Cherokee Starlight - It's All We Have

It's All We Have
Poem by Stavros (aka: Poet 168)

Reading T.S. Elliot
After two books of
Bukowski is like getting hit
In the dick by a midget flutist

Short and Absurd with
Whimsical moments that pierce
The ears like a Bee sting

The rhyming is pretentious
The meter is mundane
The themes are epic, but...
They all feel the same

There is one hundred or more
Years disconnect happening in
These air-conditioned rooms, fueled
By MTV, reality celebrities, drug
Mules, pop music, regulated vaccines,
Orange presidents, women's suffrage to
Women's rights, school shootings,
A prolonged sugar rush, the double
Bush tower drop, infinite war, and
Black boys in hoodies being
Gunned down by police.

Dr. King's essence was surfing
The cosmos as all those innocent
Cries from African-skinned mouths,
Gagged & bound, suffered the
Deep South's Southern Hospitality
Haning's goin' on down there,
When T.S. Elliot wrote his white
Words in black ink on yellowish
Paper.

Bukowski was just a cum stain
Away from a life of hard drinking
And coherent ramblings making all
The hard of war easy to swallow
With a gutter's view of mankind
That was way too palatable.

No one could've foreseen
The Beatles or Elvis from T.S.'s pen
They didn't feel the pimp hand of industry
Slap Little Richard & Chuck Berry;
Didn't feel the English rape
Of American Blues music from the
Stones, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Pete
Townsend, and Eric Clapton. God!
Punk was inconceivable.

But T.S. Elliot should've known.
He dreamed of touching Space before Neil Armstrong
Landed on the moon. Wasn't he that said
All his poems either need be whispered or shouted?
No in between,
No Quarter.
Balls out, yelling at the world!
Just how Lieutenant Lawrence twisted his
Mouth in unkempt ecstasy riding
His camel in another Hejaz raid.
That's Punk. That's a Bukowski poem.
That's military spending from a paranoid mind

Cambodian bodies bleeding out
In rice paddies, Syrian children sleeping
Between their parent's graves.
Ho Chi Min, motherfucker!
Ho Chi Min, the #4 with a side of
Egg Rolls & Mushu Pork - except on Monday
In Philadelphia, standing on the street corner
Of that city block, you know... that one,
Whole city block where Police blew
A hole in the sky to MOVE; rid the United States of the shadow
Of the Black Panther's menacing paw print.
Meow.

Meow, motherfucker!
Meow.

But still...
With all these heavy words and
Big ideas and
Heartfelt truths stuffed between
The bindings of books in reprint
It didn't stop the soldiers from putting
Two bullets into the ass of Fredrico
Garcia Lorca, or stop Idi Amin, Ethnic
Cleansing, The Cold War, or living
Out fantasies on Epstein's pedophile
Island; there was a finger on the trigger
That sent Little Boy to Hiroshima.

No one listens to wisdom these days
With the intent to prevent a future
That's shaped by a continuing present
Of willful ignorance.

T.S. saw that too.
And he did what Bukowski did.
What all poets do in the face of
Unflinching arrogance... They
Wrote about it.

It may not seem like much, but...
It's all we have.

Written by:

Publisher:
Lyrics © TUNECORE INC

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