new poems by brigade member Gary Hicks

to a serious inquirer

                              for blindpig

answer your questions
by bringing all that you know
to the fight at hand

all the new issues
will pose all new questions
to add to the old

we're on the rough road
building movements that will fight
until victory

leninism lives
but only as far as we
cease to genuflect

marxism lives too
but please remember lenin
was his disciple



elements of style

                    apologies to messrs strunk and white

first it was grammar all

those terms all those schematic

blackboard charts telling what

kinds of words went where when

speaking or reading  this was

supplemented by penmanship

using india ink and dip into inkwell

pens assuring that my mother

would scream as she tossed

yet another shirt to scrub out

stains alongside my father's

automotive industry leukemia

laden work clothes.

later it was composition also

jammed down my throat  hated

it with every bone in my body

excepting some moments of

fun writing flyers and

press releases for the movement

and discovered i could really

do this stuff if i wanted to.

then writing in prison  letters

to the outside  rapping with

fellow inmates which meant

writing and talking way too

much  it served me well later

in and out of college except

that on campus i rediscovered

my hatred of writing things not

of my own  was i the only one

who realized that fifteen pages

or more typed  double-spaced

footnotes properly placed

was so so tortuous where only

five pages, triple-spaced

could say it all? but we were

training to be real or wannabe

rulers  and i suppose that

it's par for the course to have

so evil a skill to be mastered

the better to mesmerize and

baffle people out of at least two

sides of your mouth

when i discovered that i could

write poetry and proceeded

to do so i finally cut through

all this bullshit  and strangely

years later my writing improved

it was as though i had become

an outlaw fugitive from convention

and upon return was

convention's master by virtue

of knowing what laws to obey

having skillfully broken all of them.

berkeley ca   april 27 2012

 

 

on finding an abandoned copy of dreams from my father

                                                    for bill fletcher' jr

beethoven's paean to bonaparte
became an elegy
disguised as majestic symphony
when the general annointed
himself emperor

i am a poet, know not a
word of music but this piece
is eroica, reloaded

all of the sacred words
of the great hope
have become naught
the world which held
its breath, bated
has reclaimed the
sense to exhale

and this poem is elegy
not for him who forgot
the difference between
puddles on chicago's
streets and the swamp
running off chesapeake
aside the potomac.

this is an elegy for
the dreams all our parents
and all who came before
and who one more time
have been betrayed
by a system
about whom
our great hopehad zip to say having
found himself the
latest if privileged
passenger on the
good ship jesus

this is an elegy
for our african
sisters and brothers
and of all who
went before them
mau mau lost the
battle and now
africom* and al qaida
cousins! must be
reckoned with

this is eroica, reloaded
elegy awaiting symphonic
music in four-four time
triumphal people's te deum

*africom..the african command of the united states armed forces
berkeley ca   4-29-2012