3/19/2012
May in March, bench on Passyunk …
     ...two women
     taking in the sun – not worrying much

     what it all means       how strange it is

               talk

     about the weather, the cost of…

     now a cluster of children, friends
     now…. flock of pigeons wing on wing

     a few walk past – money in their pockets
     some – not so much

                     to love the world…

     …is hard -- against everything contrary – everything
     & the world, to love the world
     till one grows weary of it, worn

     & spring again
     you pull it on again, your soul --
     that old sock – wear it on your head

     like that…

     & make it mouth the words

-----------

     the usual conflict... when i get into activist stuff... begin to feel suffocated after a time.. the  'morality'.. the 'judgments'... making new rules, new "THOU SHALT NOTS" ...surely because this is part of me too, a defensive reaction to the horrors of the monsters who rule this world, part of what draws me in... but not all of it. What gives me pleasure in poetry, and making art... is the total opposite... a breaking down of walls way more profound than the trivial act of tearing down a fence... or blowing up shit or... and though I love this movement, and Occupy is clearly the historical movement of our time, and I love the people who are my friends and comrades... I'm feeling more and more alienated here, as I am in the rest of this Empire of Money and Death... where are the poets? the artists? Not as auxiliaries... as useful propagandists... but as badass, risk taking out there on the front lines leaders in this movement to make a better world as the political & social 'realists' ... the 'stratigists' and 'tacticians' and ... la la la --on the line with our fucking bodies? AS poets. AS artists!
Where?

Revolutionary Narrative

Revolutionary Narrative... what makes a story that does more than rearrange the conventions we use to reinforce our assumptions about the world? How do we find our way to stories that refuse to confirm our expectations--but rather, shatter them with the unexpected--not simply of 'incident'... of what 'happens,' but of the very structures of reality?

Come to The Free University of Philadelphia class on Revolutionary Narrative, Saturday, Marcy 24, 2:00, South Philly Free Library, Broad & Morris.

Write an account-- a short, conventional 'news' story, of anything that interests you. The old Who What When Where Beginning Middle End... and lets share and talk about them.

Jail Solidarity

Friday March 23, 2012 Jail Solidarity
What you see         hear       touch…

                    find in the words

gossamer cables

Ben Franklin in the mist
just the other side

of sense –
as something newly made

trees in bloom      river
of traffic pouring off the bridge
moving points of light in morning sun

the immaterial world        spectral
            trap      glass
            & steel               unreachable

            towers

the passing crowd

This is where we live
in a future that has yet to arrive

this is how we change
what we have become

                     find it

in the music
the life of the body

the singer on Market Street

hat full of coins

Art is the enemy ....

ART is the abortive MONSTER that came into existence when primary communal social organisms were SHATTERED BY FORCE, the radioactive particles released smash and mutate cells of hierarchical power--waging perpetual war with All Things Owned and All Who Own, a cancerous growth in the Body Politic, such that those who make themselves the Instruments of Force, in terror of its power, seek always to control and use it-- imprisoning it in Canons and Museums guarded by Gatekeepers and servile Establishment Critics charged by the Instruments of Force with preventing by any means possible its securing once again that FREEDOM which is also its death, that is, the end of ‘ART’ as a THING disembodied from LIFE, hindering and delaying but not forever, its return and dissolution back into the communal body from whence it came and whence it shall return.

Chapbook & Broadside

Chronic, Chronos Kairos, beautiful handprinted limited edition from Damask Press, with drawings by Becket Flannery.

You can order from me: $12.00, postage included.

Frameable 19' x 11' handprinted broadside, $8.00

Checks payable to W.R.Johnson
1304 Morris Street
Philadelphia, PA 19148

Poem tree held hostage...

Not even in death are we safe…

They took the poem tree—uprooted last fall and locked in a fenced lot—took it and stripped it of what poems may have been left, stripped it of its ribbons and strings of shiny can tabs, and threw away the little piece of wood—written in memory of my sister—left it bare and exposed –and dragged to a Garden Shop on the 1500 block of Passyunk... set up... hung it with .... COMMODITIES – with things for SALE, things to be OWNED… and all things owned all who own are slaves…

Ravaged and carried off into slavery, poor poem tree..

Not even in death are we safe from the predators of capitalism