(No protection for me? My equation is to be made fun of every time I move or breathe until I die? Never to have a single peaceful night’s sleep?
Okay ~ let’s stop trying to work with this system, and start telling it like it really is, shall we?
Remember all those patriotic poems and paens I’ve published? You probably won’t even remember I wanted to get back to those, will you, America of the free speech?
But you’ll damn sure bring these up when you want to type me as undesirable, won’t you?
That’s not what you really wanted from me.
This is what you want?)
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Recorded Reading: https://www.dropbox.com/s/sl054z0os97i980/Stone%20Lions%27%20Mouths%20of%20Venice.mp3?dl=0
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Every Police Complaint in America is Made Anonymously
We make much of our “right to know the name of the accuser,” don’t we?
If you’re an ordinary American, you don’t actually have that right.
Not unless you are prepared to take that completely unknown opponent on in a court of law.
It might be the biggest landowner in town.
In the state.
It might be able to hire whole teams of the cleverest lawyers ever twisted out of our institutions of higher education.
It might be able to eat you for lunch.
Never mind that, for an appetizer.
Then it’ll eat your family for lunch.
Of course, that court is prepared to assign you a public defender (once you’ve already found out who you’re up against).
One in a hundred chance you get someone really dedicated.
The rest of the time…
Well ~ this poet’s nation has complacently allowed for an entire year both her slow torture and its own massive defacement, at the hand of the very perpetrator presently doing tailspins around this van under the 24th & Elizabeth Street camera, hooting, whistling, squeeking, playing resonating mechanical samples and, in general, tuning up for another year of it.
So it looks like we’ll have plenty of time to write about the public defenders. And a lot of other stuff the poet would much rather not be writing about.
With regard to the complaints themselves ~
Folks, we might as well be back in the days of the stone Lions’ mouths of Venice.
Don’t know about those?
No wonder ~ you won’t even pay the poets who do know about it enough to live in a place where they can sleep, much less work.
Well ~ as has been truly written ~ what you don’t learn you are condemned to repeat.
And it’s clear we haven t learned our history here.
‘Night, y’all.
Get ready for a long one.
Dark.
And cold.
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This poet is physically disabled. Public housing being insufficient to her medical and creative needs, she is presently living, in order to continue working, in her minivan, publishing all of her works using one thumb on the touch screen of her smartphone at an income of a fraction of her nation’s poverty level. She would treasure any donation you might care to offer ~ http://www.UgiftABLE.com ● #72D-31S
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Troubador of Verse 