OBJECTIONABLE CONTENT

MINUTEMAN PROJECT
© Don Brennan

A few unnoticed kids
playing beside a dusty road

A couple of men in jeans and
work boots amble by, talk loud
about the God damned Mexicans

Some stuff how they keep coming
take jobs and welfare, God damn.

Two girls and three boys playing
on a back road a few miles
north of the border

Two light skinned, three dark
laughing, acting silly as
eight or nine or ten year olds
left to themselves

Scratching and digging at dry dirt
with sticks outside a small house
while somebody’s mother
fixes lunch.

God damned unnoticed
children all hearing clearly
the curse of the passersby.




IGNORAMUS MUNDI
© Don Brennan

Ignorance needs no excuse; a precondition for knowledge said Socrates

Wisdom’s fueling juice

The brick-heads among us often sing in the choir

Grace the ‘old rich’ salon

Share chicken parts around the cook-fire

The ignoramus dwells ubiquitous as sin behind a cunning mask

And seldom has a problem blending in

Welcomed by the middle class and working poor

Cozy, too, with serial killers
(Especially the corporate and military kind)

And whoremongers, literal and metaphorical, pimping every con

Offering both sacred and profane to any willing john.

Folks send kids to school to learn and earn degrees

While Harvard and Yale hand them out to profiteering sleaze

Religious fundamentalists have their own universities

And just to give the point some grease

Sweden once awarded Kissinger
a Nobel Prize for peace.

No need to feel dismay, It’s just the way things tend to be

The precondition for every stripe of truth is, well, you know the homily:

If the bull weren’t hungry he wouldn’t walk a country mile

Snuffle through the hay and add his contribution to the pile.



OUR SOFT SKINNED
DOWNY WARRIORS

Send them all away
the downy maidens
and soft skinned
boys dressed in colors
of winter afternoons
where even the sun
struggles to light the way,

Send them all along their
downy soft skinned paths
to greatness and hope.

Remember to tell them
not to worry about coming
home too early or too late,

For the very brave with
urgent business abroad
need not concern themselves with trivia,

With details of lives left forever behind.

Think only of the future,
tell them that and all the
starry promises you’ve
made in our names,

Remind them all to dream
their nights away with
heroic deeds before their
eyes grow dim,

So dim they’ll
never see again,

Have you told them that?



NOONDAY BELLS
© Don Brennan

Now the noonday bells
Are ringing

Where were they
When I needed them?

Dosing on my meditation
Pillow in pre-dawn
Disappointment

Lost again
Without a single sign
from Heaven

I know as well as you
We’re not allowed to ask

For winks and whispers
Across light years

To tell us
What we think we
Need to know

The candle blinks and
Shimmies within the
Confines of her flame


That should be enough
To comfort us
In our dark hours

She, the sign of Kali
Is all the symbol that we
Need informing us on the

Zazu in total crackling
Silence that we
Like her

Are vessels full and
Brimming with desire

But…but…

In moments of samsara
Tangled in Maya’s web
The arachnid goddess

Initiates conflagration

We destroy everything
Within human reach

Of course desire
All the while
Screaming

For the noonday bells.



MOURNING OSCAR GRANT
© Don Brennan

Have you ever
seen a powerless
woman standing

chin on chest in
someone’s absence?

Someone who lies
beneath a stacked up
mound of earth

smelling fresh
newly turned

Makes you want to
steal a gravedigger’s
shovel

lean it out of sight
behind that
invisible curtain

up against a leg
trembling to remain
standing

the sufferer might
do some digging

maybe you could
take over when
she gets weary

help bring her
child out of that
hole

just for a
little while

time for one more
prayer, maybe a
kiss to be sure

the soul gets free

takes to the air.



FIRST AID
© Don Brennan

What else can we do
who can’t help but
snuffle like hound dogs
on the trail of Hell

Heaving for air in this
thicket where we find
ourselves

Waking up
at the strangest hours

Shivering in a
blind fog

Nothing but our noses
to lead us on

What else
can we do?

Seekers we are called
suckers for the dumb
dog scent of fantasy

Sniffing out an ancient
recollection sometimes
called compassion

More often delusion

We try to push aside
thorn and branch

Ignore our hemorrhaged
minds, where else can we turn?

To the part of us that
is not a part of this
nor a part of that?

First aid
for the part of us that
is the whole of us?

Some knowledge of
compassion
for each one of us?

The knowledge that compassion

Not delusion

Is who we are?