Best Dummies Poems

Once, I think, you said to me
That poets are like the sand in the sea
But each grain plays a part in that ocean
To set each wave in motion.
Taste this
Little oasis
So you feel
The appeal.
Listen, my friend, to know what we are
How writing, in rhythm, does take...

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The Chinese tend to take the long-term view.
They do things differently in Old Cathay.
A thousand decades, almost to the day,
have come and gone.  There’s really nothing new.
While foreigners fixate on Fu Manchu,
The Eastern mind sees things another way.
While we pervert, prevaricate, parlay,
the “chink” prefers...

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The thorns-in-sides are various
which mar incumbents’ slumber.
Could Belgium bear Lumumba?
Would Britain brook Makarios?

There’s Bolsheviks or Mensheviks,
Parnell or De Valera:
Marat had Robespierre, or
the Romans, Vercingetorix.

There’s Che Guevara, Spartakists, 
the Mau Mau, Mata Hari,
the Contras, Carbonari, 
Hamas, Harmonious Fists.

The song that stops the show?
“It Ain’t Necessarily So”....

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"Two kinds of people in this world, my friend," 
as that great thinker, Tuco, used to say: 
the road to Wigan Pier has reached its end? 
We're staying on the road to Mandalay? 

The first type jabber of equality 
but (humans being humans) there's a...

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Complicity is easy for the Right,
one single flag to which they all adhere –
“someone might steal my loot”.  This primal fear
prompts pistols under pillows, sleepless nights
and riot cops.  Who needs a Stagyrite?
But Lefties hold their differences dear.
Each Keeper of the Flame is more...

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Though Canton claims it’s communist, it’s not.
Beijing, like Belarus, breeds oligarchs.
There’s nobody alive who’s heard of Marx:
a rickshaw ride’s the only kind of trot.

Seek Mensheviks in Minsk, you’ll end with squat.
In Kursk are cadres countable as quarks,
and proles in Petrograd?  Like hunting snarks.
It’s Putin’s...

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There’s nothing lacking in the thing itself.
In some ways, it’s the very best of us.
It’s not like Marx was some egregious elf,
or Rosa Luxemburg some succubus.

The deal is, if you subjugate the masses,
they might not like it.  Corner them, and they
will fan out fiercely,...

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Imagine, if you will, working the land. 
You knead it, tend it, love it. You belong. 
Its wants, its moods, its needs, you understand, 
for you arose from it. You sing its song. 

The Father-god sends fluids from the sky 
to fertilize the Mother, here...

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There’s none more racist than your Working Man.
Conservative.  “Let’s keep it as it is:
just give me Tic-Tac-Toe and Criss-Cross Quiz.”
No greater sexist since the world began –
that foxes have their prices, he’ll accept,
and swallows whole the tabloid rag he reads
(the breasts of teenage girls...

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As Arkansas could never be Alaska,
so no-one wants Montana to be Maine.
Could North Dakota claim to be Nebraska?
Can Vachel Lindsay double for Hart Crane?

If Sing Sing isn’t Appalachian Spring,
and Justin Bieber can’t be Frankie Laine,
or William Burroughs isn’t Stephen King,
then Terminator Two’s not Citizen Kane.

If...

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B52s above the Aleutians?
It never was a Red Dread global mission.
Fidel was just Galician patrician,
and Ho and Mao were scholarly Confucians.

They wore those uniforms like horsehair vests,
to carve from abject nothingness an entity,
a national and regional identity,
ingredients which only coalesced

when nascent nations donned that soviet...

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The Corsican was never really Gallic.
The Austrian was not remotely Prussian.
Jugashvili (let's put this in italics)
could not be, in a month of Sundays, Russian.

The point of Communism is, it's global,
or else it's nothing. Swimming or it's dead,
like sharks, it fans out (kind of like Chernobyl).
Like...

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Mosaic tablets are not monoliths.
It all depends (despair, or last best hope?)
whatever end of Tocqueville’s telescope
you happen to be viewing.  One man’s myths

are gospels to another.  Freedom fighters,
or filthy terrorists?  A vexing ton
of evidence encumbers Lexington.
Our certain self-assertion might indict us.

A foreign...

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Marx and Spencer

Were I to tell you what I think of Spencer
(the middle-manager, without the “man”,
and vilest cockroach since the world began),
my poem would incense the meekest censor.

But when our hands in insurrection join,
we arm ourselves to take back what is ours,
red banners streaming from...

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There’s far more kinds of Lefty than just one.
There’s Marx and Morris, Blanc, Bakunin, Blum,
the Comintern, the Spartakists, the POUM,
St-Just, Zinoviev and Saint-Simon.

The working class may ask how this lot failed it:
so many brands, but nobody is buying.
So why’s the Trot from Trier death-defying?
Well, Marx...

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