Johnny was a fireman- PTSD

JOHNNY WAS A FIREMAN

they were running out as he was rollin in

rollin to the rescue on the 99th floor

but he was knockin on heaven's door

johnny was a fireman but he played guitar in the bullys band

down at cbgbs on a saturday nite

they loved to drink and fight

HE WAS YOUNG AND HE WAS PRETTY 

A ROCK AND ROLL SON OF NY CITY

HE WAS TOUGH AND HE WAS GRITTY 

THE ROCK AND ROLL SON OF NEW YORK, NY

never had no bigtime fame, but all the fans at cb's yeah, they knew their name'

Bullys were electric, yeah they rocked the show, and everybody had to go'

playing rock n' roll just to get some thrills

working in the day just to pay the bills

million dollar deals slipped thru their hands

so johnny was a fireman

ChoRUS

September morning, 9/11/01

A Five alarm sounded, calling every son

rolling to the rescue on the ninety ninth floor

but they're not there no more

What greater love lives in this land

Who would lose his life to save a fellow man?  Just a punk musician from the Bully's band, cause Johnny was a fireman

He was young, and he was pretty the rock n' roll son of NY City

HE was tough and he was gritty, the rock n' roll son of New York, NY

Go Johnny go

Roll johnny roll

Go, go Johnny

Roll, roll johnny

go johnny go

TWo MINUTES OF HATE - A RANT

file:///Users/Joy/Desktop/i%20hate%20rich%20peepo.rtfd/3197665796_22ba699c00.jpgI hate rich people.  i hate their values, their pettiness.  i hate their liposuction and their narcissism.  i hate their lack of brains and refusal to look deeply into things.  i hate their fish faces, their lacquered fingers, and their fat jewelery. I hate the men with big cars and little dicks trying to impress.  I hate the skinny old ladies with bleached out hair and wind swept faces teetering on high heels.

I hate women who dump their kids for a boyfriend.

i hate their dumb empty faces

i hate their lack of compassion

I hate the lack of conversation

i hate the  fat men who boss around empty women

i hate the women who chase rich men like vultures

I hate women who have plastic in their breasts and in their minds

i hate the kids who only care for clothes and trying to be popular

i hate the neighborhoods full of people whose minds are full of popcorn

i hate people who spend hours choosing wine and meats and organic vegetables with moral superiority

I hate housewives who do nothing all day and want to be considered interesting

I hate people who shop as a hobby

I hate people who ask if they look fat.

If you have to ask, you look fucked up.

i hate rich old women who buy young dick with their money

i hate rich ugly wrinkly men who buy young women from former communist countries

i hate american fags who go to brazil to pay to fuck kids for fun

i hate american straights who go to bangkok to pay to fuck kids for fun

I hate men who go to the phillipines to pay to fuck kids for fun

I hate third world men who sell their daughters 

I hate third world men who sell their sons

i hate young russian women with cruel faces and designer pocketbooks

i hate old white men who buy young asian women and think that they are loved

i hate drunken white men who careen around in public

i hate women who try to poison their old husbands 

i hate poor people who deify the rich

i hate poor people who will kill for a thousand dollars

I hate poor people who will kill for 40 bucks

i hate groupies who try to make friends of friends of rock stars

i hate gated communities

Some say eat the rich, I say they would be tasteless, tough beef jerky

Something you'd want to spit out.

Everybody's entitled to their 15 minutes of hate, Rod Harrod

ONe more Heartache

I truly don't understand why I can still feel heartache at my age. I'm post puppy love, have been married and divorced, have raised a child, have had boyfriends, .  .  I found an old boyfriend who had been a major  heartbreak in my twenties,  apologized to him for my bad behavior, found out that he was on the latest  of four bad marriages, but wants to make a go of it , but now instead of just retaining a distance, i've gone all romantic..  what a bitch.  it's very ego killing to have a bad love affair late in life. when you're young, you figure you'll learn from your mistakes., but to let my guard down this late in life just makes me sick at myself, makes me feel like a fool...like Marvin Gaye once wrote

One more heartache baby, I can't take it now. my heart is carrying such a heavy load, one more ache could break it. just like the camel with the heavy pack one last straw broke the camels back .  One more heartache, I can't take it now

One more heartache it would turn me right around.  First you build my hopes up, then you let me down. Like a house that's built with toothpicks sittin up on a kitchen table, one last toothpick tore it down, the foundation was not able  Oh, one more, one more heartache, I can't take it now., .

Jerry Agony RIP

I don't know why some people just want to die young and beautiful.  Jerry  Agony was a teen rock star at CBGBs and Max's with the Contortions and Richard Hell...and then he just got sick from too much of everything and then he died.  Two days ago..Never got to be old and 50.  Joey Zero was so messed up, cause they were best buddies.  Jerry's parents were so broken hearted...Felix Cabrera canceled a gig to go to his wake  so that he could translate for his poor mother who just had this one son late in life..and then in her late 80s has to bury him.his father, so sweet, an elegant gentleman..just like Jerry

Uploading Berlin Pics

Letter to a wannabe ExPat Man

Dear expat Man,
I spent a long time outside the US, having been brainwashed by Henry miller, james Baldwin and anais nin, as a child growing up in flushing, Queens. The upshot of running away to Europe was that I was eclipsed in music by babes like cyndi lauper (who was cute but not beautiful), and Madonna, who sounded like connie francis and had dance steps right out of “introduction to Jazz 101”. Sure I hung out with exotic drag queens in berlin (most, I might add, are gone, due to their insisting on tricking with strangers they met along the ku’damm) Toured in now non-existent communist countries, and got to play punk rock (an unfortunate musical form for any vocalist choosing not to bellow) but what was the payoff? Do I own a house, like most people of the baby boom generation?? Nope. Do I have a retirement fund?? Nope, unless I marry someone and then kill them. Do I have a career? Yes, if you call playing old soul classics for drunken tourists in Greenwich village is a career. I say, screw expatriatism. Stay home. Marry for money, have babies, and save your traveling for your retirement days. Sincerely, Joy RYDER (the vanilla queen of soul).

Going to Berlin

Well, Jess and I are finally gonna get on the Queen Mary and go to the other side of the Atlantic. It's a good time of the year, and I've lost my job..so no reason to scrap vacation plans..actually, time to EXTEND the holiday..since it might be one of the last times that Jess and I actually travel together..actually, I'd prefer to tour with him...on bass or guitar or with his whole band...I've got to figure how to upload a pic..on this thing..I love Blogger..

MY kid's baby pix

Well, My son said he had no choice becoming a musician. i disagree, but here's an early pic w/ Will Roper The Sonic Specialist at Monongo Studion in Berlin....

Another shooting on Staten Island

Man, this place is getting crazy. Three nights ago I heard a bunch of "pop, pop, pops" up the street. "Man, THIS TIME it's just fireworks.." I said to myself, I said. "The kids bought them for Memorial Day weekend, by mistake. They got mixed up maybe, and thought you shoot them off like you do on the Fourth of July." In my neighborhood with it's ever growing Indio, Ecquadorian and Hondorian population, some amount of cultural confusion would be understandable. I ignored the firecrackers, and went back to channel surfing; trying to decompress after a long weekend upstate with my ex, his girlfriend and their circle of maniac friends. I was clicking dumbly between Law and Order and some nonsense on Court TV. I was alone, having dropped Jess off to meet his girlfriend at the movies downtown in Tribeca. The next morning, at my son's school, where I was prepping for a 6th grade weekly drama class I teach (presently working on a cold reading of Act 1 Scene One of West Side Story, about a murder and gangs in 1950s Hell's Kitchen), I got a call from a friend who works at Child Protective Custody. "Did you hear about your friends?" She says, laughing..(Nini is on some mental pills, anti psychotics and stuff, so she has a tendency to blurt things out and laugh inappropriately..well, inappropriately to me, but she's funny, so I like her)
What friends?, sez I.
Those guys in the commune. That guy Jeff got shot.
Now, I know a lot of people in the commune. They kind of stand out, since they are the only other white folks in the neighborhood except for Mrs. Adams, and she's an octogenarian shut in, and Jackie and Bill across the street, who are old hippies trying to keep the neighborhood a Sesame Street ethnic mosaic. Oh yeah, and Mary the sculptress and her son....Lately, it's become ghettoville, with drivebys and police helicopters with floodlights flying over my house at odd hours.., as corny as the stuff I watch on Cable TV, but I digress..
I know of Jeff, vaguely. I've seen him with the GANAS crew, coming back from a party, or a group outing. They often go out to events together, and came to a gig I had, years ago, at Le BarBat. They also came to All Angels Church once, to hear us sing. I've been buddies with Katie, crying on her shoulder when I was mishandled at the food stamp office, across from their store, and I met with them once, to discuss the possibility of having an open air rock festival on their land upstate. I know several of the other commune people too, cause I used to be a "thrifty", a compulsive thrift shop buyer, cruising old Pucci, Gucci and Fiorucci stuff in their thrift shop. Eventually I stopped the habit: my costume designer friend Maria from Berlin would always mention how used clothes have a sweat smell and aura of the old people who wore them..Even with all that negative persuasion, I remained a thrift store junkie.... I cruised garage sales and auctions until I was so chock full of crazy stuff that I never used that I started a thrift shop of my own, with a mentally ill boyfriend who was impossible with all the schlepping, and haggling and boyfriend stressing, I got sick of old clothes...before going out of business, I sold the rest of the stuff to the Ganas people...and they were very cool. They bought a lot of really nice 70's bellbottoms, patch pockets and corderoy, unworn, given to me by a church member who also was struggling with a buying addiction..which went back to the 70s, he never wore the stuff, just bought everything on sale, just in case...he was raised in an orphanage, and craved new clothes, but went overboard..so they were exchanged hands several times.Lately, I don't do much shopping..so I haven't seen the Ganas people.... I don't have much money anymore, so I don't buy much of anything...but it was strange to hear that one ot them was shot.
Nini said the shooter was a woman, a stalker...an ex-lover of aformentioned Jeff
Shakespeare said "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"...ain't that right?

I bought the paper, and found the article on the front page, all about the Ganas commune, their free love philosophy, their property, and about Stalker Lady. Apparently the cops hadn't followed up on Stalker Ladies' threats...I had a stalker too, when the thrift shop partner/boyfriend decided he was going to either marry me or kill me...and he kept harrassing me. The cops wouldn't do anything about it, either..there's a loophole in the law, because he wasn't my common law husband....Thank God boyfriend gave up after 2 years. He slowed down with the threatening calls and surprise visits to my home and workplaces..but that was lucky. Jeff's stalker was chasing him for 15 years.

Before I read it in the Daily Blues, I had heard that the Ganas people were into free love. This was another reason I backed away from hanging with them. I'd read about the Oneida community and the DaDa community in the 19th century..the former made nice silverware, the latter nice art, but that stuff's not for me....I'm a monogamist or at least a serial monogamist...and don't like open relationships..having been around during the experimental sexual revolution..most of that stuff was ugly..it always gave me the creeps..whether they were alternative hippies, or suburban swingers..yuch..I agreed with Wilhelm Reich and considered Satyr's Disease or Nymphomania forms of mental illness. I had been the babysitter for the head of the John Birch Society in Queens. as a teenager. I didn't know the political platform of the group, but I came to find out that John Birch was close to the Ku Klux Klan as you could get in NYC...I learned that he and his wife were swingers..so I always saw wife swapping as the behavior of the depraved mind...so I have always steered clear of that stuff. Despite all that, some of the folks at the commune were nice, kind people, and I genuinely liked them.

I laughed with Nini.We talked of being women cast aside....I guess some people can't handle that free love stuff....I know I couldn't. Looks like the 10 commandments were right, after all. Nini and I talked of going to the commune to do some Christian preaching....It's just a bitch that we've had shooting number 3 within a 4 block radius of my house (two on my block) within 3 weeks..it seems that the world is getting more violent...and this isn't even Iraq.

housing issues in the economic empowerment zone

I live in an "economic empowerment zone"....the PJs are down the street..complete with urine
in the hallway..most of my son's elementary school friends have moved away to better neighborhoods, making this nabe constantly struggling...My house is okay, sort of...The only urine odors in my house I encountered were from the feral
cat that got in through the basement window. (I think he slunk
around to the Chinese joint on the corner and wound up as General
Tso's Chicken)..
This week we have had
1) A shooting in a house with 2 kids..noone was killed but the shooter got away
2) A shooting across the street, while a bunch of loud kids were having a party, 3 shots fired, shooter got away.

I called the police today and they said to call 911 asap anonomously..next time it happens..

I still am trying to figure how to remove the window with the bullet hole that landed in my son's bedroom window last year. I've just taped it up. This neighborhood is getting stupid.

One of the things they tell us in AA is not to make big
decisions in the first year after a major event..ie after the death
of a loved one..or after a divorce..or even after positive
things..birth of a baby or falling in love...so not to make rash
decisions. I will wait to see if the Teaching Fellowship pans out,
where they're placing me..I'll be losing my housing subsidy due to
the income spike, so I should slowly look for something...as for the
kid, I may want to move to a state that has better instate
tuition..I'm all for the multi generational family...He's finished
with HS next year..but I doubt he'll be mature enough to survive on
his own til his early twenties..I wasnt, but had to..and I wouldn't
wish my hardscrabble life on anyone..I'll try not to be rash..

Rethinking my Performance Character before the Great Depression

I've been informed that Mae West was the wealthiest woman during the Great Depression. My new CD has been pressed up, so now I have to make a feeble attempt to promote the thing. The songs are good, the production isn't so I'm pretty lackluster about hustling the disc..But Peter has been helping me get a decent live show together..complete with great old obscure blues tunes..so this could be interesting....I maybe be po'..but there are some cool things that have happened because I've spent some of my time creating sounds/stories from ideas....the mind of an artist is tuned differently. As an artist, I get to see movements, trends, and truths before they're available to the general public. (Hell, I knew Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 before we invaded the country..so I knew more than most US Senators..dig that...) So now I see a great depression coming, unless we get rid of these foolish men in DC. They've hocked our country up to the eyeballs, to Saudi Arabia and Communist China, abolished tariffs so that our balance of trade is off the charts... Mao Tse Tung said that the Capitalist would sell you the rope to hang him..and it's coming true...Well the depression is almost here, so it might be worth the effort to work on a new singing personae, before the collapse. My former political science professor, Ted Becker, has suggested that I model my aging singing self after Mae West, but I told him I think Lil' Kim has taken over that iconic place in the collective unconscious.. the risque busty, slutty chick with a sense of humor complete with trips to the Women's house of Detention..or in Kim's case Bedford Hills.....I think there are a finite number of roles in the game of life....like characters in the game of Clue..Mr. Whiskers, Dame Flookie..etc..When one human is knocked out of the role whether thru death or age, another takes their place. HOWEVER...the Jean Harlow "white Goddess" (first identified by Robert Graves as a muse/spirit )Is an amazing exception. She has morphed into a zillion interchangable seedpods, Brittany Spears Christine Aguilara, Gwen Stephanie, Ashley and the other Simpson, Paris Hilton , etc..My son's personal ideal is Trish Stratus, a skantily clad lady wrestler..I wonder where he got that imprint..?? I guess being around strong women....speaking of my son..and ..School..school..how wierd..the kid will have to go somewhere..and he's slacking big time..The only places that will take him will probably be Berkelee school of music, or maybe Antioch, or a place I heard of in S. California, that has a pop music department..Unless I let him hang with some scientists..I wish he was a bit more focused on science and math and could get into the tuition free Cooper Union..Blahhh..U of Miami..classical and jazz..and a good GPA...BLAAAHH>>> maybe the U of Florida...also kind of skewed toward classical and big band jazz but PERHAPS..maybe he needs to go to a community college, get a good GPA then transfer to a decent school.. He's a good actor...I'd like him to take more acting.. BLLLAAAH anyhow, so much for schooly stuff. He might just have to play bass for my band...

12 million shadow people

Alex and I ran around the demo in front of City Hall on Monday. We were in the front, but were pushed around, the police using the same old crowd tactics they used in the anti-war demonstrations of years past..noone got let into the parade route, everyone got let out..to minimize the crowd..the immigrants were hopeful..upbeat, positive..Last week, in the LA demos, the immigrants were waving Mexican flags, but since that created angst in the Nord Americano collective unconscious, the meme was telegraphed that it would be more friendly if all the Mexicanos waved Yanqui flags..which they did...wow..ideas get around fast when people are focused. If only the impeachment movement was as focused..these nutjobs would be out of the White House, and we could become a visionary, progressive humane nation.....I noticed a distinct difference in the attitude of the South Americans and Mexicans since the big demonstrations on Monday. Before, most would avoid my eyes, look down, as if to stay in the shadows. Since Monday, I see a yearning for recognition...a selbstbewustsein..self confidence, after years of dodging police, immigration people, gangs, and whatever...The labor unions were behind the marches, to a great extent, because if they include these folks in their ranks they will no longer be competing as scabs, undercutting US workers wages..How come noone talks of busting Walmart for hiring undocumented workers illegally? When I got home I turned on CNN, and saw the reportage. I was proud of Ted Kennedy and the Irish American priest (who spoke beautiful Spanish) and the Congressman from Maryland with the Irish last name who addressed the big demo down in DC. The Irish, who came en masse, who were vilified, spat on, ignored, hated by those who came before..it was right that their decendants chose to address the unloved and abused immigrants. They need to toughen up the borders, sure, AND they gotta start busting the people who hire people for less than minimum wage, without disability insurance..who don't pay into medicare, social security, taxes, etc. The sons and daughters of the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans are back..Montezuma's revenge??
Maybe I'll take my social security when I retire, and move to Guatemala..just as long as it's peaceful..they can work here, if I can get a nice cheap hacienda there...

America is beautiful.

Church Street NYC

The new Americans...They sure organized themselves quickly. I wish the antiwar people could come out as quickly and strongly. Then we'd see some changes.

Job opportunities

Annie asked me to call her friend Diane, because she's been evicted from her trailer near the Goethals Bridge. She wants me to move her buddy. Today the school called me back, to invite me to sub. Yesterday I had a fat little Chinese kid threaten to hit me..in drama class, he's in Special Ed..the subject I'm supposed to teach soon..so I decided to write and play piano at home today..as poor as I am..I want outta here!!!

Tacos in Port Richmond

>The sign in the window said something in spanish about selling photo ids, so I figured this was an authentic mexican joint. funny, they imagine the gringos can't read espanol, i guess if i moved to mexico city i could put up a sign in english advertising fake id, and noone would be the wiser. anyway, i dragged my son out to dinner, cause the apartment was totally freezing..we ran outta heating fuel. i put in 200 bucks on november 10th, and its now january 10 ish..so i though, okay, 100 per month, not so terrible. i called the fuel company and it turns out they have delivered 1200 dollars worth of fuel in december...or $750 per month. whoah..my rent is just 850...too wierd for words..the downstairs neighbor has moved out, so the landlord is losing money on this money pit..
money troubles abound this post christmas season, more than usual. december 10 i was given a pink slip, my last day of work was the day before christmas eve..i've been sending out resumes..but somethings wrong with it..they don't return my calls..maybe ishould leave off the part where I was a musician for 24 years..that's how i got my last job, by underreporting my life experience..anyhow..being financially off kilter makes me edgy..i've been depressed..can't wake up, cause i can't sleep, and wind up watching movies in the middle of the night...and don't wake my son, who goes to school late, and is pissed...well, my son and i had had an argument this morning, because he got pissed that i didn't pay his phone bill..and i told him to get a job, since i had been recently laid off. he's sixteen.. i got mad and started yelling..he said , wow, you're not much of an adult..no job and no self control..grrrr..anyhow..i gave my substitute teachers license to 3 schools and called a fourth, then went shopping in this mexican village in the middle of staten island. i guess the folks are mexican, or maybe guatamalan..or something..i don't ask, i don't tell..i was kind of astounded by the blossoming of a zillion mexican restaurants..so i guess they're not bulgarian...
i hope to get thru february..that's the tough month..i have a job in june, but spring is way off...meanwhile i can see my breath in the apartment...should I pay the electric, or pay the fuel...??? my stepmom is dead and gone, my fairy godmother who bailed me out after my aneurysm, after my fathers death, when i couldn't afford the dentist..and my tooth fell out...she is somewhere, i pray..and this one month is just a struggle to make me tough..i've struggled most of my life, so why should i complain? my struggles are miniscule compared to the rest of humanity..brazilians must forage for food in garbage dumps, pakistanis huddle under plastic tents in the hills in winter...sudanese are hacked to death by insane arabs..i am not completely able to go off to california or europe to record when i want to ..what's the big deal?

life in the slow lane

I haven't figured out how to upload pics to the site, or even how to link to other sites. i have a feeling that the blogs will be read by people in the future, trying to decrypt our society many thousands of years hence... or maybe they'll be sitting in a slightly out of sync parallel universe, and will be curious to know what makes us tick. In any case, I keep adding a paragraph from time to time. not that anyone reads this. thanks to google and pyra, we can all post our journals, rants and doctoral theses without much trouble...i'd love to be able to upload pics..i'm too tired to really say anything rant'y..i've said all i can about pat robertson and the pharisees, called the neocons a bunch of psychopaths..and now i must gain strength for tomorrow..a really long tough day...i've got to take my new cd to the pressing plant...

I want to create a new blog, but I cant

I am told my cookies are disabled. Well so are yours buddy. I'd like to create a blog that can be used by family members, to upload pics, info, letters,etc. but nah..no luck. I've got miles to go before I sleep. Maybe I can move these posts to my other blogs, and then use this one as my family blog..we'll see. J.

I wake up in a (COLD SWEAT)

I'm gonna try to publish a link and see what happens. I went up to a club in Harlem last nite, Buddy Fox (aka Bloody Socks...in Cockney Slang) had his birthday bash and aloha to nyc party there...he's moving to Maui..the place had that eerie Disneyland feel to it..Good ol boys on harley hogs and cowboy hats hanging by the 'El"..up in Harlem, not so wierd if they were gay, but I got a real hetero vibe..a white band playing blues..good barbeque menu but very corporate...nuttin' like, say, Sylvias, or even that kookie nightclub on 7th Ave. that had rented one of the bathrooms out to a Chinese restaurant, where you could get hot Southern fried chicken livers to go with your beer..now that's Harlem. Or the restaurant that shoves out a plate of pigfeet and potato salad out from behind the bullet proof plate glass window..that's Harlem..there were no pimps or pickpockets, or sloppy drunks. Most everyone looks like Columbia students with major credit lines on their credit cards..Disneyland..Harlem...they need me to tear up the joint.

EDDIE'S DEAD (THAT'S WHAT I SAID) - A Poem

EDDIES DEAD
THATS WHAT I SAID

Maybe it was a flashback
from his time in Korea
in the army
watching soldiers have sex in the open
against fences
with local girls

That caused him to think Love was dead
and made him kill himself

Or maybe he thought about his wife
dying when he was 28

Or the fact that his fiance quit him
at 52.

Maybe the stress of trying to comfort
families of the dead
Ate him up inside
Silently standing by in his clerical collar
awkward
as they came to claim body parts IDd from DNA
held inside the refrigerator trucks
humming 24/7
under the big blue tent
at Ground Zero

We had met the year before 9/11
I was the day bartender
Eddie would come in
and eat his lunch
at the bar.

We got to talking
2 ducks out of water.
Irish History
Episcopal churches
He knew my gospel choir

We’d talk for hours
After I had left my boyfriend
After his first fight with his fiance
Middle aged teenagers on the phone
He kinda liked me
I was like his sister, he said.


Eddie wasn’t very cute.
Hounddog eyes, George Washington lips
He kinda resembled Bob Hoskins
A young Alfred Hitchcock

Came to my church with me, once.
It was cool
I was proud of my buddy
in the seminary
Worked for a trade union
A people’s person
A tough Christian man.

Wierd, tho, I didnt want to call Eddie
after my brain surgery

I was afraid hed get too upset
He was a bull in a china shop
And my head felt like delicate porcelain
I had to knit alone

Eddie said he had been
shunned by the other seminarians
Because he majored in disaster counselling
Pharisees, we joked, looking for a nice
suburban parish with a cosy manse
But
EDDIES DEAD THATS WHAT I SAID
Dead from his own hand.
That’s the word from a mutual friend
I called the Brooklyn precinct
(They never got back to me)

His girlfriend broke off the engagement
Last time I saw him he was
drunk
Tipsy on his feet
How many Episcopalians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Two. One to screw in the lightbulb and one to mix the cocktails

My son and I held him up
We all had dinner together that night
He came out to visit us on Staten Island
He babbled on
Trying to figure out why his fiance had left him
Without a forwarding address
Just a goodbye email
the stress of unemployment
the stress of leaning on him
She ran out on him and the landlady
(I wondered briefly if he hadn’t done away with her, and his first wife too)
He was miserable
A bellowing bull
In mortal pain

He had comforted those families whose loved ones body parts were DNA’ed
ID’ed and claimed
down at Ground Zero
In the tent near the Pit

He stood by as they cried
Wearing his clerical collar
Silent
Awkward(He was new at that)
That’s why he was a pariah
Low man on the pastoral totem pole
According to him.
I didn’t want to see him when I took sick
He was a bull in a china shop
I was worried he would worry
Too loud..and my head hurt from surgery
Eddy knew all about history
and buildings
Pointed out the place where my great grandfather worked before the Civil War
strolling one evening in Soho
Eddie went to Harvard, even
but didn’t wear it on his sleeve
He told me a few years after we met
Me the bohemian, It was fun to have a friend who wore a suit and tie
And fit into society so well
But EDDIE’S DEAD, THAT’S WHAT I SAID

I called his job, no good
they said he passed away from bronchitis
Bronchitis?
I called the local precinct in Brooklyn
they didn’t call me back
I called the seminary
Mary worked in the office.
She gave me the lowdown.
The family wanted to keep it quiet.
She called him the last
casualty of 9/11.

what it feels like to be a pre-jim crow black

AS THE ADMINISTRATION CONTINUES WITH THE UNPROVOKED WAR, the dismantling of social security, the trade deficit, the sinking of the dollar value, as ships filled with goods from China flow in, and nothing flows out, as illegal immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala flow in to NYC, creating whole little villages of illegals, I look for somewhere to turn..there are no congressmen who find this all problematic...the man who pushed thru the Medicare drug reform bill last year, is this year a lobbyist for the drug companies, at a salary of 2 million dollars per year..meanwhile American kids sign up with the National Guard to get a college education, and hold back the odd flood or riot or hurricane damage, only to be deployed to Iraq for an undetermined time, using Hillbilly armor..rummy in his patrician way distaining the soldiers who are sissy enough to look for decent flack jackets and humvee armor...take the money from kellogg brown and root, they've colllected enough money from the govt, illegally. These people who have illegally taken over the government using hacker vote counters are carpetbaggers, and are taking MY nation apart. They're dismantling 200years of legislation, based on Christian concepts, and are sending us down the tubes...