AMERICAN DISSIDENT

The American Dissident
A Literary Journal of Critical Thinking
In the Samizdat Tradition of Writing against the Machine
A Forum for Examining the Dark Side of the Academic/Literary Industrial Complex

Poet’s Exhortation to Comrades Not in Arms
The following poem is taken from Diversionary Vacuousness*

Poet’s Exhortation to Comrades Not in Arms
What is poetry which does not save nations or people?/ A connivance with official lies!
—Czeslaw Milosz

Anger! I am angry!
All the crap here in America,
and the sonnets, the cutesy haiku,
the witticisms, the diversionary vacuousness!
I am infuriated with you, dear poets!

Bitter! I am bitter!
All the shit here in Massachusetts,
and the word play, the quips and banter,
the sing-along songs, gesticulations, rapper formula!
I am indignant for what you do, dear poets!

Confrontational! I am confrontational!
All the useless verse hatched in service of,
while the boil grows and the cancer thrives!
You so complacent, so jocular, so incurious,
so content in your little circles and gatherings!

Spiteful, full of personal animus,
whatever you may call me, I don’t give a damn!
You, pétasses, putos and maricos, pisseurs d’encre,
sheep of effete fashion, and dainty professionals
have become, despite marginality for a few,
little flaccid dollies.
How I want to slap you around!

Furious! Get furious! Get off your asses,
dear poets!
Get out of your accursed university chairs,
grab the throat of academe,
challenge your brothers and sisters,
so comfortable in their ivory-covered blockades of sham!
Let us reclaim education, damn it!
Stop turning your backs on injustice, cowards of denial!
What purpose such yellowbelliedness?
Indeed, what purpose, if not to serve disservice?
What function, your silence?
Indeed, what function, if not to make you functionaries?

Get tough, dear poets, or step the hell aside, cease your
ineffectual readings!
You have been stopping up the toilets far too long.
Write angry! Speak angry! Holler, howl, enrage!
Be strong! Be resilient! Halt your reflexive recoiling
in the face of aggression! Stop running away!
Oh, your frailty makes me puke, your hide-out poetaster
safe havens!
Drink the hell of life, enough Starbuck’s!
When I look out at you and lay my wrath upon you,
enough senseless clapping!
Start questioning! Stir things up, instead of brewing
in pre-approved garbage!
Poets, you have become a tamed army, sequestered in cages
you can not even see.
Open your eyes! Be observant! Be conscious!

How depressed you make me feel, when at your meetings,
yet that should not be.
I am not alive to amuse you, or bemuse you, or subjugate you
with cleverness.
I do not write to obtain your chuckles.
I am a serious man and need not apologize for that.

Your poetry, so much of it, delivered like the trivial discourse
of university presidents, or the President,
so many unexploded, hollow words, diluting the genre
in this vast wasteland, USA, Inc..
No wonder your presence is so in demand at the White House
and Governor’s Mansion.
The System has sucked you in, dear artistes, musicians, actors,
plasticians, and poets,
with vacuum cleaner into complacent little societal slots, where
you perform your little artsy things, disrupting nobody and nothing.
The System has crushed so many of you, and I feel bad for you,
the System using you.
Your poetry, no longer your arm, but rather its arm.

Talking to you, dear poets, is like talking to clerks of the civil service,
or professors tenured to the doctrine of follow, fawn, and fear,
yet that should not be.
I reject you vehemently, just don’t need you as you are currently,
and must assume
you just don’t need me as I am, nor the writing I regurgitate upon you,
and that is just fine with me.
Perhaps I shall take it elsewhere, into the heavens, or back streets,
or into the mayor’s office where the police...

*For a copy of the new chapbook, Diversionary Vacuousness, please send $5.00 to G. Tod Slone, The American Dissident,
1837 Main St., Concord, MA 01742