An old poem i wrote
AlterEgo
Posts: 89
This was something i wrote maybe two years ago (during half an hour when i was supposed to be paying attentiton in class 
) in response to September 11 and everything that followed. Basically an anti-war poem.
"Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there." - George W. Bush
Agent Orange Kent State
Cold War stalemate
Israel Palestine
watch out a land mine
Catholic Protestant
firebomb in a tenement
poison gas trench barricades
caught up in the Palmer raids
Gettysburg Shiloh
dead men in a row
Khruschev JFK
might have blown the world away
Bloody Sunday Black September
I'm too young to remember
Guess what? It's still going
bombs bursting blood flowing
ashes cover people scared
hoping that they will be spared
children cry parents dead
all the world gray and red
everyone cloaed in fear
What's going to happen here?
Do I mean here or there?
I don't now I don't care
silent screams cities burn
Won't the world ever learn?
It makes me think
of a bumper sticker I saw
on a car on Bardstown Road
"War doesn't prove who's right
only who's left."
) in response to September 11 and everything that followed. Basically an anti-war poem."Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there." - George W. Bush
Agent Orange Kent State
Cold War stalemate
Israel Palestine
watch out a land mine
Catholic Protestant
firebomb in a tenement
poison gas trench barricades
caught up in the Palmer raids
Gettysburg Shiloh
dead men in a row
Khruschev JFK
might have blown the world away
Bloody Sunday Black September
I'm too young to remember
Guess what? It's still going
bombs bursting blood flowing
ashes cover people scared
hoping that they will be spared
children cry parents dead
all the world gray and red
everyone cloaed in fear
What's going to happen here?
Do I mean here or there?
I don't now I don't care
silent screams cities burn
Won't the world ever learn?
It makes me think
of a bumper sticker I saw
on a car on Bardstown Road
"War doesn't prove who's right
only who's left."
"Dude...it's a hamburger on top of a rocket ship!"
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The giant of the world, America, was smitten by those who suffer most from its intrusions.
Suddenly, the streets of the land of the free were filled with SUVs sporting American flags. The Weather Channel used Old Glory as the watermark behind the local forecast. Car dealerships offered 0% financing and there were more victims' charities than heroin junkies.
Suddenly, George 'Dubya' Bush was a hero for smiting the evil evil-doers of evil. Blinded by rage and revenge, this patriotism casts a darker shadow on the world than did our ignorance.
~~~
God Bless America
September 11, 2001
This is so sick
My God...
Oh my dear God,
what's gone wrong?
We sit back so smugly in our cushy armchairs,
warming our hands at the gently crackling fire of DEMOCRACY
and LIBERTY
and IMMUNITY...
while our government shovels off money to fuel a holy war just far enough away
to be an afterthought on page A17 of the New York Times...
You see, the important numbers come to us in the form of the Nasdaq Index or touchdowns...
not in lives lost to a car bomb in the middle of a shopping square half a world away full of brown people with funny names...
not in illiterate children who go to schools that can't afford books because of the constant financial stream into our oil interests in a desert nation that depletes our resources like the leach of a politician's pocketbook...
We just don't care enough.
We just don't care to KNOW enough.
We simply warm our hands...
wash them of the filthy green ink smeared from each bill we send...
But their blood is the color of that dirty ink
And our faces are smeared with it
Oh Christ, what do we do
now that our Benjamin-green blood pours through the streets of Manhattan
and past the cherry blossoms of DC
and across some tranquil hillside in rural Pennsylvania?
We do all we can do
when the sanctity of our sacred American soil is raped and dephiled...
We go on to CNN
with our hands in the air
and tears of feigned innocence streaming down our cheeks,
and plead to a sky raining retribution and jumbo jets down upon us,
"Why us, Lord? What did we do?"
Ah, what did we do?
We armed a nation of crusaders,
and then sat back,
FREE
and IMMUNE,
and SEPARATED,
and read the sports page.
The sleeping giant this time is not the United States.
It is the PEOPLE of these oblivious United States...
It is the vengeful anger of we who march across the planet spreading our magnificent tail feathers just wide enough to hide our personal agenda for the world...
Are we not more like the world's Godfather
than the world's police?
Could we really be so arrogant
as to never expect page A17 to be the front page?
Sadly, this will not awaken any sort of AWARENESS in us,
Or bring our patriotic sense alive in the name of all that is good and righteous...
No, this will only incite a blind rage,
a sordid revenge,
the wrath of the American Bald Eagle
as it rips its proud talons into the meat of turban-wearing fanatics and every last one of their goddamned camels!
And after we gnash the guts out of each quivering radical with the ragged teeth of our oh-so-mighty army,
we can sit back in our slightly less comfortable armchairs
and warm our hands to the blazing fire of LIBERTY
and tarnished PRIDE
and a shattered pretense of INDEMNIFICATION.
We can go back to shoveling our money into a holy war half a world away
knowing full well
that we can squash any ravel of towelheads that dares to resist our bidding...
Now,
however,
we will do so
while jumping out of our skin with every creek of the floor behind us.
We will toss in our fat, comfortable sleep
As the hellish images of the doomed,
leaping from the windows of a buckling piller of commerce like rats in a sinking ship
(Because to them, it's better to die trying
than to die praying),
Scream across our spoiled dreams
For now,
and only for now,
we know IMMUNITY
and INDEMNITY
are both myths...
We knew this once before
We forgot it a long time ago
God bless fuckin' America...
and God bless every one of those ignorant souls claimed by the holy war afterthought on page A17 of the New York Times
and God bless the greenbacks that sparked it all.
i want to rap that for some reason...........i like it
http://www.myspace.com/alotalotbetweenus
(All copyright Lesego Rampolokeng, of course)
TO GIL SCOTT HERON
by Lesego Rampolokeng, poet, activist
"RUN NIGGER RUN was inspiration injection
of the LAST POET'S intonation insurrection
gil scott-heron was suckled on
a mouth to brain respiration rot's subversion
liberation doctrine brought art to the fight
for immunisation against the degeneration
of garvey's children & the spawn of fanon
on the run from the super-duper-shit-man
now life's an acquisition
the unborn have to make requisition
the terror campaign's gone electronic
in the bionic generation a computerised nation
that won't falter at the altar of self-immolation
satan collaboration spiritual contamination
life experimentation with extermination
gil scott-heron the revolution is on television
tricks of the triple six cripple mystics
at the feet of the crucifix no place for romantics
relics of the FUNKADELIC ground on the FAMILY STONEd
HENDRIX EXPERIENCE had GEORGE CLINTON for president
in the street's PARLIAMENT
no relation to the white louse saxophoney man
but the one on the JAMES BROWN SEX MACHINE
salaam alaikum MALCOLM-Xed the CLAN
into a BOO-YA TRIBE of SHABAZZ
made the ENEMY go PUBLIC on BASS
brought the PRODUCTION out of the BOOGIE DOWN
got the PARIS panther on the howl on the prowl on the tracks
of its JUNGLE BROTHERS become POOR RIGHTEOUS TEACHERS
not preachers of fractured futures
when WINTER IN AMERICA froze bloodstreams in south africa
gil scott heron the revolution got on television
we choke in angeldust the stars go bust
street art vision goes to rust
creeping up the aliment of the pop-charts
acting out industry designated parts
of self-emascluation masturbation on the bbc sabc mtv screen
& flip flop goes the hip hop nation
in sudden homicide running down the blood-line
of the griot running riot from dusk to the AFRICAN DAWN
& they called it negroid hell descended devil child
but black was MALOPOETIC mental attitude
in FULANI frontal attack
in psychological genocide time
but now scott-heron, the industry's mutant children perform
a systematic life devaluation coward-style
they defile then revile the warrior profile
& the revolution's pantomime is broadcast
in an audio-visual bomb-blast
gil scott heron the revolution is on television
switch off that shit"