Amigo

Down clotted roads of clay

Isolate as Delta or Ozark farms;

Past the barren ball of the sun

For five hours in the wrong direction:

The lost Locale and sus pasajeros:

A farmer and uno touristo perdito

Who, sitting next to each other

On the hard seat, sat silently.

Toward home, inscribed on the window

Were the words: "Con Dio me fue."

The grass stood still, pines hovered

At the edge of split-rails

The engine´s rods clanked like a bell,

Until, at last, the old man rose

His straw hat planted firmly on his ears

Turning as he descended,

And through the void of the dark

As through the silence of the grave

Of silent fathers,

As through the thousand deprivations

Between unknown father and unknown son

Which have ever existed under the ashen blue

Of a single, feeble star:

Said, politely: "Amigo, Amigo"

By the Pacific


Runnels of silver spume
Swept as polished slate
Are awash from noontide fire
To the hovering of the cross.

The tongues of plants and men
Hossana in silence--
Retiring beside
This siren's tide.

Sharper than the swords of Conquisidores
The masks of Capachuin monkies,
Swinging through the crowns of palms:
Boughs bend back, quieted.

Then blazes this fire
From Cathay to Darien:
O voyager, where are you?
Are you the Captain, or the driven mast?

The swept ship sways between the fronds
Still searching: Find the way West at last!
Find the peaceable people and the just
In the broken semaphore of these million stars.


Will Morgan

Capitalist Dogs, Socialist Dogs

In Latin America there are two sorts of dogs:

One kind barks at you from behind the coiled razor of each house,

The other is as feral as any upstanding citizen,

And scavenges night and day.

There is a look of fright and non-chalance

In the eyes of your average Capitalist dog,

His hind is slender and his belly slack--

For he has agreed with the Masters that food is scarce.

He can be seen proudly trotting the sidewalks,

Or sniffing the ravines and dumps.

After a fashion he is sleek and natural

And well feigns the gestures of the scavenging crowd

Through which he passes, imitating their motion,

Assimilating each gesture of diffidence or disdain

With amazing aplomb:

Hurtling himself forward, in spite of pain.

One rainy afternoon, as the sole of my shoe beat

Loose on the riddled pavement,

By the door of the el viejo who cobbles shoes

For a price none can afford,

My better passed me,

Keeping up that regular lope and lurch of neck

That so surely mark the fallen;

Moving sideways like a snake

To avoid attracting attention

To his crusted coat and bleeding palms.

His hurt gazed was averted,

Poor, but too proud to concede;

Only hoping that no cop or straggler

Would stone him for a joke,

Hoping only to pass

For normal, and thus live:

His gaze diffuse but rent

Like that of all Capitalist Dogs;

Prancing with high but pretended purpose

While desperate within,

A play with no act left.

Fascinated, I turned to watch him ascend the hill,

Head erect, body faltering, trotting jautily

Under the burden of himself.

He held himself so severely

You see, and this I could admire,

But the charcoal-stained street

Is no place for heroes.

By contrast, your average Socialist dog

Is known by his slow gait, subdued eyes,

And calm approach, welcoming death.

A stillness and terrible berevement

Look-out from his shocked eyes

As he claws garabge bereft of a scrap.

It is as if he has already died from hunger,

And now knows that he had only one life to lose.

It is not true that the Socialist dog

Demands a hand-out;

He has simply come to terms with the world

As it is: his pride is vanquished.

If you stand by a gate

A Socialist dog will sometimes appear, shriven, silent

Neither looking at you nor approaching;

Not sitting, only standing, only staring to the side

Never lifting his head, never gazing in your eyes

Never asking, never pleading,

Only standing, a mute witness of himself

Beneath you, beside your door.

It is rather you who will look down into his empty sockets,

Eyes that now seem to silently assert

That hunger should not be,

Yet poised as if by accident and purposeless as stone,

Perceiving, perceving something.

Understanding at last that something

In this world is missing.

And so he stands,

Awaiting you, because he will not beg for the grace

He has discovered, nor utter a single sound,

As he awaits you

To enter at his door.

Will Morgan, San Jose December, 2011

The Children Are Crying

The children are crying to Tio Caiman:
''These are our streets'' ''The whole world is watching.''

It is as if they expect
Freedom to follow upon their request:

An answer that will not be, eventually,
A bullet.

Their voices are those of their parents'
Forty years complicitous.

But in the barrios of San Jose
Above the barranca

A parenthesis of tin shacks
Interrupts the gaze

Of a single, white-washed skyscraper:
The Banco National.

Lo Banco National is patrolled by armed guards: so that
The barrio is surveyed by straveling dogs;

So that: the legislature cannot find a copy of the Constitution,
So that: the deputies hang like sloths in the Corco trees.

Let us sell the gold beneath the hills to pay for money!
A tarantula crawls into his root,

The conquistador grips his sword
A bloodied cross.

When the cries reach the Pope
He curses Marx

For befriending Jesus, and restores the law of nature:
Cutting sugar-cane at two dollars a day.

The B-movie actor who brought Morning to America
Slides the bullets into the chambers.

The guns are held by the pasty palms
Of soldiers, their faces pulp-dark.

When they have raped the Nuns
They blow out the brains of the Jesuits,

Brains that have dared to imagine
That existence might scantify essence,

Or if a volcanic fault
Might swallow Lo Banco Nationale.

His bannas made safe
Tio Caiman slips beneath the murk

Leaving his children to cry:
"Whose streets?" Their streets.

"Whose eyes?" The eyes of those
who feign sleep.

Will Morgan, San Jose December, 2011

This Land is Your Land...from The Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters

At at certain point there is simply nothing more to say. At a certain point politics ends. If, then, at the bottommost rung of corruption, culture does not rescue politics, or at least rejuvenate it, then all is lost.

When, in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's, Woody Guthrie had the courage to compose the words: "This Land is YOUR land, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters" he caught up, in one breath, all the buried courage and hope the American People held in reserve for their vanquished country. With a few simple notes, Guthrie moved beyond what the country had then become--- to that imagined America which has always had more influence and power than the real one.

Likewise today, all around us, we view the hopelessness bred from two generations of greed and deceit. Official corruption is the norm. Our political parties do not hold fast to principles for which they believe and fight, but have rather surrendered love of country to love of wealth and power. In lieu of a principled politics they play a game designed to get the majority of the population to believe they have deeply irreconcilable views of world, which they do not. Everyone can plainly see they do not have such differences about the really important matters: namely: money and war. Practically all American politicians wanted to give the Bankers a bailout, and practically all of them agree, time and again, that the United States should continue to occupy most of the planet. Meanwhile these same politicians have agreed to set free International Corporations, groups of private individuals having no allegiance to any nation or its people, institutions whom we treat as "persons" under the law, to run wild over the entire globe, extracting, at a bargain prices, as much wealth as they can from any nation they can plunder.

The results could have been predicted. Indeed the results we are now watching were predicted.

Although certain foolish men, like former President Bill Clinton, still go around the world, praising themselves for trading away national sovereignty to these corporations in the NAFTA and GATT treaties; the people, as usual, were not consulted in the matter.

It is certainly a mark of the strangeness of these times, that politically left idealists like myself now find themselves among the last defenders of what amounts to traditional national sovereignty. After all, The State, qua State, is not the anarchists' cup of tea. But what becomes true for them, becomes true for conservatives, who must also choose a new politics if they are to advance their beliefs. The conservatives and the left now have nowhere left to hide except within the traditional ideal of the nation-state. For if a State order devolves, from a hyper-greedy Capitalism, into neo-feudalism, as ours is doing, then no one concerned with equity and justice, or even with wealth or power, can be pleased. For it is far harder to move a Capitalist and Neo-Feudalist society toward justice, than simply to move a Capitalist society alone, albeit slowly, toward that same justice.

Both Democrats and Republicans now rail, in public, of course, against British Petroleum Inc., while still taking corporate money and looking out for corporate interests. But it is notable that no Democrat or Republican politician has said a single word about what "compensation" is to due to each citizen of the United States for the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. For to mention that-- would be to assert the primacy of the nation-state, and in United States, that national sovereignty is exactly what has been ceded to Corporations.

How has it come about that WE, the citizens, no longer have legal standing in the preservation, use and enjoyment of our own land? What happened to the WE in the Constitution, or that same WE used by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence? Furthermore, do I have to live on the Gulf of Mexico to claim my right to the use of it? Obviously not, for, as a citizen-- I have been free to travel and to use it at any time up until this point. Since when did our land come to have a purely monetary value? Did the people as a whole, unknown to me, cede the right to enjoy and use their coasts to British Petroleum Inc; or even stranger, did they somehow cede the right to their waters and their coasts to the President of the United States? Did they instruct him, or their Congressman, that the the coast of the Gulf of Mexico was worth to them only the paltry sum of 20 Billion dollars; or if that figure rises, as it surely will, to the paltry sum, of say, of 75 Billion dollars? (A figure still less than half of BP's total worth.) (As if such dollars could somehow magically restored a destroyed ecosystem!)

The notion that any nation or set of citizens can be compensated for the destruction of their land flies in the face of the very purpose of any nation-state, which is the defense and the sole use of its own territory. Since much of the Gulf of Mexico coast is held, not privately, but in public parks, marshes, federal lands, nature preserves, then I, Will Morgan, am a directly aggrieved party to this land's and water's destruction. Moreover, even if there were no public parks on that coast, the beach is open to my use at numerous spots; and even if that were not true, the water would be fully open to my use, and even if that were not so, the idea of the Gulf of Mexico, even if all I ever did was to imagine going there, is, therefore, a potentially realizable right, which, I, as a citizen of the United States, have in my possession; or else, again, the words "nation-state" or "citizen" have simply lost all meaning...

We are faced here with a strange ceding of our national rights to private, international institutions over which our government has no control. Moreover, if such an institution freely chooses to operate in a reckless manner, then shouldn't it, by rights, make itself open to the forfeiture of all its legal rights under American law, rather than merely apologize and open an escrow account on behalf of hotel-owners and fisherman? What are the lives of these hotel-owners and fisherman supposed to be like while they wait the thirty or more years for their waters to heal? (If indeed they ever heal) Can any citizen, whether resident of the Gulf or not, be compensated for being stripped of their profession and of their culture? Can any citizen anywhere be compensated IN MONEY for having the use of any part of their country taken from them? I think not. Every war ever fought whose purpose was to defend or seize land is evidence that such compensation does not exist.

If BP Corporation had attacked the Gulf Coast with high altitude bombers or dropped phosphate weapons onto its residents they might have done LESS permanent damage to the Gulf than they have by spewing crude oil into the Gulf for three months. In such a case we would have considered BP, under the old rules of the nation-state, to be an "enemy". We would have immediately declared war on them, destroyed their ships and plants, and bombed their headquarters in London. Instead, our President sat politely for a month, assuring all of us that those who had to put him into office would surely find a solution to the problem. After that, he went out of his way to assure the British Prime Minister that the slight scolding he gave BP before the cameras was certainly not intended to cause BP's stock to drop.

This meretricious behavior is all that remains of the modern nation-state: obedient to a fault to those Corporations which sustain it; lethargic, at best, in even understanding, much less acting upon, those Corporation's effects upon a real citizenry, eg "the small people".

Woody Guthrie was one of those "small people." No politician, no captain of industry, no businessman, Corporate CEO, or Wall Street Banker bothered to express, in notes or words, a heartfelt love for his country. For they were too busy enriching themselves on the wealth of the land the singer celebrated-- to stoop to a effort so far beneath their self-importance and rank. This is as Thomas Jefferson predicted, for the class of men best fitted to direct the State, he thought, should come, not from the "artificial class founded on wealth and birth" but from the "natural aristocrats of virtue and talent."

Thus the praise-less task of praise fell to a Hobo and an Oklahoma drifter named Woody Guthrie.

Listen again to what he sang, and may God save us from ourselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE


Will Morgan
July 20, 2010

When Bankers Testify Money



When bankers testify money
Their eyes squint in disbelief
That anyone could not know--
That the game of bilk is bilk.

When bankers testify money
The citizens, secretly enthralled,
Crave to be the priests of lucre,
Cracker-jack vendors at the ballpark.

For the truest of les citoyens
Always buys the Powerball stub,
Always covets MacBurger and MacMansion:
Knows his duty as a toothless tool.

So when Bankers testify money,
And create it, when Senators cannot---
The masses reel astonished,
And Senators feign to admonish

The lords of their own fiefdom.
Hamilton, bastard brat, appears again
To Mr. Jefferson in the fire, praising
The velvet chiffon of Nancy Reagan:

'A true tale from the Old West
Brought to you by Twenty-Mule Team Borax'.
La luxe, you see, is quite as sweet
As the Summum Bonum.

For after the assassinations
Vice becomes virtue, and virtue vice,
General Grant learns to weep
Before General Lee,

St Paul falls from the Areopagus,
Kant leaps into winding sheets,
Mortmain stuns the Gautama
And dead-stock stinks worse than livestock.

When bankers testify money
The mad bull charges up Broadway
Scattering feathers from satin pillows,
Bankers' potlach burning all bodies to shame.

Will Morgan
April 30, 2010

The House that the Bankers Built

with apologies to Mother Goose

This is the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the bundle
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

These are the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the crook who emptied the nooks
That derived the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the Bailout that paid for the bonus
That emptied the nooks
That derived the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the Stimulus owed to the Bank
That paid for the job in lieu of the bonus
That emptied the nooks
That doubled the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the man in the street tattered and torn
And the nation forlorn who now owes the Bank
That paid for the Stimulus and for the bonus
That emptied the nooks
That doubled the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house the Bankers built.

This the coin printed by the Bank
Given by the Constitution free
To the nation tattered and torn
Who yet owes the Bank that paid for the job and for the bonus
That emptied the nooks
That doubled the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the cock crowing to the citizen
Who clasps in his pocket
The coin printed by the Bank
And to the nation tattered and torn
Who now owes the Bank for the job and the bonus
That emptied the nooks
That doubled the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

This is the call to freedom
Crowed by the cock to the citizen
Who clasps in his palm the coin
Inscribed We The People
And to the nation tattered and torn
Who need not pay to harvest their corn
Or for the bonus that emptied the nooks
That boubled the derivatives
That swelled to bundles
That exposed the mortgage
That lay on the house that the Bankers built.

Will Morgan
March 5, 2009