Week Ten of The Artist’s Way has proved to be the most interesting so far. A sense of self-protection wasn’t that difficult for me, I think, partly due to growing up queer – one learns to protect, hide certain parts of the self rather than surrender them, or even to question them. In looking back I see how I was questioning masculine values to a degree – it was some years before I question the culture that created & perpetuated those values.
There is some talk about the drug of fame, the drain of competition. I’m not sure if I ever wanted fame, notoriety maybe, but fame – no thanks. I had a rather-well-known friend & very frequently we would stopped in the street when someone recognized them. Often the praise was for something they’d rather forget 🙂
The issue with competitiveness is often winning becomes more important than creativity. I’ve met slam poets who ‘sculpt’ pieces for points, or who question their talents if they don’t get enough points. I know one doesn’t write in a vacuum but audiences are fickle, unpredictable & unreliable narrators of anyone’s talents.
I enjoyed the tasks in this chapter. The Deadlies was fun though I didn’t do it quite as suggested – as each was dealt with I put it in another envelope to make sure I looked at all of them at least once. Some of them needed to be tweaked to make them applicable to today: i.e. it’s been over 40 years since I’ve used alcohol or drug to cope so I had to find something in my life today that has a ‘similar’ addictive resonance in my life. Blogging?
Doing a lovely thing for myself every day was interesting too – with food as one of the Deadlies is having a Klondike ice-cream bar a lovely thing or giving in to the spiral of ‘I eat badly because I’m self-destructive’? But I only have one ice-cream bar a day – so maybe it isn’t so deadly 🙂
Blowing Shit Up
kill them
kill them all
bomb the shit out of them
teach them
to be good world citizens
let them die of hiv
malnutrition
then bomb the shit of what is left
<>
they don’t know any better
they are lost little children
stumbling through the shopping mall
of our needs and wants
if they can’t satisfy those needs and wants
then kill them
kill them all
<>
bomb the shit out of them
bomb their contaminated water supply
their understaffed hospitals
over-flowing orphanages
bomb their rubble to rubble
kill them
kill them all
<>
liberate the enslaved of all nations
from the despotic heels of dictators
religious fanatics
bring them into our refined gilded fold
of credit cards smart phones
that’s all we want to do or
we’ll bomb the shit out of them
kill them
kill them all
those blasphemers
who don’t have a seat at the world bank
we have to assimilate them
into the stream of human kindness
if they can’t be assimilated
bomb the shit out of them
smash destroy replace repatriate
then we’ll stick around
help rebuild those economies
brick by byte
because what is good for them
is even better for our capital gains
<>
we’ll bomb the shit out of them
till they admit we are right
to kill them
kill them all
bomb their rubble to rubble
because
after all
who doesn’t like to see
shit blow up
right
(2007)
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TOpoet 