WHO CARES?

the benevolent eye of a caring person
round arms of a hoister

kids from hip to hip
lips of a lusty kisser

furrow in the brow
from lower back pain

having fallen on a
sidewalk in the rain
chasing down a
loose grandchild

quit smoking as many
times in twenty years
as she’s quit dating
quit drinking

a woman of furious survival
keeps the TV on most days and nights for adult company

now and then pops a diet pill, a sleeping pill

sometimes flips to cpsan when she
feels aduthood disolving like alkaseltzer

feels herself dissolving
in frustration

dances with girlfriends
sometimes by herself

motown, aretha, tina turner
marvin gaye on the box

let’s get it on, you make me feel like a natural heard it on the
grapevine woman

what you see is
what you get

whirls her youngest son
about her tiny grand daughter

what you don’t see
is better yet

baby you’re no good
you’re no good, baby
you’re too poor

work too hard
dropped school
men gone
mamma dead

overweight
daughter pregnant
section 8

raped
gunshots in the night

shut up and live
woman
into the future

rich getting richer
you getting poorer

future of a caring
woman
benevolent eyes
hip to hip
lips of a lusty
kisser
needs revolution on
a soon come day

natural woman
with a life to live

needs a job that pays
some daycare
children in good schools
grandchildren fed
weekends at play in the
green grass

medicine for the sick
clean water would be
nice, and clean air
for breathing without
asthsma

affordable housing
wouldn’t that be
something?

no gunshots, no rape
no need for war
but

what you see is
what you get
baby

around here
you’re no good
around here
you’re too poor

can’t get no
satisfaction

can’t get no
revolution

on a soon come day.

don brennan

Gail sang her Peace Song II at Sacred Grounds Cafe, corner of Hayes and Cole streets (#21 bus) last night. She had sent me another last april. Here it is.
don brennan




Just Another Peace Song
by Gail Mitchell

and they cry
the children on their knees
peeking into tiny fingers
trying to see the light
praying to their God
won't you bring him home alright

War is not the answer
and he's so far away
their father's tears fall
as each one looks away
He's their older brother
His voice is in their head

They are forbidden
to speak his name
so in their hearts they call
whispering into darkness
please don't let him fall

and the children rise
with their own battle cries
calling in the darkness
fleeing into the light

A million voices rising
will you bring them home
alright

A song from Gail Mitchell, San Francisco author and poet, recent graduate of SF State's MFA program in poetry. Gail will be reading tonight at Hospitality House at a showing of new paintings by SF artist and writer, Charles Curtis Blackwell, 5pm, Leavenworth St. between Goden Gate and Turk.


Another Peace song II
by Gail Mitchell

There's a woman over here
she's down on her knees
looking towards the sky
say oh Lord please

There's a woman over there
with a child in her arms
praying to Allah
to keep them safe from harm

And though we'll never know
their names
their tears are just the same
each breath drawn in sorrow

They're praying for their sons
They're praying for their daughters
hoping they will live to see tomorrow

And when those tears fall
I pray for mercy on us all
Cause their pain
is our shame and disgrace

Because we're sons and daughters
mothers and fathers
sisters and brothers
and we're tired of war

A short piece by a friend who is currently tramping about in the Colorado Rockies, Bill Evans. Bill will be reading his poetry at Bibliohead Bookstore, 334 Gough St. (at Hayes) in San Francisco on Thursday, July 20, 7:30 pm.

Deadliest Species
by Bill Evans

Deadliest species: kills millions,
needs sip of blood to reproduce.
Common mosquito.

Deadliest primate: sips oil
through long straw, needs
periodic bloodbath to thrive.
American capitalist.

Former U.S. diplomat John Brown has revealed a top secret State Department telegram sent to all U.S. ambassadors, authorized by Karl Rove (SF Chronicle, pg. E2, Sunday, June 25, 2006). In sum, every U.S. ambassador, world wide, has been directed to commit suicide on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 8:30 A.M., local time.

The impetus for this executive order was the Graffy Initiative, asserted in a recent interview with BBC, that the three suicides of Arab detainees at Guantanamo were "a good PR move to draw attention."

Determined not to be outdone in the PR struggle by a few rag tag Al Queda operatives flying by the seats of their pants, the Bush administration regards the mass suicide of US ambassadors as a public relations "Shock and Awe" event that will establish once and for all the unflinching determination of the planet's greatest superpower to stay the course.

Prior to the dispatch of the telegram, all ambassadors were placed under arrest in the event that some may be reluctant to follow this particular order from their president, who has agreed (after consulting with God, of course) that just this once, he will allow an exception to his firm resolve against the practice of assisted suicide.


Since gwb only reads children's books and the easy parts of the Bible, it is assumed that Rove, an expert on the serious works of Jonathan Swift, is the souce of the diplomatic suicide concept:

Ballad of Jonathan Swift

John Swift in 1729
distraught at the fate of the starvation

Proposed a modest solution for the good of all
especially the rich of the nation

Fat up the poor on potatoes and cabbage
and plenty of milk for their young, then

To savor human flesh, roasted and broiled
simply educate the aristocrat's tongue.

Don Brennan

I once learned a long word for something I eventually found to be not all that complicated. During the war-torn years of the 19th and 20th centuries, European societies attempted to maintain sanity and some sense of meaning in the face of overwhelming negative stressors, viz. industrialization and imperialism. One of those recovery efforts was eventually labelled "Existentialism" by, I think, the French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre. Sartre was an atheist, but the intellectual movement he tagged ran the gamut of religious belief. Anyway, it always seemed to me that the unifying impulse has been an attempt by euro-thinkers to reclaim their humanity by disentangling themselves from a millenium and a half of bible thumping. The abandonment of dogmatic thinking for Europeans has been, in a sense, an attempt to return to paganism and/or heathenism. In that spirit, I have composed the following:


GIVE ME THAT OLD TIME
EXISTENTIALISM
by Don Brennan

Let us raise up an altar
on this space we have
smoothed
with a nonviolent broom
pointing skyward in a public
place lost in treetops
high as a pyramid’s
fourth tiny eye.

Men of wine breath
crack-eyed girls
relaxed in our shade
will be able to see
the desert in the distance
feel the fine stinging sand
rising up
from undisturbed sleep.

Visiting priestesses
glinting blades in hand
will peel the sheer skin
with erotic glee
from tall sea waves,

cast the drizzle across
the city down Western
Addition streets
to the Tenderloin,

cleanse the towers of
finance, circle out 3rd Street
to heal the pain
of Hunter’s Point,

sprinkling ocean scent upon
sellers of tamales and flowers
down the corners of 24th Street
from Mission to Potrero,

bearing the windless sounds
we all yearn for, plead for
with voices beginning in the bowel,
with rhythms incandescent in our
hearts,

the way lovers feel
when all reason
is lost in heat

and we are become a grotto
ablaze with sacred candles

an altar to pagan shadows
painted plaster saints
bronze Buddha statues
the spinning arms of Shiva
reaching for us
with the passion of a dervish
offering some shelter
from the cold,

some love
against the loneliness
all around.

Often said, isn't it, that inimate relationships require much effort to sustain? OK, true enough, but you shouldn't have to be in a sweat over it all of the time. Intimacy gets down to love and everybody, or at least every song writer, knows that love is all there is, makes us and breaks us, is everywhere for sale but money can't by you any, can't live with it or without it, so what's the problem?

RENEWAL

Standing with the sunrise
at your back
raising a forearm
to cover your eyes

as though the darkness
fading from sight
might steal away your vision

You have said to me
return now
look into the light
into time behind the sun

Return to the landscape
we have shaped together

I can see only your
silhouette

Your shadowed eyes
watching me, warmer
than the red sun, cooler
than the blue sea at my feet

The sounds of gulls in flight
call me to wait
to walk at your side

A call as graceful as your smile
fills the space between us.

Polemical writing is interesting to those drawn to controversy. Human beings have been described as rational animals. Perhaps "opinionated" is closer to the truth. To write poetry from the heart, don't you have to express your opinions?

NO CHICKEN

bird flu and aids
how's a poor boy
going to eat
with no chicken?
make love when
his girl friend is
dying?

too much rich
too much poor
nobody knows how
anymore
how to live

too much rich
destroying our world
too much poor running
from destruction

crossing rivers
filling up back roads
running borders
jamming city streets

rich heating up oceans
steaming up our atmosphere
storming the southern hemisphere
genocide by hurricane
draught
tsunami

rich fabricating weapons
poor biting bullets

usa rich profiting
from bombs
making
selling
dropping

usa poor dying
no work
no health care
plenty jail

too much crime to trust
anymore
too much street war to
love anymore

blank government cheques
for killing
nothing much to spend
for healing or to teach

too much israel
too much washington dc

asymmetric warfare
rummy calls it:
mass murder by the rich
suicide bombing by the poor
torture at guantanamo
hunger strike
hang yourself

says bush and the gang:
geneva conventions
do not apply
to asymmetric warfare

somos todos
commandante
marcos

we are all
al queda
who
can't see anymore future
for our girls and boys

too much religion
preaching hate
too much government
spreading fear

white collar stealing
gone insane
jacking, dealing
same old games

here we come around the
corner with our loot
can't eat these tv's but
we can sell'em
ain't that the truth?

get me some cash while
the ice caps melt
the seas rise up
disease in the streams
poison in the air

middle class folks
trying to climb up
out of the mess

trying to keep
from falling down here

where we're running
from too much bullets
too much tanks
too much rock
too much smack
too much laundry
in the banks

while the ice melts
the seas rise up
girls and boys dying
from guns and aids

and now they're saying
not even any damn chicken
anymore.


Don Brennan

HOUSE OF OOLONG: Most writers i know are fond of coffee shops and tea houses. I sometimes fantasize about owning one. I would call it The House of Oolong. I have been told that Oolong in Chinese means "Dark or Black Dragon".

HOUSE OF OOLONG

In the land of honey and
four kinds of milk
a man on the sidewalk
stares through the window
of the House of Oolong

Between sips of tea
i stare back at lips
discernibly mobile
a face roughly shaven
eyebrows in a knot

Rehearsing a panhandle line?
composing a prayer?
reciting a silioquoy?

On this side of the Oolong window
half and half puddles at the foot
of a black pot
honey waits to be squeezed
from plastic bears

Out there
the noiseless commotion
of a stranger's lips
creates words behind vague eyes
by the thump of a heart pumping
blood borne precursers of speech
through a capillary net deep
beneath shaggy hair and stocking
cap, flowing into consonants and
vowels to gather like the drip of
honey and milk at the tip of a tongue
as the man's mental molecules
become words in ways
i can't imagine

Whatever he might have to say
perhaps brillant or absurd or
both, remains unheard, arrested
in flight against the outside
Oolong glass

On my table a fly struggles
to escape the grip
of a honey bear.

don brennan

Perpetual war, what's that about? Human nature, one supposes, the bully on the school yard becoming a power broker in adult life, the sucess of the sociopath in the realms of wealth and power, the joys of conquest, hubris unbound, tiny minds fulfilled, stunted imagination driven by delerious ambition.

SNUG FIT

it does not come easy

stealing the wealth of
millions of people does
not happen without a
fight

but empire fits the usa
foot like a cinderella
cowboy boot

a target range glove
enclosing a christian
soldier's fist

armed robbery requires
hard hitting violence
shock and awe
wehrmacht
state terror

tailored schemes of the
cia fit uncle sam as a fine
suit of armor cradling
the muscles of a crusading
knight

of course the poor fight back
for what is theirs

imperial aggression creates
a cycle of resistance

snug as sweat shop spandex
hugging the butts of millionaire
athletes, perpetual war is a
perfect fit for the 21st century.

Don Brennan

A poem on poetry: it's not unusual to define poetry in terms of feelings... expressing, articulating, exploring, etc. This is what writers of poetry do, and what gives the poem its purpose, its value. The following is a poetic commentary on the conventional wisdom:

POETRY IN TIME OF WAR

Feeling lies
to us

Needs to lie
to keep the
heart from
disappearing

From dying inside
strangled by
compassion

A dread heart pumps
cold blood
chilled by rage

Flickering candles
can’t survive
cruelty’s hurricane

Dead women
and men in the ground
grieving
wrapped in their children’s
bones

Can see only truth
when the heart
is lost, beating
by blind force of will

Love pumped out
displaced by murder
injustice

No, not about feeling
poet
send your feelings
into exile

Tell only the truth
cold and bitter

by don Brennan

Mild Winter

Come with me
let me take you to tea
to watch women and men in
long hair and necklaces
ducking out of a rain shower

Into our warm cafe, passing quickly
by lovers like us, brushing by
potted plants in full crimson bloom
as we plan a fantasy trip to Africa
in this half-crowded room

Knee to knee at a puddled table
coats piled like ideas on enameled
benches, lying about like bored girls
in summer, safe from storms
in wait for a moment of abandon

And the steam of tea to shuffle out
of shoes, stretch in silk and cotton
surrounded by a winter cafe and us
leaning over a map of the world
knee to knee

You have come with me
and time feels like freedom.

by Don Brennan