Here is the winning poem:
Give us your tired, your poor,
Your weary and strung-out
Your old and wasted, your young and stupid
Your Doe-eyed and dreamy-eyed and lusty-eyed
Your phallus-driven gangstas, your unwed mothers
Your hard-working dullards, your unkempt retards
Decadent oil barons and snot-nosed
dirt-faced children.
Your abundant curly hair,
your fractious factions and moth-ridden
memories of what you never knew. Your
broken bodies and genius perverts and
unstoppable prejudice and you who breathe
with the uncertainty of the wind.
Welcome.
For we here are,
and always have been,
The same as you.
12 comments:
Oh I thought it was the shining one.
Is Brett's poem reflective of official public policy?
Kirby,
Policy? no. Reality? yes.
And I actually voted for this one:
The City on a Hill
In the dreaded streets, the gays
come in, flashing their pubic sins,
dancing drunk and cleaning up
the shittier parts of town, and then
the artists move in, with their new gay friends
and the coffee shops follow, and their
attendant art galleries, a few bars, and men
in overalls knocking down, building things,
Gangsters move on, or are converted into
badpoetry readers at night when the Christmas lights
shine on young tooserious faces, and when
the parents come visit their kids, they say 'hey,
This ain't as bad as it used to be, I remember when...
This neighborhood's okay, I'll tell a friend.'
And the nuclear fams take over, and
the big-box stores follow,
and the gays and hipsters move on to clean up
Another ghetto, where they youngly, hiply perpetuate
the American Dream,
while the old men shout 'get off my lawn' at
shadows that are no longer there, and they whine
of rust on the Statue of Liberty, when in truth
She's cleaner now than ever she's been, and
Shining.
Although I don't mind it if you counted my vote towards the other. They make pretty much the same point, although I find the rhetoric of "The City on a Hill" to be a bit sharper than "The Same as You."
We all forgot about the Washington Monument at the Capitol, and the White House, and the most beautiful building of them all, the Pentagon.
In practice, it is sadly of course the other way around.
Give us your intelligent,
Your enterprising,
Those who can learn a new language,
And function.
Give us your best and brightest,
Fleeing your communist hellholes,
From Vietnam to Cuba,
Give us those who will tolerate religious freedom.
Give us your young and beautiful,
Your sharp,
Your friendly,
(Your Protestants especially!),
From South Korea,
From Taiwan, and Vietnam,
Give us your Catholics,
Your Lutherans from Namibia,
Those Christians from the Sudan,
Who stand tall, and teach us
To care for our posture.
Give us those Europeans
Who are tired of welfare states,
And the huge taxes,
Of your redistributing creeps.
Give us your better Hispanics,
Cubans, and Venezuelans,
and those fleeing Chavez,
With the large families,
And the loot they've taken
From the very poor,
So they can help vote down
Our secularist materialists.
Give us those with a work ethic,
An education,
Even in your blighted countries
Most of you have at least one college.
Let us skim off your best and brightest,
And leave your countries darker than ever before,
While those you send to us,
Help us hold aloft the torch
To highlight your darkness & shame.
i'm calling all catholics to leave america
it is no longer hospitable to live here...even though we found the damn place
because the crazy dove columbus
lost his way
come forth true path lovers
move beyond the snide welcome
on liberty's face
you have dallied long enough
on these bloody shores
to stay longer will submerge your souls
in the hell holes of
morbid idealisms
suspend all hope
all good will
turn away in horror and shame
let us get on millions of boats in california
and sail west to the sun
dusting off our feet
right at the shore
this is a playground
and it isn't fun
to play anymore
the images are brutal
and we're mired in language dire
gut dirty gutter songs
of hardly intelligible meaning
nought but commercial ditties
repeating in the ear
we're surely at the edge of hellfire
the images alone are enough to cause nausea
the unrequited sort
let us sail to something like a buddhists dream
of serene emptiness
let us kneel at the shore of the island of
buddha mind jesus mind
and then perhaps sail back and enslave the protestants
in the newest venture for world domination
(of which i am the architect and developer and engineer..freud and marx were kindergarteners compared to my stupendous dream)
let us depart o my catholics
depart for another land
this one is well nigh trashed
and the protestants won't fess up
it's all their fault
they gave birth to nihilism
they gave birth to atheism
(although the psalms mention it it's a well known fact that atheism is a nervous disorder which arises out of misunderstandings of the true word the true icon...a misunderstanding which began with luther and melanchthon and calvin and we've never recovered...OK maybe there were a few minor precedents in the gnostic neoplatonist madmen))
to proctologists it's commonly referred to as erasmus ass
progress and a cynical belief in man's inherent abilities have rendered this land a twisted tormented desperate region of unimagineable flimflaw
away now
where the fishing is better
where beauty stands a chance
this museum is a torture chamber
this web of madness
but a panic in a dream
the poor don't need health care here they need TVs and bigger cars
away to the truly poor
catholics drifting like imaginative lemmings
in the sea
praying for new ways to trim the sail
and fair winds
come along now
the battle is done
america the fresh water stream
has become a polluted swamp
i desteteth it
and i call us to seek a new and lovely kingdom away from the babble and the regurgitative riffraff of heresy
lent was hell
but now i see the truth
wake up catholics
we're in the uncivil war
cling now the day is near
cling to the one strand of hope
the ship that is
the crucifixion
let us board and trust the captain there
his dying breath
the power in our sails
blessed holy days all
jesus wants us
to check out the great new show
on friday
mangled and gasping man
hangin by a few nails
through the center of his hands
from a tree
great graphics
checkitout
jh
brett the poet
i would have never iamgined
seems just like yesterday
he stole france from under my nose
now he's like baudelaire
i'm duly stunned by both poems
but moreso by bretts' prose
NOTE TO JH:
Columbus found Haiti.
welcome back, again, to this madhouse.
are you sure he didn't make it to columbus missouri
or ohio
amerigo vezpucci
another errant pilgrim
wops everywhere
vazquez de ayllon
or
brendan the monk
or
an errant jesuit
or eric the red
or two drunk scots
or the runestone cowgirl
or
phylliss diller
Phyllis Diller is 92 the paper said and is painting a lot of pictures. Does anybody buy them? What are they about?
The earth is entering a new period.
The great explosion of human population is coming to a close. Up against the natural limits of resource and space, the earth's population will now either moderate, or enter a period of social upheaval.
Along with this, is a coming to a close of the mass migration which characterized easy transportability and movement, facilitated by fossil fuel machinery.
The regional, territorial, geographic conglomerations of humanity made sense. The mass movement of peoples based on economic necessity and greed doesn't. It must stop.
We're no longer a nation which "wants" more people. We have to give that up. It's already dead, but people--immigrants rights folks--are trying to resuscitate it, but it's over. We don't want any more starving, struggling poor. We've got enough already, and there's no more promise of wealth and prosperity.
We are a planet of nations. And that makes perfect sense. Countries need to consolidate and control their fates. Our interdependency needs to respect limits. Globalism is gangsterism on a huge scale--it must stop!
Kirby, your poem is cynical.
Why should America benefit at the expense of other countries?
Why can't nations work to benefit their own people?
That's the trouble with America today. Our government only represents the top 2% of the population, the very rich. And the corporations.
In other nations, the favoritism works the same way, with slightly different mechanisms. The rich first, and everyone else after that. That's America, and that's Mexico.
But America didn't become great and powerful by creating a huge underclass. It became great through a powerful, entitled middle-class. That middle class has been systematically dismantled in America, and brokered out to China, India, etc.
How is this a good thing?
It isn't!
Post a Comment