THE CONGO QUESTIONHitler, Mussolini, Stalin, so vile,
Millions bloodletted at rogue altars,
Before them all a rider men named Death,
King Leopold of Belgium others call’d,
Transforming Congo, uranium-rich,
Into a personal slave plantation,
Extracting fat resources from vast lands,
Enforc’d by workcamps, crude executions,
Bloody tortures, body mutilations,
Robespierring deadly genocide,
Crushing a dozen millions to dust,
Stakes drove in place, grating tentacles entrench’d
Today, as the mighty Congo River,
Thro’ gorgeous Grand Inga roaringly flows,
Some magic, megalithic megadam
Could power all of Africa, such force
Unleash’d by holy torrents! But progress
Halted & hounded, grossly unfunded,
Look at how Three Gorges raises China!
Hydropower breeds importance, self-worth,
Cutting off imperial stealth taxes,
Saving those three-in-four primary kids
From homework in the dark – switches on lights,
With power spare to show an old cartoon.

TRANSNATIONAL NEOCOLONIHILISM

Praise Empires’ demises? Do not be fool’d,
Fresh fetters rub descendents at the nape,
Lives festering in lice-nest interest,
Itching all the day, scratching barely helps,
It is the poor who establish the rich,
A baby dead of hunger in the time
I said that sorry line, as astral light
Cannot escape a Black Hole’s gravity
Likewise economies by cabals kept,
Pirates concocting legal challenges
To halt ‘self-interested’ governments
Laughing in faces of upstart nations,
List dragging on & on – with Canada
Banning toxic, chemical additives
From petrol, the Ethyl Corporation
Sued for a quarter of a billion,
Such cases serve as stinking deterrents
To putting proper health before profit,
Promising lawsuits like hustling rustlers,
Like common switchblade crooks on hooker streets
Enforcing filth on widening regions
Repatriating profits to maintain
The masses’ impoverish’d cantonments,
The tiny few’s palatial paradise.

THE THEFT OF HOPE

“Why should we feed the impoverished?”
Cries Kapital, “there’s no profit in them!”
Starving in a world of vast abundance
With one hand looting systematically
The other hands back crumbs of nothing-dust
& calls that ‘gift’ relief, while in the grit
Starving in a world of vast abundance
A man-made famine gnaws at modern bones
Caught in cycles of lowering wages,
Increasing the profits of investors,
Heaping misery upon the masses,
Who slaver over morsels in the drains,
As in a dreary storm invisible
More tribulations claw the Global South,
Despite the tiniest carbon footprints,
The worst of alter’d climate they’ll endure,
Some Twenty-First century apartheid,
Entirely wrong, greed-wrought, so let us act,
Enforcing rapid shifts from fossil fuels,
To energies renewable, & free,
Bulldozing conspiracized lethargies,
Subsidizing urgent abdications
Of those who’d rather let us burn petrol
Than drive about in sun-fuel’d, fumeless cars.

GENETICAL UNITY

Black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor – all shades between;
The one thing shar’d by these is DNA,
There is more genetic diversity
In just one troupe of monkeys than the whole
Seven billions of human beings,
Just tiny tenths of tenths seperate us,
The hairless ape from those still hugging trees,
In our fabulous species family
We’re basically all Shakespeare folios,
With stagecraft, lines & speeches all the same
But maybe there’s a typo in Titus
Photocopied in a Keralan shack,
Sent polymorphing, eventually,
To many, many, many, many more,
But, when comes the ultimate reckoning
All Humans are all descend from four thousand,
Toba’s supereruptive survivors,
Africa’s fabulous Adam & Eves –
Then mixing in marvelous mutations,
Via Nature’s ancient infuence on genes,
You get the vast variety of Man,
Or at least ninety-nine percent of us
The others, super-rich, might share our genes
But never human, no, they are monsters!

FAKE DEMOCRACY

At election times’ pretended freedom,
The unkempt acceptance of perception
Bends knees at scripted manipulations,
Moulding acquiescent democracies,
From funded think-tanks bias spins on bribes,
Political parties helps to power,
So back-scratch tax-breaks & havens make slaves
Of those whose personal data, en masse
Bought up, studied, to trigger loyalties
With well-timed headlines, blanket coverage
Of insidious, brain-washing bullshit,
While any cause of noble importance
Ignored, brushed over, daub’d in bullish spit,
For in the eyes of certain secret clubs
We are all cattle, dumb, for the market,
Sold & slaughter’d for ravenous gullets
& when we all go skipping to the booths
To place a cross by someone else’s name,
Signing away our rights to question curs
With the cross’d mark of the illiterate;
& never universal anyway!
Some disenfranchis’d, some dissillusion’d
& some just plain denied the so-call’d vote,
By slavemasters sat at varnish’d tables!

THE GOVERNANCE OF GUILDS

We live among archaic institutes;
Two party politics, coalitions,
Dividing, almost gleefully it seems,
Voters with dehumaniz’d rhetoric
Vast majorities of unheard voices
Who wrong-side ballot, flail in sterile soil,
Let us reject partisan loyalties!
Let us accept a superior body;
The leading wisdom of twenty-five guilds
Fair balanc’d by one hundred senators
Standing for equal regions in the land,
Electioneering every second year
Disavows all devious entrenchments
When credentials of individuals
Are open’d up to public perusal
Presented with elections of the Guilds
Vote for none, one, ten, or all twenty-five,,
Then let the local mayors have their day,
Divided into regional sub-groups,
From whom we’ll choose a hundred senators
To fill one hundred & twenty five seats
A senatary meritocracy
A government untainted by ego
To guide the ship of statecraft safely on.

THE RIGHT TO REBEL

At forced procrastination of progress
Springs ancient, revolutionary right,
The Magna Carta halted King John’s tithes,
Slave-soldier Marmalukes oerslew their Sultans,
Less rebels, more agent of destiny!
Come stand with the Cretans at Arkadi,
Paying their punishing Pasha taxes,
Until, among Psiloritis foothills,
In the midst of vineyards & olive groves,
A monastery rang for Enosis!
Accept the necessary scope & scale
Of action, from the D-Day of our dreams
Thro’ Paris to the Reich Chancellery
& blow it up with dynamite, the skill
Is there, the will is there, but shocking greed
Is blocking vital efforts – but take heed!
Go break into the vaults of Tax Havens,
Hurling huge hoards into our hungry streets,
Open all business to transparency,
Lowering prices to their fairest depth,
Imprisoning any crass accountant
Who fudges books or dares facilitate
Illicit stills of moneyman moonshine.