wombrain conception

by Roberto Lavidez

a man must gently

whisper ancient

stories of ancestors

into the woman’s ear

his words will spiral

around her womb

where they form

celestial germ

of water

that receives

a man’s seed

this is what

Dogon of

West Africa

believe

birth and death

follow upon

one another in

an eternal cycle

child who enters

the womb

is not new life

but life

renewed

this is what

the Ainu

in Japan

believe

ancient earth mother

created all spirit babies

who were ever to be

born in the world

and placed them

at sacred sites

near streams

mountains

caves and

gum trees

here  

spirit children

wait to enter

a woman who

passes by

this is what

Aborigines

believe

spirit babies choose

their womb homes

very carefully

spirit baby curls up

in different wombs

to see which ones

fit it perfectly

this is what

Tapirape Indians

of Brazil

believe

savages

believe

in spirit

babies

as modern

tribes who

believe

in the afterlife

send fetuses

in the care of

nanny angels

©robertolavidez2012

Little Boy

By Roberto Lavidez

it was a beautiful day

Kiyoshi went out to play

mom was gardening

dad was reading

in the sky a plane flew

down below nobody knew

the little boy was dropped

Kiyoshi waved and hopped

a flash cut across the blue sky

the light blinded mom’s eyes

a beam hit dad on the head

Kiyoshi fell under the shed

it was 8:15 a.m.

the city was in flames

as the day grew darker

bodies filled the river

allied countries cheered

Emperor of the sun grieved

Hiroshima buried its dead

while the pilot snored in bed.

©robertolavidez2002

Cuban Salsa

By Roberto Lavidez

the rhythm of a mulatta

the sound of salsa

the blend of rumba

and cha-cha

excites Havana

mojitos exorcised Papa

rum, sugar, seltzer

poured into

his novella

leafing through

mintlike hierba buena

fou-fou and

mashed malanga

a staple to the guerrilla

very filling

the raw beauty of

Sierra Maestra

Commandante’s  brand

is Cohiba

sweet and tough

was Celia

who smoked Winstons

courtesy of the CIA

smokescreening Cuba

Revolucion

as Cuban as salsa

Marxist-Leninist-Castroist

never dull is

Fidel’s politica

despite the blockade

by imperialist America

novella o historia

favors the intoxicating

and gyrating Cuba

©robertolavidez2003

JFK’s Face

By Roberto Lavidez

70 million people

in 10 minutes

I can’t adjust to that.

It doesn’t matter about us.

We’ve had a good life.

We bring these things

on ourselves.

But 70 million people

in 10 minutes.

I can’t adjust to that.

The thought of women

and children

perishing

in a nuclear exchange.

I can’t adjust to that.

Tears ran down

the president’s cheeks.

Nukes run down

the face of the earth.

Bobby has never 

seen JFK's face

like this.

©robertolavidez2012

Sentencing

(in a sentence)

By Roberto Lavidez

Civilians protesting

against human rights

violations by despotic

regimes are deliberately

silenced by security forces

to instill fear amongst

dissidents who are seen

as threats to national

security which is

all about fear of losing

security of positions

in the government

reacting in drastic

measures such as

extra judicial executions

of those who on several

occasions disappear

after inquiring about

others who have

already disappeared

only proving the

disparity between what

the government says

about human rights

and the wrongs they do

showing virtual collapse

of state authority and

increasing volatile

human rights situations

urgently calling for

political awareness

and involvement in

mass action to help

protect the lives of men

and women who have

committed themselves

in one way or another

to defending human rights

and ending unfair trials

torture and sentencing

fellow life savers

to death.   

©robertolavidez2012

cry baby cry

by Roberto Lavidez

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

collapsing deck of credit cards

balancing act bungled by mascots

fannie mae is not funny

freddie mac cannot juggle

clowns hanging by the golden thread

of invisible balloon

acrobats jump without safety net

wizards vanish without trace

crowds scramble for shreds

of carnival tickets

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

no more special rates,

freebees, gimmicks

gambling goes bust

mug shots of long faces

plastics, backpacks, broken bottles

join the wasted migrant worker

at the amusement park

among pellet ridden pigeons

milk bags filled by

mother’s frustrating toil

labor strike

tempers boil

bargaining table stinks

of soiled pampers

public squares

whining at corporate sharks

barking at ceo jerks

fattened with perks

who coddle bonds

massage swiss

and fondle exotic assets

giving birth to

domestic poverty

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

financial meltdown

nervous breakdown

neo-liberal fears

great, greater, greatest

depression

the unemployed

couched,

soaked in alcohol

igniting fire

to self immolation

trickle down economy

of toxic imports

and expired goods

what’s left on the table

for the working poor?

a plate of promises

from quack politicos

a bowl of threats

from gang of creditors

and thug collectors

a cup of suffering and petition

from pastor in pimp suit

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

owner-ship is sinking fast

everyone’s at risk of losing

a car, a house, a spouse

finding fault in breadwinner’s

low wage

defaulting on mortgage

pension sabotaging old age

meanwhile

same horse shit goes

merry-go-round

whitewashing

white collar crimes

blacklisting blacks

scapegoating boat people

racializing asians

profiling muslims, jews

and any group they choose

ghettoizing the wise

marginalizing aboriginals

demonizing those who

are different and nice

silencing those who speak

pepper spraying those who see

truncheoning those who listen

taser gunning those who stand up

arresting those who resist

torturing to pacify

killing to save

the lifestyle of those

who make a killing in

mining, drilling

to excess

extracting riches out of

third world resources

colonialists, imperialists,

hyenas and jackals

in pursuit of g.o.d.

g for gold

o for oil

d for diamond

while the expendable

lying at the bottom

of dante’s excavation

cry out to commandante che

for chevolutionary justice

to the wall!  to the wall!  to the wall!

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster

ride goes awry

global village is under siege

global pillagers

illuminati of conspiracies

make you see

what they want

you to see

nations are halluci-nations

cities are fantasies

states are states of mind

republics are cliques

with identical state of mind

and shared hallucinations

to think otherwise

is heresy to bureaucracies

crazies that rule democracies

are out to rein sovereignties

for a one world state of mind

debraining citizens

governing mentality of every

consuming desire

cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

lords of poverty

gene-ruse with charity

prophets of development

masters of disaster

they send troops

if tsunamis are unavailable

to create havoc

destruction for reconstruction

a carousel of employment,

unemployment, deployment

turning coeds in debt

into patriots risking death

the ministry of peace

holds the key to war

the ministry of love

the secret to hate

orwellian 1984

is here to stay

brother

informing all in uniform

that 2 plus 2 equals

4^th of july

that it is safe

to conform

‘til the comets fall

to not think of any

other thrill

outside the roller coaster ride

to not fear the impending doom

and sit tight for the next boom

everything for profit

for one stop shopping

commodifying identities

wholesaling immigration

retailing citizenship

marketing refugees

to paint a human face

on social irresponsibility

devaluation of human dignity

down spiraling morality

breaking away from disaster

helluva doomed ride

cry baby, cry hunger and deprivation

cry baby, cry discrimination and exploitation

cry baby, cry racism and sexism

cry baby, cry torture and violence

cry baby, cry graft and corruption

cry baby, cry suppression and oppression

cry, cry, cry baby, cry

free market

roller coaster ride

goes awry

 ©robertolavidez2012

        

Neruda Mix

By Roberto Lavidez

While browsing Vijay Prashad’s book “The Darker Nations,” A People’s History of the Third World, I chanced upon the last page of ‘La Paz’ chapter which is page 150 and the first page of ‘Bali’ chapter which is page 151, each page containing a Neruda poem.  A lyrical passage titled “Los Dictadores” (“The Dictators”) taken from Cantos General is printed on page 150.  Facing this page is the other Neruda poem ‘Recabarren’ (printed on p.151).  The fact that these poems appear as they did on Prashad’s book caught my eyes and invited me to mix Neruda in a concoction that I have never attempted before.  The contradiction of dictatorship (poem l) and the aggrieved communist (poem ll) urged me to play a little ‘blasphemy’ with Neruda’s words, alternating lines from each poem to see how far this process could stretch without losing much of the potency of each poem.   I began with a line from “Recabarren’ and chose to end the mix with the line from the same which is the shorter of the two poems. 

How much has happened since then,

An odor lingers among the sugarcane:

How much blood upon blood,

A mixture of blood and body, a penetrating

Nauseous petal.

How many struggles upon the earth.

Between the coconut palms the graves are filled

Hours of splendid conquest,

Of demolished bones, of smothered grasps.

Triumphs won drop by drop,

The delicate dictator talks

Bitter streets, defeated,

With wineglasses, collars, and gold braid.

Zones dark as tunnels,

The tiny palace shines like a wristwatch

Razor-edged betrayals

And smart-gloved laughter

That seemed to sever life,

Occasionally drifts across the corridors

Repressions armed with hatred,

To join the dead voices

Military crowned.

And freshly buried mouths.

The earth seemed to give way.

The sob is hidden like a plant

But the struggle goes on.

Brain Drain

By Roberto Lavidez

never a gain

never a gain

never a gain

a brain drain

of quixotic grain

mapping scenarios of dystopia

dragging headless corpses of Goya

back into the vault of memory

so as not to shame philistines

dumping sugary masterpieces

into silent auction of entropy

eyes melting in psychedelic incubus

black rain leaking from sheltered history

tracking diabolical miscalculation

Rwandan skulls

Darfurian bones

intersecting in skeletal universalism

unbridgeable internationalism

never a gain

never a gain

never a gain

a brain drain

of quixotic grain

desensitized by dissecting

cubist Guernica

in cold precision knife slashes

belly of totalitarian bull after

gorging mankind at the heart

of pictorial counter reality

by horns of statism

and socialist exoticism

degenerate art condemned

for its vulgarity of disposing entrails

on red carpet at regime pageantries

echoing cries at concentration camps

gatekeeper lashes out at intellectual

whose aim is to scandalize tyrannies

and declare moral bankruptcy for

catatonic society

never a gain

never a gain

never a gain

a brain drain

of quixotic grain

hegemonic institutions mutilate art

protestations to cover up its

modus of brainocide

decapitating truth from the

body of evidence

a way of manufacturing consensus

on behalf of all the living dead

local anesthesia spreading global amnesia

washing away historicity of civilizing missions

justifying injustices thru oral revisions and

blitz commissioned by monster corporations

never a gain

never a gain

never a gain

a brain drain

of quixotic grain

devouring nation states of mind

humpty dumpty linguistic humanism

staging Dionysian pacification

thru slavery, terror and genocide

attacking hemispheres of sovereignty

colonizing spineless craniums into

mutating subservience

in the onslaught of ideologies

thoughts could either shatter the shell

of pseudo reality or it could disintegrate

into pastiche mindscape of surreality

a brain drain of quixotic grain

©robertolavidez2012

November Chill

By Roberto Lavidez

Osip was arrested last night.

What was he arrested for?

What do you mean, what for?

He was arrested for nothing!

What do you mean, nothing?

You cannot be arrested for nothing.

He talks too much.

I knew he was going to get in trouble

for talking too much.

Terrible.

He must be a terrible man.

Osip, a terrible man?    

They arrested the man, right? 

He cannot be arrested for nothing.

He must have been arrested

for saying terrible things.

Like I said, he talks too much.

But he’s a poet.

They arrested him for being

a poet. 

He must have offended god.

What terrible things he must

have said. 

“His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights,

   fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boot tops gleam.

Around him a rabble of thin-necked

    leaders –

Fawning half-men for him to play with…”

Excerpt from Osip Mandelstam’s poem on Stalin (November 1933)

I knew he was going to get in trouble

for talking too much.

Terrible.

You know what surprises me?

What?

If Stalin actually read his poem.

He must have.  It was about him.

Osip got his attention alright. 

What a terrible thing to

get arrested. 

A poet.   

©robertolavidez2012

Merging two stanzas from poems extracted from the collection of Poetry of the Spanish Civil War by Marilyn Rosenthal is an exercise that reflects the various ways of playing the webstruction game. 

A stanza from Stephen Spender’s “To A Spanish Poet”

Your heart looks through the breaking ribs –

Oiled axle through revolving spokes,

Unbroken blood of the swift wheel,

You stare through centrifugal bones

Of the revolving and dissolving world.

is intertwined with a stanza from Paul Eluard’s “The Victory of Guernica,”

They said to desire good intelligence

They rationed the strong judged the fools

Gave charity split a halfpenny in two

They greeted the cadavers

They overburdened themselves with politeness

alternating lines from each poem. 

The stanzas were taken randomly from the book and the result of merging the two is a webstructionized ‘grafted’ stanza using the above combination:

They said to desire good intelligence

Your heart looks through the breaking ribs –

They rationed the strong judged the fools

Oiled axle through revolving spokes,

Gave charity split a halfpenny in two

Unbroken blood of the swift wheel,

They greeted the cadavers

You stare through centrifugal bones

They overburdened themselves with politeness

Of the revolving and dissolving world.

what you see

By Roberto Lavidez

what you see

is what you think

you see

color of democracy

an illusion of harmony

color of man

is freedom

palette of justice

mixes oil and water

to paint dreams

of equality

to fool the eye

to trick the mind

mixing yellow and blue

makes you see green

hygienic, organic

the cleansing army

mixing red and white

makes you see pink

cure for cancer

teen pornography

color coding life, death,

sex, violence

ocean is blue

color of peace

infested with sharks

blood is red

color of love

tainted with poison

light is white

color of purity

emitted with bombs

red, blue, white

could be anything

or nothing

what you see

is what you think

you see

justice, freedom, equality

an illusion

or delusion

of harmony

you see

©robertolavidez2012

Snowflake Society Webstructionism # 3 by Roberto Lavidez

Vertumnus Verve Webstructionism # 17 by Roberto lavidez