Best Marxism Poems
Arm to arm, sinews clutch
One another, makes friend and crutch;
One crimson call, which guidance brought
The feeble, stern: the working lot
To stand much greater, taller, strong
Filled with hope, in lines long,
That stretch from pain, from glum, from slum
To the halls of white where nations clump
In the deadest form of gathered hoards
Of finance and shares, secluded boards
Who array the work, who shackle in loans
Whose empty plots tempt the sleeping droves
In tent and rag, in cough and drag,
From hand to mouth, to work and back.
Yet in contempt that line is struck,
Still the routine is mute, no more this work
That builds the villa, never the mason’s,
Unthanked which blooms the fields all season,
The folks split off by plastic partition
Giving wealth immense, yet maimed cognition
Had kept whom bound to desk and ground
Their eyes have met and their fists now pound
Against steel ribbed doors, but why such fear
Thee lords of land in prim kept highest tiers?
Arisen so, on the claim of wealth,
At the cost of Earth, of hearth and health;
How much more flight, behind guarded holds,
Behind sentries and dictates so cold
Even in scorch of war, where poor kills poor;
So the wealth of nations in tons can pour
Onto odd few hands, to hold all us chained
To the will of profit, for profit’s sake.
But in queues, we’ve come, tools shucked
Your batons brooked, your shots shrugged
By the calloused bossom, by tried spine,
That props all of it up, runs it all in time.
And without us many, your wealth is rust,
Without our trust it’s all a fleeting gust
Of paper slips and accords of force
And we see dawn, from these dues divorced.
And the sun to snatch, the sickle drives,
And the barricades the hammer tries,
While the quill writes, not fearing death,
A push for renewal, for a gasp of breath.
I ask, at what cost?
Coiled beneath the leaves, nothing is seen of his reprieve.
The viper’s warning is curtailed.
Silently masked among the decay, a wooden shelter becomes his stay.
The viper’s ambush is prepared.
Wanting, searching, like field mice the children are learning.
The teacher prepares to pounce.
Writhing, frothing, innocence from adolescence is fleeting.
Status quo, they begin to denounce.
Like poison, consumption, coveting is quickening within the arterial circulation.
Rebellious youth herald Marxist slogans.
Crying, suffering, parents beg for an answering.
Who trespassed within the kindergartens?
Forty Years now lost.
There is reason why evil
has persisted, Man does not
wisely use his power, rejecting
God's council, a Better Plan – the
devil having no power, but for
the power given him by God's Man.
We are co-conspirators, feigned
ignorance no panacea nor bliss...
on what Christ Loves the Devil uses
a pulverizing fist –
Free Will has glorious Manifestation –
but such freedom does not
come without risk – let not
one's lesser ego, lead to internal
cancers, electing to office bloody stools
and piss....
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 to chew, review, construe.
“Since Revolution’s what you like to do,”
some western wag asked Mao in sixty-two,
what of the French?” (Vendée, Charlotte Corday,
the sans-culottes, et cetera.) “Your view?
A triumph, or disaster?” Like Sun-Tzu,
Tse Tung replied, “It’s far too soon to say.”
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”.
"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 throne,
and someone grabs it. "Hence, so shall it be,"
he says. And as So-Shall-ists are they known.
The other lot have hides as tough as shellfish.
They have a ton of chutzpah, but no shame.
To cap it all, they're really rather selfish,
and that's why Cap-It-All-ists is their name.
So, which are you? A nervous-nerd-Ralph-Nader?
Or do you kiss the coccyx of Darth Vader?
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 sincere
than Cash-Is-Trash-ists, Ogden Nash-ists, quite
apart from Crypto-Fascists, Widow’s Mite
Apologists, Red Guards, or those who steer
by Stalin’s light (Stakhanovites). It’s clear:
you’d never have a play without a wright,
and so each faction finds its Miller Lite:
Kropotkin, Castro, Kopp – who’s cool this year?
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 perestroika, not Pol Pot.
Why did the whole thing vanish in thin air?
Why’s Sputnik spat on? Why is red so square?
We needn’t be complacent in the West.
There’s lots to learn within the Warsaw Waltz
for, as a tool to scrutinise the faults
of Christian Capital Conquest, it’s the best!
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, as do poison gases,
and pimps and prelates will be swept away.
So simple, so methodical. So why
did communism curdle and collapse?
One short, scant century it took to die:
a flimsy, flawed philosophy, perhaps?
We messed up, through our immaturity,
the grandeur of that peerless theory.
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 below.
You help her raise her young. Who need ask why?
It's as it's always been. You simply know.
However. There's a steam-forge in the glen,
a brooding squatting thing, which reeks and groans.
The fat man in the stove-pipe hat gives tokens
to those who'll quit the land. Pity those men!
Those rootless, soulless wraiths, diminished, broken,
divorced from soil, machine-oil in their bones!
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 Fifty Shades is not The House of Usher,
and Ginsberg couldn’t write the Wayside Inn,
why should you think that China’s part of Russia,
or Kim Il Sung is also Ho Chi Minh?
Why should they be colluding, callous elves?
Why can’t they be as different as ourselves?
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 skin,
abhorrent to the blinkered Baywatch mind:
unowned, untethered, boundless, non-aligned –
but with Kalashnikovs airlifted in.
As Mary Jane moved in on moonshine stills,
the five-year-olds rehearsed their fallout drills.
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 are all he heeds).
Compassion for his Comrades? Jesus wept!
He’s happy with his Fangios and Faldos,
admires Samantha Foxes, Katy Prices.
His only Cristianos are Ronaldos,
and God alone knows if he’s heard of Isis.
Keep feeding him his Oprahs and Geraldos,
but pray you don’t encounter him in crisis.
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 peanut butter, it was made to spread.
This in-one-country nonsense once held sway
(Archangel, all the way to Kazakhstan),
but when he died, his system blew away,
as do all systems centred on one man.
Napoleon's snowball stopped with "Viet Cong".
The wonder is, it lasted quite so long.
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 army’s trampling our soil,
despoiling farms and cottages at will?
We’re justified (according, then, to Hoyle)
in using violence? It’s never quite as
simple as they say, those righteous writers.
Is Dien Bien Phu so far from Bunker Hill?