING

The natives did share their food with the
first settlers

But
It is well documented
though not well known
that the first official Thanksgiving
(proclaimed by the governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637)
was in celebration of a massacre of 700 Pequot
men, women, and children gathered together
for their own dance of thanks

Ordered out of their home they were shot as
they came forth; those who stayed inside
were burned alive

We have a long history of freedom

We have freed the Americans from America

We are now freeing the Iraquis from Iraq

There will feasting when the boys come back

PATRIOT ACT

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PATRIOT ACT

There are thousands now
coming back from Iraq
one legged and deaf and blind
dragging the dead they left behind

Yet they speak so well
of those who sent them to that hell

That they are true patriots may be a fact
and this is how true patriots act

Or could article one thirty four be the reason
where one critical word and your pension is
gone plus five years in the brig for treason

CLIMBOUT SUNSETS

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CLIMBOUT SUNSETS

John Gillespie Magee
slipped the surly bonds of earth
reached out and touched the face of God

Planes are bigger and faster now
I in my Aero Commander
commander of the air

Climbing at dusk have set the sun
on the lip of the world
and held it there

Have rode the Concorde
faster than the speed of sound
and faster than the earth goes round
that can lift it up where it went down

And there are times I’d best the lark
to try to hold or yet turn back
baby’s smiles and love’s first spark

I think Magee, the reverence would see
as we all fight the dying of the light
and try to touch the Sistine finger
a little longer before night

UNCLE ERNEST

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UNCLE ERNEST

If Uncle Ernie
had not gone off to war before I was four

If he had not loved movies, or sat
in that seat in that theatre when on leave

Where the bomb came through the roof
and through the floor
and killed a few
and then blew up
and killed some more

He’d have been here handsome and bright
helping my father with the ranchers load
and telling stories to my delight

Marrying and making me
cousins in the night