art music poetry

Joe Clark Folk Song by David Michael Jackson

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I’m not all that political. I have no record. I could not have lived my life as a mechanical engineer with one. The records we are creating with our outrageous number of people in corporate run prisons in the U.S. is racist . It is the sharecropping shanty shack of our times.. It is excluding large segments of our population.
When we create so many casual “felons”, mostly black and hispanic, we lose the ability to tell who is indeed dangerous and too many of our citizens end up living outside of our system.
I wrote this song and have assigned a Creative Commons license.

Joe Clark

Oh I can’t get a job cause
I sold that weed
to that cop in
ninety three
On the piece of paper they always ask me
have you had a felony
I was fighting my war on poverty
when the war on drugs got me
now there’s no work at all for me
no Social Security

Oh they threw my tail in the company jail
and threw away the key
so I told her to find her someone else
and forget about me

So I work at outside in hot and in cold
and we live in this trailer park
and when people ask me who I am
I say I’m….I’m Joe Clark

So I’ll build you a fence
and work in your yard
if ever there was a worker
that was Joe Clark
so if you’ll give me a chance
I won’t be a slob
I’m Joe Clark
and I need a job

Oh they threw my tail in the company jail
and they threw away the key
so I told her to find her someone else
and forget about me

by david michael jackson

A Not so Social Poem

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Don’t let it
put its big thumb
on you and
crush you like a bug.
Beware of likes and
no likes.
Don’t pour your soul
down a page of approval.

If you look,
there are to many paintings,
If you look,
there are too many poems,
If you look,
there are too many songs to sing, or
not sing.

If I look,
I am insignificant.

If I weigh me
I weigh nothing.

It is better to be
famous among the barns. **

Knowing where you stand
ain’t so grand.
Delusions are grander
and produce better work.

**- from Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

Rebuttal to Burroughs

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Thank you Spaniards
for your small pox
and lust for gold.
Thank you for not caring as
European
greed created genocide with your manifest destiny
Thank you Europe for your slave trade.
Thanks for getting us off
to such a good start.
Thank you for becoming us
and then acting like
we ain’t you

‘Just Haiku’ and other Haiku by Joe Brennand

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‘Just Haiku’

Basho’s deep north
a hermit crab walks
from side to side

on the shore
where the tsunami hit
a hermit crab

spring horizon
ripples of sunlight
on the shore

frost in the air
you see both sides
of the argument

departing summer
one pebble
skims the lake

mobile library
a ladybird eats fallen raindrops
from the leaf

a fox searches
upturn bins
stars twinkling again

Mocking bird
I am diagnosed
with dyslexia

Afternoon thunder
twins
in your ultrasound

Joe Brennand

Joe Brennand Haiku

Haiku by Joe Brennand can be found on the Camel Saloon, Dead Snakes and Writer’s Haven

After Dylan on the Ninth Wave. A Poem by Robin Ouzman Hislop

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After Dylan on the Ninth Wave.*
 
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age – Dylan Thomas (1914-53)
 
Worm’s Head on Rhossili beach’s
Rocky peninsula
Crags that jut in the eye’s squint.
A bellying belly capped by a pixie cone
In a turn around bay, on a turn around tide.
 
Long levelled backwater mud banks
Bogged to the edge of another shore
Down dusk grey fallen sky
Misted on slow dark billowy waters
Slip to the rippling sand’s brink
Break with a sigh from the far horizon’s
Foggy veil’s sheeting light
That winks in the blink of a squint
As clouds rush down, head on.
 
Whilst the man on the hill
Beach up from the dune in heather, fern
Cliff path & bleats of rolling flocked wool
Wanders side on against Gods & Goddesses.
The might on high of ancient deities at play
In their buffoonery with the day
As they rollicked & frolicked
Harangued & battled for naught
Other than gainsay for the man on hill.
To push him & pull him, hither & thither
As his shadow swelled & swathed him
Down under into the rock below
Whilst they in their lightning & terrible frightening
Also would fall from their lofty citadel
Although immune from his suffering
To rage, rage against the dying of the light
To like him in their burial.
 

 
Worm’s Head on the Gower Peninsular was a well known haunt of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, also known for his prodigious drinking bouts from which he sadly died at the age of 39 in a New York bar. It is recorded he was once stranded on the Worm’s Head when cut off by the incoming tide from the mainland. Origins of the name Dylan in pagan mythology can be found in the Mabinogion, where he is described as the Son of the Wave, a Sea God born of the Goddess Arianrhod. Robert Graves in the White Goddess describes the mythological source of Dylan, as the Divine Child born on the Ninth Wave and sometimes ancient graphics depict a naked man caught by fishermen in a net are held to refer to Dylan. Its etymology variously ascribes the root as ‘The wave that floods’, ‘The flood that recedes’ and ‘The tide that returns’.
 
Lines in italics from Dylan Thomas’s Birthday Poem at Laugharne Bay & Do not go gentle into that good night.’

 
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