Talisman (or: Adam’s Leaf Descending)

by headburner

Posted to Poetry on 2003-07-10 06:22:00


Yes! Earth does rotate…Forget the apple.
Let’s talk of love, Martinis, Brillo boxes
And $3.9 billion spent monthly
On the (no)war effort.

Simplify Marx’s Manifesto
To feed the hungry masses
With AK 47’s and seven feeble
Unarticulated axioms,

No longer an ideology.
(A protecting red flag, a working man
With his fist raised, a Negro holding hands
With a white man holding hands with a Chinese,

A white dove flying, etc.)
– No Pasaran (The Fascists)! In 1938
There where no more Anarchists in Barcelona.
Stalin and the Republican army had the upper hand.

The concrete and steel curtain held the illusion.
It all collapsed when East German workers
Found out that their Checkpoint Charlie
Neighbours drove VW’s to work.

To sell communism communist cells
Became advertising agencies.
Don’t tell me propaganda isn’t Coca-Cola
They are the same thing…

One traffics in products the other in ideology.
They both need to retail their goods.
Through what means? Images!
Ideology has been substituted by imagology.

It’s a planetary thang! An anarchist
Raising his fist will kick tear-gas cans
With the latest Nike shoes.
While a kid in Thailand earns $2.00 a month.

Still some long for the Cold War
(At least the world was shaped by its meridians and parallels).
Nowadays there are enemy cells everywhere and the pour men
DO HAVE THE BOMB, the bomb, the bombs, “the bombs

That will bring us together”. So, time sets its own chronology,
We talk of love, Earth revolves around its axis,
I read the New York Times, drink Martinis,
While you put on your D&G sunglasses.