Punishment

RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: LIFE SONGS

 

Punishment

 

We punish the poor for being poor

We punish the weak for weakness

We punish the world with endless war

With misery and bleakness

 

Let us hope we can make amends

Let us bow our heads and pray

When pressed sweet justice bends

Let us hope it bends our way

 

There are times we turn our backs

For no other path will do

The train has sadly left the tracks

There is nothing left to lose

 

But often we can light a fire

And lead the way through kindness

The way is long, we cannot tire

We cannot yield to blindness

 

Bombing Your Own

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: UKRAINE

Bombing Your Own

 

Only in a world so twisted

Would such a thing be possible

Russians turn on Russians now

And this is what we know

Ukraine did not bomb the Kremlin

The Kremlin bombed its own

 

Conscripts and lowly mercenaries

They fed them to the war machine

They send their young to die there

For reasons not yet known

Ukraine would never bomb Moscow

Moscow would bomb its own

 

They’ve fed their people lies so long

The stench is in the air

The truth will finally rise up

Their cover will be blown

Ukraine did not bomb Moscow

The Kremlin bombed its own

 

They’ve lost the war of words now

The seeds of truth are sown

They’ve sacrificed too many lives

For the vanity of one

Ukraine did not bomb the Kremlin

The Russians bombed their own

 

Hardship (for JFK)

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: POEMICS

Hardship

 

The road ahead is hard and treacherous

Powerful forces will oppose us

Many will fall by the roadside

Many will break our hearts

But as a great man* once said

We choose this path not because it is easy

We choose it because it is hard

Because it challenges the human spirit

Because it moves us toward the stars

It defines who and what we are

 

There will always be an easy way

The path of least resistance

Let the Russians take Ukraine

Let the rich have all while we pay

Let the garden of earth go untended

Let the waters fill with industrial waste

Let the wilderness be stripped clean

Let climate change and oceans rise

Let the rights of women and workers fall

Let the pain of others not move us

Let us wait and watch and let be

 

But that is not who or what we are

Not who we were meant to be

We rise to the challenge because we must

We meet our adversaries at the gates

We defend others as if they were ourselves

We protect our homes from plunder

We act with honor and with dignity

When pummeled and pushed we fight

We know the way forward is hard

But it is also good and right

That is why we choose it

 

* JFK

Brutality in Paris

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: WORLD DEMOCRACY

Brutality in Paris

 

As they labor on Notre Dame

As roses burst into bloom

As Paris blossoms in full spring

As Parisians and gardens sing

The Champs-Elysees explodes in protest

And the gendarme mows them down

With water cannons and riot sticks

The city of dreams and dreamers

The city of art and philosophy

The city of people’s rights and equality

Yields to the spirit of brutality

What price law and order?

What price economic austerity?

The city of lights should not hide in shadow

The city of enlightenment

Should not fear the cost of equity

The cradle of western civilization

Must always stand strong for

Liberty, fraternity, equality

 

When Paris yields to brutal tactics

The grand republic is tarnished

When Paris suppresses the people’s voice

The heart of democracy is stained

When Paris unleashes her vicious sting

Her beauty is diminished

Paris has lost her way before

But she has always found her balance

She has always restored her soul

May she do so now without delay

The world should move toward France

Not the other way around

 

Mississippi Sprawl

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: RIVER SERIES

Mississippi Sprawl (River Series)

 

They tried to tame the mighty river

To curb its mighty sprawl

But levees break and crumble

And mighty dams will fall

The mighty Mississippi is

The greatest of them all

 

The age of epic tragedy

Comes knocking at the door

Fire rain and thunder

A chain of monster storms

Too late to turn the tide

We watch the planet warm

We listen to her call

The mighty Mississippi is

The greatest of them all

 

The latest floods upon us

The Mississippi sprawl

We scramble to take cover

To make the flooding stall

But levees break and crumble

And mighty dams will fall

The mighty Mississippi is

The greatest of them all

 

Mar-a-Lago Burning

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: AMERICAN JUSTICE

Mar-a-Lago Burning

 

The rope is lowered ‘round the neck

The wheels of justice turning

The dealer playing out the deck

That’s Mar-a-Lago burning

 

He thought that he would never pay

For instigating revolution

He did the deed, he got away

Too late for a solution

He didn’t think, he didn’t know

The time has come to let it go

Nobody cares about the past

That ship has left the port

The next election’s coming fast

We don’t have time for court

 

But justice strikes like thunder

The tide is finally turning

At last the guilty will go under

That’s Mar-a-Lago burning

 

Pouring Rain

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: CLIMATE CHANGE

Pouring Rain

Rain came down like a runaway train

Listen to the pouring rain

Listen to the pouring rain *

 

Listen to the rhythm of the pouring rain

A jackhammer of the gods

To the driving drumbeat of jazz

As you listen don’t you think it’s odd

That the earth needs so much cleansing?

Like a rusted-out bus that you keep in

the garage, the one that threw a rod

Back in nineteen sixty-nine

Back in the days of glory and youth

Back in the days of cheap red wine

When every day was a new adventure

When peace was the sign of the times

 

Rain came down like a runaway train

Listen to the pouring rain

Listen to the pouring rain

 

I’ve never heard a rain so hard

Seems like the sky is falling

Pounding on the roofs of homes

To remind us of a calling

Back to the glory days of youth

When the world was in our hands

Reminding us of a simple truth:

Take care of this sweet land

 

Listen to the pouring rain

Listen to the pouring rain

 

* Number Nine: The Adventures of Jake

Jones & Ruby Daulton

 

Tucker's Reign

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: AMERICAN MEDIA

Tucker’s Reign

 

Three million viewers daily

And not a particle of integrity

He pedaled propaganda to the masses

Not the facts, not reasoned opinion

Not a particular point of view

But raw uninhibited propaganda

An alternative universe

A purely imagined reality

 

He was the King of Conspiracy

An instigator of insurrection

A Russian pawn

An apostle of the Don

No one could take him down

Until they did

 

Not even the first amendment

Could protect the blatant lies

The unbridled hatred

The fake outrage

The unashamed racism

Of Tucker Carlson

 

He made Fox News a lot of money

But in the end he cost more

Than he made

 

What price integrity?

 

Crack in East LA

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: AMERICAN HISTORY

Crack in East LA

 

Remember back in the nineties

When the CIA delivered crack cocaine

To the gangs in East LA

Transforming the crips and the bloods

Into well-armed citizens militias

The CIA used the money to finance

The Contras of Nicaragua

A force against democracy

The CIA doesn’t push drugs anymore

But the gangs don’t need drug money

To buy weapons of mass destruction

It’s easy to buy guns

Any kind of guns

From sawed-off shots to M-16s

If you’ve got the money

They’ve got the guns

The forces of law’n’order don’t need

To start wars in the hood

To kill off the poor people

The people of color

The people who don’t vote

The people who don’t matter

Give ‘em the guns and they’ll

Do it themselves

Shoot ‘em up bang bang

Another black or brown dead

Why not give ‘m an education

Instead?

 

Remembering Ronald Reagan

RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

 

Remembering Ronnie

 

I remember Ronald Reagan

The man Republicans used to love

Now that we’ve experienced Dubya

and the Don we know he’s not

as bad as we once thought

 

He was bad but not that bad

He never started a war on one nation (Iraq)

for the crimes of another (Afghanistan)

He never drove the economy over a cliff

He never called for open insurrection

He only sold arms to an enemy (Iran)

He only punished poor people

He only turned his back on gays (AIDS)

 

Some of it was not his fault

He was largely absent in his second term

His dementia was clear enough

His Alzheimer’s was diagnosed later

 

Reagan was elected to his second term

at the age of seventy-three

Americans may soon face a choice of

two elderly men to lead the country

One would be 77 at his inauguration

The other would be eighty-one

 

Give all that America and the world faces

Global climate change

Russian military aggression

A Chinese-Russian alliance

Challenges to democracy

A world in constant crisis

Do we really want to trust the next

four years and the future of the planet

to a man who may not remember

who Ronald Reagan was?

 

Untold Casualties of War

RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: WAR

 

Untold Casualties of War

Two tours in Iraq

Two tours too many

The carnage he witnessed

The carnage he inflicted

Tore a hole in his heart

Large enough for his soul to slip through

Large enough to bury the man he was

 

His friends and family said he was okay

They said they thought he was okay

But he was not okay

He was never okay

They should have known

They did know

They didn’t want to know

The young man they gave to war

Came back filled with flames

Teeming with rage and ready to implode

 

One day for some reason nobody knows

The building rage inside exploded

His victims didn’t know

They never saw it coming

A sudden burst of gunfire

A flash of blood and darkness

A rumbling chaos and silence

 

He was his last victim

An untold casualty of war

India

 RANDOM JACK POETRY HOUR: GLOBAL POLITICS

India

 

They count their numbers in billions

They count their poor by the block

There are far too many to ride

The great majority must walk

 

The world’s most populous republic

The caste system keeps them in place

To keep up with their growing needs

They are constantly in a race

 

They have marketed cheap labor

They’ve developed a technology force

While others have fallen behind

India has stayed the course

 

Trapped between west and east

Kashmir and Pakistan to the west

To their north the Chinese beast

They must always pass the next test

 

They are giants in economy

Arts and culture are on the rise

And when it comes to population

India wins the prize