SOCIAL JUSTICE

To fight is to stand

To regret is to mistake

And to jump is risk

To see is to know

To smile is to make amends 

And to think is wise

To sing is happy

To sin is unforgiven

And to try is bold

To soar high is proud

To be yourself is unique

And to be alive

To dance is vibrant

To fear is the enemy

And to give is kind

To feel is caring

To seek is the adventure

And to win is strength

To aim high is brave

To understand is clever

And wonder is pure

To dream is to rest

To break is to be broken

And faith brings spirit

To play is to live

To focus brings ambition

And to stare is speech

To trust is secret

To have faith is courageous 

And loss takes you down

"If I believed that my reply were made
To one who to the world would e'er return,
This flame without more flickering would stand still;
But inasmuch as never from this depth
Did any one return, if I hear true,
Without the fear of infamy I answer..."
'Inferno' by Dante Alighieri (Canto 27; Lines 61-66)

Edgar Allan Poe's last words before he died...

Poetry Preview #1

If I could transform my thoughts into art, I would create a masterpiece beyond what has ever been created, because with my imagination and my dream for fantasy, I am able to imagine peace and no suffering, love and no violence, happiness and no hatred. If I could transform my thoughts into art, I would create a masterpiece beyond what has ever been created. 

Beneath The Bed Covers

Everyday, I create slits
And shed blood, sweat and tears as I restrain hits
It's not like I want the sorrow
But it's how my life is, a horror

I have my goals, but I don't know if I will be able to meet them
Each day, I hide underneath my bed sheets, close my eyes and talk to mum
Telling her that papa is making me cry
Although she might not hear, I still try

I become who I really am under my blanket
I wonder if anyone will remember me when I am in a casket
I dream of a new life better than this
That is the dream that I will miss.
--Sharon Tan

Dream Variations by Langston Hughes

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

The Beatles with Ed Sullivan on "The Ed Sullivan Show"

http://www.beatlesagain.com/the-beatles-on-ed-sullivan.html

What's Genocide?

their high school principal
told me I couldn’t teach
poetry with profanity
so I asked my students,
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.”
in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas
then straightened out like an SS infantry
“Okay. Please put your hands down.
Now raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Rwandan genocide.”
blank stares mixed with curious ignorance
a quivering hand out of the crowd
half-way raised, like a lone survivor
struggling to stand up in Kigali
“Luz, are you sure about that?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.”

“Carlos—what’s genocide?”

they won’t let you hear the truth at school
if that person says “fuck”
can’t even talk about “fuck”
even though a third of your senior class
is pregnant.

I can’t teach an 18-year-old girl in a public school
how to use a condom that will save her life
and that of the orphan she will be forced
to give to the foster care system—
“Carlos, how many 13-year-olds do you know that are HIV-positive?”

“Honestly, none. But I do visit a shelter every Monday and talk with
six 12-year-old girls with diagnosed AIDS.”
while 4th graders three blocks away give little boys blowjobs during recess
I met an 11-year-old gang member in the Bronx who carries
a semi-automatic weapon to study hall so he can make it home
and you want me to censor my language

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

your books leave out Emmett Till and Medgar Evers
call themselves “World History” and don’t mention
King Leopold or diamond mines
call themselves “Politics in the Modern World”
and don’t mention Apartheid

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

you wonder why children hide in adult bodies
lie under light-color-eyed contact lenses
learn to fetishize the size of their asses
and simultaneously hate their lips
my students thought Che Guevara was a rapper
from East Harlem
still think my Mumia t-shirt is of Bob Marley
how can literacy not include Phyllis Wheatley?
schools were built in the shadows of ghosts
filtered through incest and grinding teeth
molded under veils of extravagant ritual

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Roselyn, how old was she? Cuántos años tuvo tu madre cuando se murió?”

“My mother had 32 years when she died. Ella era bellísima.”

…what’s genocide?

they’ve moved from sterilizing “Boriqua” women
injecting indigenous sisters with Hepatitis B,
now they just kill mothers with silent poison
stain their loyalty and love into veins and suffocate them

…what’s genocide?

Ridwan’s father hung himself
in the box because he thought his son
was ashamed of him

…what’s genocide?

Maureen’s mother gave her
skin lightening cream
the day before she started the 6th grade

…what’s genocide?

she carves straight lines into her
beautiful brown thighs so she can remember
what it feels like to heal

…what’s genocide?
…what’s genocide?

“Carlos, what’s genocide?”

“Luz, this…
this right here…

is genocide.”

- Carlos Andrés Gómez

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1d0IYd/community.livejournal.com/greatpoets/2868543.html

Sea Lullaby

The old moon is tarnished

With smoke of the flood,

The dead leaves are varnished

With colour like blood,

A treacherous smiler

With teeth white as milk,

A savage beguiler

In sheathings of silk,

The sea creeps to pillage,

She leaps on her prey;

A child of the village

Was murdered today.

She came up to meet him

In a smooth golden cloak,

She choked him and beat him

To death, for a joke.

Her bright locks were tangled,

She shouted for joy,

With one hand she strangled

A strong little boy.

Now in silence she lingers

Beside him all night

To wash her long fingers

In silvery light.

Elinor Wylie

ANARCHY
Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,
Thou art the grisly terror of our age.
"Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,
"Art thou, and war and murder's endless rage."
O, let them cry. To them that ne'er have striven
The truth that lies behind a word to find,
To them the word's right meaning was not given.
They shall continue blind among the blind.
But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.
I give thee to the future! Thine secure
When each at least unto himself shall waken.
Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?
I cannot tell--but it the earth shall see!
I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be!

JOHN HENRY MACKAY

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped. Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas!Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

                                                        --Wilfred Owen

ACT IV
SCENE III. Juliet's chamber.
[...]
JULIET

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life:
I'll call them back again to comfort me:
Nurse! What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial.
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.
Laying down her dagger
What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point!
Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,--
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed:
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort;--
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:--
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefather's joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.
She falls upon her bed, within the curtains.

[...]

ROMEO

In faith, I will. Let me peruse this face.
Mercutio's kinsman, noble County Paris!
What said my man, when my betossed soul
Did not attend him as we rode? I think
He told me Paris should have married Juliet:
Said he not so? or did I dream it so?
Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,
To think it was so? O, give me thy hand,
One writ with me in sour misfortune's book!
I'll bury thee in a triumphant grave;
A grave? O no! a lantern, slaughter'd youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.
Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interr'd.
Laying PARIS in the tomb
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry! which their keepers call
A lightning before death: O, how may I
Call this a lightning? O my love! my wife!
Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty:
Thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there.
Tybalt, liest thou there in thy bloody sheet?
O, what more favour can I do to thee,
Than with that hand that cut thy youth in twain
To sunder his that was thine enemy?
Forgive me, cousin! Ah, dear Juliet,
Why art thou yet so fair? shall I believe
That unsubstantial death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavoury guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark!
Here's to my love!
Drinks
O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
Dies
Enter, at the other end of the churchyard, FRIAR LAURENCE, with a lantern, crow, and spade

[...]JULIET

O comfortable friar! where is my lord?
I do remember well where I should be,
And there I am. Where is my Romeo?
Noise within

FRIAR LAURENCE

I hear some noise. Lady, come from that nest
Of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep:
A greater power than we can contradict
Hath thwarted our intents. Come, come away.
Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead;
And Paris too. Come, I'll dispose of thee
Among a sisterhood of holy nuns:
Stay not to question, for the watch is coming;
Come, go, good Juliet,
Noise again
I dare no longer stay.

JULIET

Go, get thee hence, for I will not away.
Exit FRIAR LAURENCE
What's here? a cup, closed in my true love's hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end:
O churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after? I will kiss thy lips;
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make die with a restorative.
Kisses him
Thy lips are warm.

[...]

JULIET

Yea, noise? then I'll be brief. O happy dagger!
Snatching ROMEO's dagger
This is thy sheath;
Stabs herself
there rust, and let me die.
Falls on ROMEO's body, and dies
Enter Watch, with the Page of PARIS

[...]

PRINCE

A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Exeunt

An Unpublished Manuscript of J.D. Salinger 

It is possible to assassinate my heroes
with the scope of my individualism
However, by their own persistence to themselves
I believe that they have chosen me to pursue a self
What is literature
but the illumination of that which I would write?
Salinger speaks through me, to me
whispers, ‘Where to, little boy?’
My answer is the dogged pen to page
which lights consistently the pathway home
It is on that road
that I alone can trip my way back to myself

          --Rider Strong

Top of The World
You don't know it, but 
Sometimes, I go to a hill that overlooks
the landscape's mask of city lights
For a sip of momentary grace.
On this brink of everything I know, I can gain
An eyeful of the lost Atlantis in the human soul,
And a breath that fills my lungs with the air between two stars.

If right now, you
Were to capture this elation
In the framework of your mind,
Or find transcendance through these words,
Then at most you would know
Nothing
Of the beauty your existence throws to me.
For mine is a love no experience,
No thought, no measure, no words
Could ever degrade into reality by virtue of degree.
          
          --Rider Strong

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am in a thousand winds that blow,

I am the softly falling snow.

I am the gentle showers of rain,

I am the fields of ripening grain.

I am in the morning hush,

I am in the graceful rush

Of beautiful birds in circling flight,

I am the starshine of the night.

I am in the flowers that bloom,

I am in a quiet room.

I am in the birds that sing,

I am in each lovely thing.

Do not stand at my grave bereft

I am not there. I have not left.

--Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932)

March 2, R.I.P. Dr.Seuss

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." 
— Dr. Seuss
"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go..." 
— Dr. Seuss
"Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You." 
— Dr. Seuss
"A person's a person, no matter how small." 
— Dr. Seuss 
"I meant what i said and i said what i meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!" 
— Dr. Seuss 

As Loud As Silence

This poem is for the music and lyrics that inspires me, and
changes my attitude and views on the way our lives should be
led, and in the ways we should think. The lyrics I hear every
morning have the capability to change my mood for the rest of the day. 

The lyrics block out everything else in my mind, and are far from silence.

The words dab at my mind like a fist thrown into the skin

like the sharp texture of your hair

blowing wildly in the wind

as locked are the gates of heaven

as close as the opportunity to sit on Saturn’s rings

and as blazing as winter’s falling snowflakes,

in the peace within a war zone,

where lies the feeble raven.

Like a star rising from the earth’s core,

like a lonesome shadow

like the graceful whomping willow, 

a picture with no story, a dull sun

with no beaming rays

the dignity of a distressed damsel

like the loyal nature of a predator

like the powerless thunder,

like the whisper of luna

a man of the cloth swearing to the heavens,

a corpse with a pulse,

a terrifying child who thinks of not but death,

lying in the cell of a prison,

while pondering a beginning outside Genesis

and anticipating his controllable fate.