Boomtown - A Poem by Mick Parsons

Two More From ArtWërks

1.

The streets have been full for centuries.

Even if the buildings were to disappear

tomorrow, these streets would remain

filled end to end and side to side

with memories and with ghosts

and with the specters of memories.

In the dirt between the bricks

there is a memory

locked in stone and pebble

rubble and rabble

memory that filters down

and into the water

and from the water

into the dirt

and from the dirt,

it is rubbed into the soles of our shoes

and we remember again

all the things we didn't know

that we didn't know – comes to us

in dreams and in visions

and in visitations that,

if we're paying attention

will tell us the way

we are to go.

2.

So sit down here

and tell me a story

and make it a good 'un

like the one you told me

yesterday. Tell me

about one of the places

you frequented when you were

young, and fresh the fruit was

and how the women were sweet and ripe 

and how clear and how cool

the water was and what it

felt like to really sleep,

to sleep out in the open

under the stars and what it felt like

to feel safe and to feel free

to feel something different

before all the fences and wires

and wireless was all built up

back before there were gate keepers

and invisible gates

back when you were my age

and the world was something more

beautiful than it seems today.

It Goes Without Saying

You're in a meeting

you'd rather not be in

and I am at the bar –

drinking dollar beer,

thinking about the bars

in college when

Thirsty Thursday meant

dime drafts all night.

My friends and I, we'd

each walk in with 2 or 3 bucks,

fill a table with plastic cups of

cheap warm beer,

and watch the frat boys

strike out, stumble out

to the sidewalk to puke,

leaving behind tables

of untouched beer. After

we were sure they were

gone, we'd drink their beer,

and my friends,

who were better with girls

than me, would try

and pick up the girls.

(Drunk sorority girls

will sometimes dumpster fuck

so they can later claim

to be culturally well rounded.)

Trading shots with

two local musicians

and a well-endowed

bartender four years older

than my daughter,

I think about

the night they raised

dime drafts

to a quarter, and how,

we felt like we'd been

robbed and drank anyway.

Somewhere around the third hour

you stopped by the bar

to pick up the car

and everyone was surprised

when you left me there

without giving me a hard time

or seeming to judge me at all

or even the casual

“Don't get arrested”

comment that even

tolerant wives will tell

wayward husbands

who still insist

on keeping up

drink for drink

with the crusty old bastards

with the souls of fallen gods

even as the world outside

slips into another winter

from which

it may not return

and from which

we might not

have the will

to save it.

“What a world you must live in.”

Here's the thing: people are like cats. I suspect that's why people hate them so much. People that tend not to like cats say it's because they're dog people (I always imagine McGruff The Crime Dog and some Planet of the Apes scenario.) Some people think cats are just too sneaky. Some think cats are to feminine and flighty – including some newly minted feminists who haven't read or thought about what feminism actually is. But As critters go, human beings are incredibly predictable in at least one way: we tend to like things that mirror the attitudes and attributes we'd rather have, instead of those we actually have. And because there is no yin without a yang, no Starsky without a Hutch, no Cagney without a Lacy, it is also true that if we like the people and places and things that represent what we aspire to, then we hate the people and places and things that remind of who (and what) we really are.

Which is why most people don't like cats. They're too much like we are.

Now, don't get me wrong. We should always aspire to be more, to be better. Of course, we're short of heroic icons in these modern times. Two of my heroes, Utah Phillips and J.L. “Red” Rountree – are both dead and have been for some time. I was introduced to the stories and songs of Utah Phillips in my early 20's, and it was through him that I began to learn about the long memory he sang and talked about – the memory of workers, organizers, unions, anarchists, pacifists, agents of change... and those those who believed in and harnessed the positive power of chaos... such as Albert Parsons, Big Bill Heywood, Joe Hill, and Ammon Hennacy. I chose as my heroes those who embody those ideals I believe are important and that I hope to better exemplify and live by in my own life. Red Rountree was maybe the last of the philosophical bank robbers. He didn't hurt people, and believed in having fun. He also had a deep grudge against banks.

But it's difficult to get around that fact that most people are like cats. Cats are moody, territorial, and dislike having their routine interrupted. I have two cats, and if their daily ritual is maligned in anyway, they simply don't know what to do. And people are the same way. We like our rituals, our patterns, our hegemonic convergence that defines each and every day of our lives. We like it so much that even if we become unhappy, we live with it.

And if we're forced to face the idea that something has to change, we look for a way to change as little as possible, lest we upset our all so sacred routine.

Which is, of course, the problem people have with the Occupy Wall Street Movement. At it's core, it represents the idea that something has be done to change the inequities that most of us life under. This means not just adding new rules. It may mean throwing the old rules out and starting from scratch. Because the problem isn't just that the rules aren't fair. The problem is that in America, the Golden Rule – “He who has the Gold makes the Rules” is the only rule that matters. It is upon that rule that Capitalism is built, and it is for that very reason that Capitalism is a wholesale failure as a social, political, and economic model. We have lived under it so long that people have forgotten that Democracy – the idea that all people are equal and deserve and equal voice – has been consumed by Plutarchy and Capitalism.

Keep in mind, not all #occupywallst folks are anti-capitalists. But they do recognize that something's fucked up. And they're willing to do something about it. It's not a revolution, that's true. But maybe... just maybe... it is a kind of evolution.

A Sketch of Division Street

The trailer court was up on the hill and off to the left at the end of Division Street. You have to drive past the cemetery on Bone Hill and the St. Alice Home for the Aged to find it. When it snows bad, sometimes the plows don't make that far up the hill until well after 10 in the morning, which means the kids who live there either have to trudge down the hill to an available bus stop, or – since the drivers on those routes aren't supposed to let kids on the bus who aren't on their regular route – trudge the extra couple of miles across town and out to the highway bypass, where the new high school is. The smaller kids don't have as far to walk, since the intermediate school is in the center of town.

But none of them walk down the hill to go to school when the snow plows haven't cleared the way for the bus. And the parents don't call to complain. And the school doesn't call to ask if something is wrong. And a truant officer never shows up to question why – except in the spring, of course. They do take special care to make sure the wild kids from Barrett’s Trailer Court aren't out enjoying the day when they could be in school being ignored by the teachers and judged by their fellow students.

And although there has been some talk about “what to do” about the trailer park and the unwanted minions who reside there – the basic premise being that trailers are dirty no-good places, and that poor people have poor habits and that because of those two unrelated axioms … unrelated except for the fact that they are both applied to the people who live at the trailer park – there isn't enough consensus to get anything done. Whenever there's a break in or something is stolen, the first thing that Police Chief Dolarhyde does is roust the trailer park kids, since they're the most obvious suspects. That it rarely ever comes to anything doesn't matter; one of the ways the chief is able to keep his job is by sticking to the obvious. When nothing is found, the general assumption is that those white trash sons and daughters of whores simply sold it to someone from out of town for drug money or threw it away. 

The only time the trailer park kids get a break from Chief Dolarhyde's program of perpetual harassment is when the gypsies come through the area. And since the gypsies never stay in town, but find places to camp outside the town limits, they're considered a county problem, not a town one.

The Problem: A Poem by Mick Parsons

The Problem - A Poem by Papa Mick

Random Unlabeled Photos (From Artwërks)

1.

Paint the body electric

hip hop bee bop –

O, let us sing the songs of ourselves

electric slide

run and hide

safe and sound

sunbathing beneath a blue sun

illuminated for the body

and the electric funk

born out of a need to dance

and a desire to stay

a little while longer.

2.

Let us go then, you and I

and wander silent empty streets

like drunkards, lovers, and reprobates.

Let us imagine ourselves ghosts

material immaterial

substance transubstantiated

wandering the bric-a-brac

counting the minutes of the witching hour

when even the cops have the sense

to go home and leave this place

to the rest of us that neither

need their rules nor

care to understand them.

3.

Counting down the hours til dawn

all the midnight shadows are drawn

in, tied up, and stowed away

in anticipation of an approaching day

that most people will not notice

because they're too busy

being respectable, worrying

about what shoes to wear

on Sunday morning and whether

the sermon will go long

making kick off

one more missed opportunity.

4.

The lines are drawing

themselves on my face –

deep lines around

the corners of my eyes

drawn around

the edges of my mouth.

They each tell a tale

geologic in proportion,

private in scale. The old men,

they like to remind me

I am still young. And while

I cannot argue

I cannot acquiesce

to their insistence

that it's all downhill

from here.

5.

This is the other side of night

that place Céline dreamed of

but never found; that steady peace

that comes with the meditation

of one painted line and the poetry

of coffee at 3 AM. Counting down

the hours til dawn and the cats are yowling

or maybe

just another bunch of bums

the cops will later blame 

for various and unrelated petty thefts.

RE: Procrastinating the Night Before Deadline

Burned pipe tobacco and spent tea leaves

look amazing similar when combined

in the ash tray. I'm trying to chase a story

and chasing my apathy with scotch

and Earl Grey tea. Maybe if

that voodoo queen was correct, one of them

will tell me the future and the other

will describe the manner of my death.

I'm far less interested in the former

than I am the latter; but I have found

I have no say in the message –

merely the form in which

the message is transmitted.

And either, really would be a welcome

excuse, since writing about politicians

doesn't change the fact that they're just

politicians; small town boys and girls

who grew up and into old men and old women

who fear the future that does not include them

and who want everything to be

exactly as it was the last time they remember being

truly happy. And if I could I'd write one long article,

laying out all of their sins, and all of my sins, as if to say,

in some imperfect but decidedly specific way,

that I am tired of their games, their petty insults,

their petty behavior, and then I would just

turn my back on them let them rot on the vine

and die as the world moves on into a future that will not

include them and into a future that will someday

not include me.

But the tea leaves will not have it;

the pipe tobacco needs replenishing, the scotch bottle is handy

the music makes my mind drift, and I know that even

if I were to quit, if I were to go downstairs

the scribbled notes and the paranoia of news paper

without my byline in it would induce me back

because it is here, and only here,

that I am sure I exist.