Poem For El Salvador
(Sung)
I want all the children
to have enough to eat
I want to believe
in a world without end
I want everybody
to be safe and happy
I want everyone
to be loved
(Spoken)
Poem for El Salvador
Poem for Lebanon
Poem for Cambodia and Chile and Northern Ireland and Grenada
Poem for South Africa and Namibia and Angola and Poland and
Afghanistan and all of Southeast Asia
Poem for the millions and millions of words
written for the millions and millions of strong angry fighting men
Poem for the bleeding gums of 50,000 women refugees in Somalia
and for the broken ribs of Cambodian nurses raped by Vietnamese soldiers
Poem for the breasts of Argentinians hooked to electric shock torture machines
and for the ashes of Palestinian mothers exterminated by Israeli bombs
Poem for the hands and knees of the maids who scrub the floors of the Salvadorian ruling class palaces
and for the hair of Spanish midwives hacked off by the medical police
Poem for the cracked skulls of the battered wives of San Francisco and Dallas and Philadelphia and Chicago
Poem for the wombs of all mothers
birthing more and more men
who invent new diseases
and cut off the heads of children with bayonets
and worship and torture
for the greater glory
of the Cult of Personality
Poem for cancer in the hearts
of all strong angry men who hate life
Strong angry men keep coming up to me and saying
“Why don’t you write more poems about the armed struggle for
liberation in El Salvador and the Philippines and Namibia
and Angola”
So I wrote a poem
about the son of a Russian Communist Party official
who begged me to smuggle him in some “good American pornography”
and the wild stag parties of the Red Brigade
on the night before they go out and shoot off the kneecaps
of another Italian judge
and sitting with macho Marxists
at a disco in downtown San Salvador
looking all the pretty ladies up and down
and making love with the daughter of a white collar criminal from Exxon
while she was on an Irish vacation
and I was living with real wife-beating soldiers
of the Irish Republican Army
and hearing the same dumb joke about the slut who couldn’t get enough
as told by Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger
and Colonel Khadafy and the Dallas Cowboy football team
Poem for the starving women artists in Somalia
and the bleeding women geniuses in El Salvador
Poem to burn all criminally innocent entertainment
and the bad fatherly poetry of Mao Tse-Tung
and the naked pictures that remind us who we’re here to serve
and the pamphlets of right-wing assassins
plagiarizing the slogans of left-wing assassins
and the literature of all strong angry men who hate life
The problem isn’t overpopulation
It’s overpopulation by the wrong people
The problem isn’t overpopulation
It’s overpopulation by the wrong people
Poem for the wrong people
Poem for the strong and angry capitalist, marxist, Christian,
Islamic, Jewish, caucasian, black, arab, and asian
woman-haters
(Chanted)
2-4-6-8
Organize and smash the state
2-4-6-8
Organize and smash the state
Kick the ass of the ruling class
Kick the ass of the ruling class
Push ’em back
Push ’em back
Way back
Push ’em back
Push ’em back
Way back
Push ’em back
Push ’em back
Way back
(Shouted)
Use the food as a weapon
Use the medicine as a weapon
Use the soul as a weapon
Use emotions, use words, use laws, use love
Use it all up
Throw it all away
The thing we dreaded most
has already happened
We’re already living
after the end of the world
(Sung)
I want to go back
to the simple life with you
I want to believe
in a world without end
I want to be strong and tender
Be in love with my life like you
I want to go back to the source
I want all the children
to have enough to eat
I want all the children
to give up the fight
I want everyone to be happy
and warm and safe and strong
I want everybody to be loved
Prayers For Brilliant Blindnesses And Dangerous Teachers
oh dangerous god who never kills but only changes
What is the difference between right and wrong
oh god, father of the stagnant water and mother of the funny words I thought of while I was there
All the things I believe in are wrong, and I know it,
and yet I still have as much power as people who hate
oh god sabotaging climaxes with your obscene abundance
oh god of pure disappointment
I want to say what can’t be said
I want to live without opinions
oh god of unnatural animals living in me like sex on other planets
Give me a song about sex and war that shocks people so bad
they pay me to stop suffering
oh god who scorns all mediocre longing
I am living without ulterior motives
I have shut up until I had something to say
So reward me now
Give me dreams I can spend like money
Give me an ego I can laugh at no matter how beautiful or stupid it is
oh normal god who can’t hide your fear from me
oh god of childhood eating up the mother and the father
I have no wife and kids
Tell me why
I play with dolls and toys
What am I waiting for
oh nagging god who begs me to tease and not to fuck, to create and not to conquer
you croaking reptilian two-faced teacher who inspires me only a little bit just to keep me hooked
You can’t stop me if I want to imitate you
You can’t abandon me if I free myself
from looking for a woman who would complete me
oh god of haunting facsimiles and hungry substitutes better than the original
Once again I have proved my self-control
Once again I’m becoming bigger than life and wilder than my fears
forcing you to change all your teachings
oh god of unlearned love and of heats and smells that go nowhere
What am I trying to prove
Who am I trying to impress
oh sneaky, anguished god who can’t escape me no matter how much I heal
I’m not the most dangerous person in the world
or the most intelligent
or the trickiest
or the most spontaneous
or the most anything
Help me therefore to give myself away for free
and to make things that last only by accident
oh god of brilliant blindnesses and enemies who reawaken life
I’m not myself
So then who am I
I want as much emotion as women
I want to be disciplined enough to go crazy
in the name of creation not destruction
oh god of opening the negative world to me as I fall asleep on my birthday
I can’t crave what I never hated
oh god revealing to me my exact infinitesimal purpose in history at the weakest moment of a day when pleasure extinguishes my worship of the adolescent in women
oh loose and yowling god of childbirth who saves all the best pleasure for women alone
oh god of no hope for men who try too hard
What hidden forces control me
What if there are women who secretly want me
What if I can give them nothing
oh god of drowned worms and electricity leaking out my feet into the rain as I cry about the temper tantrums and obsessions I can no longer have with any conviction or joy
oh backwards god, oh god of hoarding up feelings for years and then spitting them all out in one night
oh intimate and delicate and precise god
I’m afraid I might try to imitate myself
I’m afraid I might try to live off the love I saved
when I was too strong to love anyone
oh god you pushy cruel generosity that gives people gifts too big for them to handle
Prove to me that I don’t have to suffer in order to be creative
Stop me from saving people who don’t even want to be saved
oh too much god
Am I influencing you yet
Am I hurting your feelings
oh crippled god of fascination and repulsion and nothing in between
I’ll forgive you if you forgive me
I’ll fake an emotion until it becomes real
if you admit that’s how you create everything
oh god of the usual mystery, god of no explanation, god of no good reason
god of thousands of people who all have a different image of me
oh imprisoned, fecund, crumbling god whom I have known for less than one hour
oh god of muscles in the face twitching at unanswered emotions
I never claimed I was a human being
I never agreed to be raised by kind and gentle parents
I never said I gave up being a dirty dog-headed god of the underworld
flailing in the snow in North Carolina, dying brilliantly of LSD
And if you don’t stop strangling yourself now where cunt meets cock
I swear I’ll never do anything normal again
I’ll make myself into a bomb, I’ll live without routine
I’ll pretend I’m insane when I talk to considerate people in cafes in the middle of the day
oh outmuscled god, outlived god, god drained of all human will
oh end of god and beginning of a fierce alien tender ego in my
heart with a face like yours but no name yet
oh black solar heat of god at midnight
love bomb god exploding from a dream impossible to translate,
impossible to use on this earth
Help me think up bigger, better, more original sins
before you change forever into the perfect pungent flavor of cunt
and disappear from this world where there are no real men
oh best god in the world, happiest, funniest, hippest god
I know you want me to be my biggest, most confused, greediest soul
I know you want to give me the pleasure of thinking terrible things
and having more flagrant desires than you could ever imagine alone
So that I am still and always split in two
So I know I am a man and a woman fighting it out in one and the same body
just so I can stay attracted and excited by this life
of never being born and not knowing how to die