The Cats Herded Me Today

The cats herded me today,
no easy task either.
I'm not resistant
but am a good bit aimless,
and by a bit I mean reluctant
to pick a direction
and head into it.

All things told,
I'm on indefinite hold
on a phantom call with my past
trying to connect to my future
if it's not been sold
and split the difference
if I may be that bold.

I could leave a message
but don't know what to say.
I could hold all day.
So, cats, show me the way.
Is there a place we can stay?
I will get out of the way
and follow today.

Indian Cove

Austin, Texas

August 20, 2014

Between Something
and Nothing
Is Everything

Do you ever,
when in the middle

of doing something
or doing nothing,
engrossed or apathetic,
distracted or daydreaming,
gently and resoundingly
suddenly wake up
come to
emerge
shed just enough
precious old skin
to realize what skin
you might have been living in
and tremble
almost imperceptibly
maybe gasp a bit
at glimpse or intimation
in anticipation
for the promise
of the new
and different
else?

Who I am.  What this is.
Where I am.  Why not
is answer not question.
The purge and urge
to diverge and emerge.
Here.  Now.  Wow.

Meow, says Tsavo
under his breath tonight
as he sits the Sphinx
and I crosslegged
on old asphalt that
nature is turning
back to nature
taking its time
under beaming moon
its shadow fingers
of intertwining oak
probing around us,
through us,
tethered branches
overhead swaying
slowly forward and back,
silhouettes reenacting
the rathers and
whethers of lives,
waving to and fro

a shadow show

of dark and glow

back and forth

between particulars

exploring the limits
of true north
of stay and go,
fast or slow

this is your show,

you know.

You feel movement

in your soul

a filled hole

not a role

real for now

you take your bow
you are gifted

and lifted

nearer,
clearer
and a little sifted.

We live thanks to physical
and sublimer forces

beyond our comprehension.

And time is beyond even that.
Though the mind trumps time.

Yet time wins in the end
for now.

What we know
is what we remember.
What we remember
is what we've let go of
to get where we are
in the center.

Larry Piltz
Indian Cove
Austin, Texas

Where Scapegoats Grow on Trees

Follow the flower wherever it goes
be it a zinnia, aster, or rose

I can't do this
I'm not a flower

I just can't go there

I can't stand in one place

I move

I sneeze

I stand without wavering

in a breeze

I accidentally rhyme

can a flower do this

all a flower can do

is be perfect as it is

I can't do it because I'm not a flower
make major mistakes by the hour
but flowers don't live long
I am worth a thousand flowers
if you measure life in human years
which I do

also I move
my mind moves
my feet moves
my tongue moves
every part of me moves
all a flower moves is mountains
I have to go over mountains
or around them
the long way
where is the justice in that

where are the scapegoats
flowers make terrible scapegoats
they're beautiful
they hurt no one
not even the rose
that's the thorns
there's nothing wrong with flowers
they are blameless
but they can't move
which is why they're perfect scapegoats
pollen may get away
but the flowers can't
I can't be a flower
I move
or can I
since it's not up to me

Larry Piltz
Flower Cove
Austin, Texas

[Auditorium at Mississippi's Hinds County Junior College in 1968 on a different occasion.]

This Is For Bobby

Just after sunrise the morning Robert F. Kennedy was killed overnight in Los Angeles, I was standing in line outdoors with a few hundred other 16- to 17-year-old boys at Magnolia Boys State.  I was one of many from across the state selected as a future leader of Mississippi that year attending the annual leadership camp sponsored by the American Legion.

The camp  was held on the campus of Hinds County Junior College near Jackson, an overgrown plantation of a town of the Old Confederacy that was still to that day, and remains, the center of gravity of a violent hate and seething resentment, perhaps to forever proudly carry the contagious germ of evil from which issue the original sins of  slavery, war, and genocide.

We were hearing the usual instructions for the day, the last day of Boys State, when one of the adults in charge announced that RFK had been assassinated only hours earlier.  There were at most one and a half seconds of silence, the calm before the storm, before a spontaneous combustion of gathered hate ignited a cacophony of screamings for joy and delirious cheering, raucous, loud, and utterly unrestrained, punctuated by whooping rebel yells, that lasted a minute or two, though seemed much longer.

Not a single adult in attendance tried to quell the sad mad disturbance by the handpicked future leaders of the state, nor said anything about it once it had subsided nor anytime afterward.  For me, it felt like being a not-yet identified potential next victim among a mob of savage slavering jackals rolling with snarling abandon in the bloody corpse of its kill, a scrum of dumb and scum.

It was mortifying, dismaying, and distressing, a vivid moment I will always remember clearly.  I so wanted to say or do something but was taken aback by shock and alarm.

Right after the morning instructions were over, I sought out one of the college-age camp counselors, not one I knew but someone I hoped might could be sympathetic.  I asked him for help, and this is what he managed to accomplish at my urging, which seemed would have been next to impossible on such short order.

1) He procured a spot for me in that night's Magnolia Boys State closing ceremonies to take place in the campus auditorium, a few moments onstage to myself.  2) He located and bought the sheet music for a specific song.  3) He found a fellow counselor to play the song on piano.  4) He located a piano, likely in the auditorium complex, and had it brought onstage.

Then without an introduction and with the accompanist seated at the piano in that darkened auditorium, I walked to the center front of the stage to the microphone stand, still burning if not seething against the tawdry spectacle of early morning, and without any comment myself sang "The Impossible Dream" to a captive audience of by far mostly misbegotten racist hateful youth.

It wasn't enough.  I didn't say, "This is for Bobby".  I didn't 'say' anything about what had happened.  I just did what I could and was too afraid, angry, or both to do more.  It's probably the most heroic thing I'll ever do, which if anything may point out that I could have done a lot more or better with my life, but I'm glad somebody did something.

And, yes, it was for Bobby.

And it was for Medgar Evers, killed five years earlier at his home, also in Jackson.

And it was for the three civil rights workers, James Andrew Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, killed four years earlier 80 miles northeast of Jackson outside Philadelphia.

And it was for the four Birmingham girls killed five years earlier in the Sunday bombing of their 16th Street Baptist Church, for God's sake, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, because they happened to live their innocent young lives in Birmingham, a city that was not a city, because a city is supposed to be civilized, and instead was a colonial outpost of hate and vile murder, slavery and Jim Crow's self-entitled legacy; and 238 miles from Jackson.

And it was for Martin Luther King, Jr. killed only two months earlier just across the Tennessee state line in Memphis, a distance of 210 miles from Jackson.

And it was for Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a college junior, and James Earl Green, 17, a high school senior, who were gunned down by Jackson police on the Jackson State College campus two years later, in 1970, for demonstrating against war with hundreds of others, all unarmed.

And it was for Bud Strong of Biloxi, a sweet and harmless mentally retarded African-American man, and another victim of a Jim Crow death squad, who was kidnapped and murdered in 1960, and whose body was left in front of an historical Biloxi tourist site named "Beauvoir", which was Confederacy President Jefferson Davis' estate across from the beach, a beautiful site covered with huge oaks and over which a huge Confederate battle flag is flown.

This hate crime occurred in the direct aftermath of a terrifying nighttime white race riot of shootings, firebombing, and other violent attacks against "Back-of-Town", Biloxi's black community, in retaliation for a Wade-In demonstration earlier that day to desegregate the beach.  Biloxi is 167 miles from Jackson.

And it was for Malcolm Jackson, another young African-American man from Biloxi, who was beaten to death in 1960 in the Wade-In riot's aftermath also, by Pascagoula, Mississippi police.  Pascagoula is 20 miles from Biloxi and 165 miles from Jackson.

And it was for Dr. Gilbert R. Mason, a Biloxi physician who as an indefatigably courageous physician, healer, leader, local NAACP president, former Boy Scout and Boy Scout troop leader, and upright activist who did so much for so long to help right the ungodly wrongs in my hometown, state, and country.  Dr. Mason, against all odds and attempts, was able to live a long full life, and I wish to God I'd known him. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=97568717

The Wargazaw Ghetto's
tall furnace chimney buildings,

become exploding volcanos
of steel, concrete and guts,
streaming smoke, flesh, and ash
upward to Purgatory Heaven,
a waystation where the victimized

Jews of the 1930s & 1940s

wear living flesh armbands,

sit in blazing rows of flaming chairs,

and watch repeatedly and perpetually

a sequel to their own victimization

brazenly acted out as their legacy against
Palestinian Gazans and West Bankers
as their earthly legacy agents
pull up lightweight stools and chairs
to watch the damnable proceedings.

Within their waystation they wait
with nets to catch the seared shreds,

and welcome with open tattooed arms
the arriving converted innocents
the ghosts of newly seared humanity

flung upward with the ash and smoke
as the close and dear relations they are.

"Welcome cousin.  Welcome sister.

Welcome brother.  Welcome father.

Welcome mother.  Welcome aunt.

Welcome uncle.  Welcome nephew.
Welcome niece.  Welcome son.

Welcome daughter.

Welcome to the Tribe.

Larry Piltz
Indian Cove
Austin, Texas

Once for a Thousand Years

Once a long time ago things got so very slow

Went down to Guantanamo and built me an Alamo

Built me an Alamo down in Guantanamo
To stand for the status quo to Tierra del Fuego

I see a land called Chile, a man named Pinochet

Who was dancing that way thanks to our CIA

Saw a ghost named Allende behaving so friendly

He was killing me gently ever so absently

Took one look at Brazil, the USA off the pill

Indians still to kill, still adding the bill

Saw Rio de Janeiro from the ground in a turbo

All the tinshack condos on Free Enterprise Row

Sailed to old Venezuela on the back of a white whale

Left a petroleum trail delivering the U.S. mail

Then dancing a cumbia went to Colombia

Quoting Rumi and creating Vietnamia

Cruised into Guyana on the back of a piranha

An unshaven bwana to gather the manna

Saw the old Amazon fight the personal liaison

From the side with the jam on for the battle with Mammon

Went to El Salvador found out what’s the dollar for

Fill the rich and kill the poor in a capitalist liquidating holy war

Inside our Honduras where our best people assure us

It’s safe for the tourists they'll scarcely endure us

Just got back from new Grenada acted like the Marquis de Sade
Use islands as cannon fodder, killed someone's sons and daughters

Ran into St. Stanislaus on his way back from Panama

Reading George Bernard Shaw on his way to the Mardi Gras

Learned all about Cuba while watching the tube

A brainwashed boob sitting there in my cube

Tried to starve them out and poison their trout

That’s what we’re about since the rise of our Old South

Given a stick or a carrot and forced then to bear it

Which one has more merit and which one would just tear it

Then consider it's your mother with no choice and no druther

And the same for your brother would you choose the other

Out in the side yard strolled the National Guard

Where the scenery is marred because justice is barred

Out in the side yard do not let down your guard

Some Alabama wild card bayonet you real hard

Back in the front yard all the media bards

Show you all the marked cards fill your head up with lard

Back in the front yard there are feathers and tar

Put your bod behind bar put your mind in a jar

Saw the gringos with guns fill up Greyhounds with nuns

Leave the land of the huns to sell hamburger buns

Met a man named Sam lost a gonad in Nam

Lost his nerve in Iran has a head like a frying pan

Met a great nation of sheep still fast asleep

Listening to some new creep up on top of the heap

Met a man named boy thought he was Tolstoy

Often mad and annoyed with some other paranoid

Met a history of lies of indivisible size

With footnotes and asides in whispers and cries

Met a humankind nearly out of its mind

Hitting you from behind taking what it can find

Met some fading dreams in some mixed-up schemes

trying to scream while crossing a stream

Met an angry pacifist married to a happy fascist

Who together found bliss reading Reader’s Digest

Overheard an old gringo who lived as a dingo

Playing a game called Butcher Bloc Bingo

Gringo gringo gringo all in the name of jingo

You butcher people anywhere you can learn the lingo

Uncle Sam is damned, damned, for its Butcher Bloc Bingo

B is for the butchery.

I is for the Ingles.

N is for the Nihilism.

G is for the Gold.

O is for the Oil we drain for instance from old Mexico

Butcher Bloc Bingo

Soon you see where the recruits go

Where they will get shot get jungle rot

Where freedom is not there’s cheap coke and great pot

And United Fruit’s corporate criminal roots

And muy mucho toot for the generals' mucho loot

It’s colonial booty our imperial duty

It’s ready fire aim in a genocidal shame

It’s a freeze frame of guilt and sleazy blame

With specific events and specific names

Like El Mozote et al of infamous fame

It’s Butcher Bloc Bingo

It’s still cavalry versus Indians

And Calvary for peasants and nuns

A gift from the glorious pale nation

In its latest manifest dustbin mutation

It’s no wonder the peasants run

Here come the haughty free press puns

Bananas and nuns cocoa and the runs

There must be some other way to have fun

Than Butcher Bloc Bingo

Why the guaranteed calamity

And planned chaotic infamy

With zealous Christian infantry

So jealous of infinity

All counting each extremity

And with a banjo on each knee

To string along the not-so-free

Plain acting like a Yanqui

Yanqui, Yanqui, Yanqui

More stubborn than a donkey

You get the drools such able fools

And continue till you are the ghouls

Strangling your own freedom rules

And tearing down with all your tools

Gone to lengths that are so honky

Why are you like this Yanqui

Too fond of hanky panky?

Which are you Drac or Frankie

Have you lost the art or lost your heart

You’re leaving out the peaceful part

Why are you like this Yanqui

Are you asking for a spanky

What makes you so blamed cranky

And not to shout but to leave no doubt

Our path to war is a Southern states route

If you want to know what our wars are about

Just hear the fears from a good ol' boy's mouth

It's the enemy this and the hatreds they tout

If they don't get wars soon just watch them all pout

Peacetime for them is a long hard drought

And they're not alone just pick up the phone

Dial a number at random turn over that stone

Most people believe what they most want to hear

Especially the things that they most want to fear

They'll listen all day to a rational voice

And later that night make irrational choice

And that's how our own Confederate South

Became Sherman's Marching Yankees

And that's how our own Confederate South

Became Sherman's Marching Yankees

Upturned Rock, Meet the Hard Place

There's always something
violently dysfunctional
trying to break upward
onto the surface
of America's politics
but never moreso than now
when the enraged caged id
of the devolving decompensating
dissolute American right wing
is breaking free of the constraints
a healthily evolving society places around
the envy and hatred of its paranoid strain
that fears it will permanently lose
its presumed privilege to feel and act
without hindrance or conscience
and at the expense of everyone else
if it doesn't unleash its mercilessness.