Thanksgiving Day... 2015

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who has something to be grateful for and appreciates it, even though the times in which we live grow increasingly strange and unpredictable; the shit has yet to hit the fan and possibly, if enough of us can maintain a positive proactive attitude, it might not happen. Maybe this is just my irrepressible Pollyanna persona that somehow got fashioned as a result of a seriously hard knocks existence and the only reason that was the result is that all the alternatives would have been much harder to bear. Regardless of how it might turn out in the end it is still better to go out with a smile on your face even if there seems to be no reason for it (grin). We're guessing that not everyone is going to agree with this but... that puts a smile on our face too. Hey! It's Thanksgiving and I am going to spend the day being grateful and give you all kinds of reasons why; gratitude for what we are and for what might be and especially gratitude for what we are not and hope never to become.

Just in case anyone thought that what got said yesterday in Smoking Mirrors was exaggeration and the state of emergency we live in- as relates to our Constitutional guarantees and those freedoms that you are sure to see if you have ever read the Bill of Rights- please cast your eyes on this lovely message coming out of ground central for the hypothalamus, or would that be the neo-cortex of The European Union? Whatever... it is still right next to the Land of La Marseilles. Hey!!! "Allons enfant de la patrie", dear readers. We used to sing that song as a child when we lived in Paris. We are guessing it no longer means what it did, just as The Star Spangled Banner is an ironic laugh riot now, should you be one of those people who find that sort of thing funny. I don't. Like the guy in Airplane said, “I picked the wrong time to stop sniffing glue.” However... as a paraphrasing take on that let me say in reverse... “I picked the right time to hasta la vista out of the European states.”

I am grateful that I no longer live in Europe because I have said in print similar things to what that courageous French comic said and the saddest reality is that both of what either of us have said happens to be true. When powerful interests have to go to this length to repress freedom of speech, what is being said is very likely true. I am grateful on this Thanksgiving that I do not fear the truth and I am grateful for all those others, no matter how few they may be. I am glad that for whatever the reason, I am lucky enough to be able to see that the Paris attacks were orchestrated by the same people who intend to put this brave man in jail for telling the truth and I am grateful that I am ashamed for the rest of the human race that refuses to see the truth and who do not rise up and protest this injustice.

I am filled with gratitude that I know Israel did 9/11 and once again I am ashamed for all of the people who could easily know this as well but who, due to ignorance or cowardice, self interest or indifference, refuse to see that this is true. I am grateful for every stripe I have suffered under the whiplash of the truth descending on me and for the recognition and realization that followed the pain of whatever it took for whatever is decent in me, to possess enough force of conscience to overcome my fear of whatever the cost of it might be.

I am intensely grateful for the strength to endure the absurdities and outrages of this unfortunate time in which I live. I am awash in gratitude for the sacrifices of everyone who has paid the price for having the stones to stand up to the only terrorists of whom we should be concerned and that is the psychopaths who run the governments and armies that dispense their terrors upon whomever they wish to torment and murder, simply because they love to do evil for the sheer joy of it and whom, despite the fact that there is often a profit motive behind the horrors they inflict, would still do it, even if there were no other motive than the enjoyment they take from it. I am of everlasting gratitude that I am not one of these doomed and damned souls.

I am grateful that I do not live in one of the presently war torn countries that are being besieged by the Zionist predators and their mercenary armies from other nations that they control because they control the presses that print the currencies of the countries where these soldier for hire are taken from.

I am so very, very grateful that I am not so unbelievably ignorant that I would be willing to go and kill innocent sheepherders and subsistence farmers and their wives and children, under the orders of bankers who control the government of the country I come from and set the parameters for whatever sad excuse for a foreign policy it possesses. I am grateful that I know that whatever other terrorists appears in these countries, they are created and financed by the same people who sent the soldiers of other nations to kill the people who were driven to these extremes, due to the violent evils visited upon them by the people responsible for what they became and who were formerly shepherds, or store clerks, or street vendors, or students ...but who could no longer be any of them because their sheep got blown to bits by anti-personnel mines and cluster bombs and Hell-fire missiles, or... automatic weapons, or whose stores were leveled along with the entire surrounding neighborhood including the streets that the vendors used to set up and all the schools and universities they used to attend.

I am grateful that I sit here writing this today and am not consumed with the thought of all the stupid useless shit I intend to go out and buy tomorrow. I am drenched in a sense of Thanksgiving that feeling thankful, for me, is far more important than stuffing myself with so much food and drink that I fall asleep on my couch in the middle of watching a football game in a country where material excess has become a religion, even through something like half the world's population often goes to bed hungry. I am so thankful that I am not complicit in causing this.

I am thankful for the readers who come and visit here and whose continuing return makes it possible for me to write these things and without which there would be little point to it and whose solidarity of heart and mind contributes to my being consistently inspired to get up to this sort of thing on most days and who bear as much responsibility for anything good happening as I do. I am grateful that I realize this and grateful to be aware that I am just one among so many of us and that I am not consumed by so many outbreaks of brain fever that manifest in self importance and vanity and far more grateful that I realize one never accomplishes anything of any lasting significance if they so full of themselves that it winds up being exposed in the work that is done and then becomes nothing but an embarrassment and a pedestrian exercise in futility. I am so thankful that I am mostly (grin) aware of this.

I am grateful that despite my failures and shortcomings that I am generally motivated by high ideals even when I am not always able to reflect on or live up to them and I am further grateful that I never stop trying and I am even more grateful for all the people whose lives and beautiful efforts make me want to be a better person, despite the inconsistency in me that has been demonstrated now and again.

I am thankful for those who link my work, regardless of my having disappointed them on occasion. I am grateful they have the generosity of spirit to overlook this. I am grateful for those who have supported my work and without which support I might not have been able to continue.

I am grateful for my faith in ultimate justice, even though I have seldom seen it and I am incredibly grateful for Mr. Apocalypse, whose ceaseless efforts at exposing the liars and murderers and nasty plots of the temporarily privileged and self chosen and without whose presence and determined efforts this world would be far worse than it is and I thank him for upping his intensity and for unmasking the predators and sonsofbitches that seek to bring about Hell on Earth and who will fail, regardless of how hard it might be to see sometimes. I'm grateful and thankful for so much more but I have run out of space, so I will close with a Thanksgiving poem I wrote a few years ago and a link to the remarkable Patrick Willis who gave voice to it in a way that only he is capable of doing. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!!!

Disclaimer; my use of the word 'fat' is metaphorical. I am well aware that we come in all shapes and sizes but I could hardly write at all if I have to watch every word I say, so just know that this references something more than anyone's appearance and is more a matter of a certain way of being.


Thanksgiving the Day After

Thank you for liberty as license
in excess to
make us fat and stupid


like turkeys portrayed
as what they are not
but they taste sweet
like the memory of
what we lost


God Bless us for being a nation of assholes
in every country where
they don't celebrate
what we have
lied ourselves into believing
was representative of our gratitude


where
irony is
the cranberry sauce
and the gravy lines the arteries
of our super highways
in the portable mashed potatoes
of wide load bodies
yearning to be free


where our children are pierced with
navel rings
and tongue studs
the one hidden in folds of flesh
and the other hardening Daddy's
fat cock
while mom cruises the aisles of the
open 24 hours Giant supermarket
in a Valium haze



searching


I been searching


I been searching every day


and generating vipers
like The Bible in hiphop
done by Snoop Dog and
dressed by Diddy
and available in Spanish
and Braille for those who
need to touch what they can't feel and


joined at the hip to
the country we fought to achieve
independence from
who never stopped running the show
and who joins us now
in another nation where
death is the technicolor
dream coat

and we like it better from behind
with a reach around than
we do on our backs and looking
into the face of the rapist
who made sure that the only people
walking on the sea of Gallilee are
Palestinians running too fast to sink


Yeah, I got your
gratitude swinging
I got your illuminated text
and the bloated bodies that
Rumi might have mentioned
if he had been Nostradamus instead


or Nosferatu
in the White House where
they don't get mentioned


We hold these truths to be


we hold these dark woods and
serial killer drop zones in the
ice plants along the sides
of California freeways to be
self-evident.


I wish I had a country to love
I wish I hadn't died in the loading zone
I wish I had not
shit in one hand and
wished in the other


I wish

I wish

I wish


we thank you lord for these blessing we
are about to conceive
indivisible
with no kind of fucking justice
in thrall
to the Homeland Security pigs
in the hall.


(there was another Thanksgiving
that wasn't on Thanksgiving where my
Mom made me hotdogs because the chili
the family was having for dinner on the
night I got back from the hospital
was too spicy for my 12 year old stomach ulcer


that I got because
someone was so angry and cruel
that I
burned my insides out


I lost it-


for awhile before
I even knew it was there

my health
my life
my heart broken inside


I cried


I wept


I died


My father called me a
special privileged character
he whipped me
like a dog


that's what I got for Thanksgiving


that's what I got


that's what I got
for Thanksgiving every day
and he was a soldier for life
in the army that protected
the land of
fat blessings
for which Thanksgiving is the
day before shopping is celebrated
and the day after the two day wait to shop)


Suffering
and succotash
cartoons and life
animated characters poping up out of the sidewalk and one of these days


one of these days

"ba ba bada ba bada 'bing' that's all folks."

cartoon spiral sucked back into the real spiral
"buddha budda budda" said the machinegun scream


"Down on your knees!"


"Good grief, it's Daddy!"


For these gifts we are about to receive
from a god that looks like John Wayne Gacy in a clown suit
on a bed of clouds with handcuffs


Thanksgiving
we thank you god for the rain of fire that
we richly deserve
more for the fundies and missionaries than
we do for the porn


What does it take to paint sugar water under the
eyes of starving black children for
photo-ops in a Banana Republic Safari Suit?


the same thing it takes to be in charge of
exploited children
the same kind of photo-op
of men congratulating themselves for
killing half a million people
so that
their buddies in supply and demand can
make enough weapons to defend the bottom line


I am thankful
on Thanksgiving that
I am not you
and grief sticken too that
you are a part of me
Here in the pumpkin pie wilderness of
the land of the free.

Patrick Willis: Thanksgiving, The Day After