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Tag: Poetry

0 Pink Cells & Blue Pricks – Thinking Outside The Bars

April 23, 2014
by Comrade Black
· PE Web Zine

by Comrade Black

I only ever spent one night in a prison cell.

I don’t often talk about it, as it was only 1 night of my life and it wasn’t for any thing interesting or heroic. My experiences in a cell were pretty mild compared to many other peoples, but for some reason I feel like sharing them right now.

I had a warrant out for me for a failure to appear for shoplifting from walmart. Nothing too exciting, although kinda funny as the way I found out I had the warrant was when on Halloween in about 2001. I was in Lloydminster, which is half in saskatewan and half in alberta. I was dressed as a mobster and had hand made a Tommy gun complete with copper barrel and stained oak butt. Some bored cops decided to stop us to check if it was real, and took the opportunity to run our names for something to do. Low and behold a warrant came up for me, only problem was it was an alberta warrant, and I was about 10 feet into saskatwean. So the xcops just told me “you should turn yourself in sometime and get that dealt with.”

A month or two later I turned myself in, to a cop shop in edmonton to get the warrant dealt with. They started by putting me in a room with a phone and phone book to call a lawyer if I wanted. Through the walls I could overhear the cops saying how they could just let me go, but thought it would be more fun to put me through the entire processing to scare me straight. It didn’t really work.

So they took me to the main cop shop n edmonton where I spent the night in the pink cells. not to be confused with the punk cells.

They brought me in to be processed, starting with a strip search. It is in my opinion more a tactic of domination and humiliation than about actually finding contraband up your ass. I was told to strip naked, hand them my cloths, pull up my foreskin, lift my testicles, then turn around, bend over and pull my ass cheeks apart. Standard procedure for failure to appear on shoplifting I am sure.

After this I was taken to a cell. My cell was about seven foot by eight foot square, and about 20 feet tall. The walls were pink and made of cinder block, with a built in cement bench and a steel toilet with no lid. At the very top of the wall was a window that let in some light from outside, the window was impossible to see out of though since it was 15 feet up above the bench.

They took away my over shirt and long john so all I had was jeans and a t-shirt, and it was freezing fucking cold. They must have been afraid I would try to put something in my pocket and steel it while I was there since I was such a notorious thief.

There were 2 doors to the cell, one was a cage, with reinforced bars, the second was a door made of bars. they would close both to ensure you didn’t escape through the holes between, but because neither were solid you could still see out and hear. There wasn’t much to look at, just another cinder block wall in front of the cells, they were like a hall way with each cell beside the other. This way while you couldn’t see any of the other inmates you could still hear them. so you could hear people cry, complain, yell, and the ones high on drugs screaming and talking nonsense to themselves. Fun times.

After about an hour they came to get me for processing. They cuffed me then brought me down the hall to a room to be photographed and finger printed. For shoplifting… After this was over they brought me back to the cell where I remained until about 7am.

They came and cuffed me to walk me through the hallway. There is an underground passage leading from the cop shop to the court house in edmonton, so after I was cuffed I was escorted by 4 cops down the hall to a court room.

A couple things were immediately noticeable – as I kinda stood out. Most the other people awaiting to stand before the judge (were were all in a literal line up) were native. Most of them were there for petty theft, drugs, B&E’s, or fighting. Most of them seemed to be known to the court. I was just some random white kid on a first offense.

When I finally stood before the judge he didn’t even ask me anything. He just looked at my file, and issued me a new court date about a month away. I was then taken back to the cop shop, given my clothing, and released to the 7:30am down town streets of edmonton.

This was a lot of years back now, and I was a very different person then. So my memory could be a bit blurry, but I tell you I remember those pink bricks and blue pricks in a way I will never forget. They intended to scare me into obedience, instead they simply cemented my hatred for their system, for the cops and their prisons. I got off with 6 months of probation, and a bit of humiliation, if my skin wasn’t white I might not have gotten off so easily.

As I write this prison populations in this colonial nation state are at an all time high, with over 15,000 prisoners held by the Canadian state right now; and the population is disproportionately native. As I write this my friend Nyki Kish sits in an Ontario jail serving a life sentence for something she didn’t do – and the fact the cops ‘lost’ the surveillance tapes or that there is no physical evidence doesn’t matter. As I write this my friend Chusia’s dad John Graham sits in a jail in the US where he was illegally extradited for a crime I believe the FBI committed. Again complete with trail that contained no physical evidence where every witness had direct connection to the FBI, RCMP, or BIA. As I write this animal defenders like Rebecca Rubin and Marie Mason and Fran Thompson are serving sentences longer than some of the readers of this blog have been alive. As I write this, more prisons are being built to keep us in.

If this touched you at all, do me a favor and consider writing a post card or a letter to a prisoner. Even if you just say hi, or send them a picture of your dog, or your favorite poem. It will make their day a little more hopeful.

0 Killing God: Reviewed by Max Wolf Valerio

December 12, 2013
by Comrade Black
· PE Web Zine · Reviews

Poet and author Max Wolf Valerio recently reviewed one of my poems; I had asked for feedback from a few people I knew who were themselves poets who I respected. Max’s review was so thorough and interesting I asked him if I could share it. So with his consent, here is the review of my newest poem Killing God. The poem being reviewed will follow at the end of this post.

This is a skilled rendering of your beliefs and perception of the world, and of the divine, and our present situation. I mean, you lay it out coherently and with precision – with craft. The line breaks are skillful, leading the eye from one place to another carefully. I like how you use parking lots, and museums to illustrate your ideas, and even bring in the number of years that civilization has been in existence and — Christianity (2,000 years). The idea that civilization is “killing God” is an intriguing one, and it is also interesting that you use the term “culture of death”. Seeing the term used here in this way is intriguing to me as the other place that one sees “culture of death” is in the writing of social conservatives, often Catholic social conservatives, who see the far left as a “culture of death” (abortion, euthanasia, movement toward less reproduction or no reproduction, the breakup of the family into smaller units — single mothers and the subsequent marriage of women to the state and not a man). BTW, I am not, of course, a social conservative, though I share some of their concerns and grapple with all these issues, as do you– obviously from this poem and what I know of you. I mean, you grapple with reproduction, death, technological interventions… etc. Your use of this term “culture of death” is not ironic, but is your take on a world that is increasingly artificial and alien. Now, I think you’ve done a good job here of rendering your beliefs, and carefully making them manifest in the use of actual objects and places: museums, parking lots, shopping malls, desecration of burial grounds. I think there is another step however, and I challenge you to go farther. I can see this poem as a statement to either preface a book of essays, even “poetic” essays or better — a kind of manifesto to a book of poems that take each one of these ideas, separates them, and really brings the experience alive to the reader in an actualized, concrete way. Or you don’t need to separate each idea, but show how they work together. Well, you can get creative as you write… Poems that make these ideas really come alive — that’s what I mean. Poems that leave less room for disagreement since they feel less like opinions. Possibly, they feel more like dreams or visions? You can experiment.

Now, one problem with political or ideological poetry is that it is the poet’s opinion. Often, political poems are turgid and each thing they say is entirely expected so the poems are not as “alive”. However, they can be instructive… But there is that issue… I mean, I can read a poem like this, and agree or not. There is space created for my agreement or disagreement that is easy to enter. There are poets who excel in this type of poem, and while he is not a leftist radical, to say the least — Rudyard Kipling comes to mind. He has that poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” which is ideological or a poem of ideas. It uses metaphors liberally, and is attempting to convey ideas the poet believes are important. This is a poem that conservatives love, and for good reason since it makes their cardinal points quite vividly. I mean, it makes them plain and is persuasive. While you are in a whole other place ideologically, look to this poem for clues as to how to proceed. I’ll link to it. Also your ideas, while very different, are also talking about a returning, a refusal of present values. In your case, it is not principles that are eternally true, but a return to some kind of elemental and pristine wildness that you believe is more essential and good and holy (you identify it with “God” in the poem) than the present morass. If you want, you can use the poem you presented to me as the first, and build a whole book from these ideas. Take each one, take the poem apart, and find ways to animate these ideas. My own approach to ideological poetry is that I try and make it less about my “opinion” and more about SHOWING the reader why my perspective is persuasive. You know, that old adage, show don’t tell. That can be applied to poetry as well. Even in Kipling’s poem, he shows the consequences of each set of wrong ideas and links them to his refrain of the “copybook headings” and finally to the copybook headings themselves like “the wages of sin is death”. The examples he posits, bring those crusty adages to life. This can be done with your ideas as well. ..Possibly really take us into each idea, show me the ceremonial burial sites, and what desecration is — don’t tell me, but show in image, metaphor, or — detail. I like detail, and a concrete detail can be imaginary, but must be entirely feasible. Because it is feasible, when the detail can be heard, felt, seen — it is persuasive.

Also the idea that “God is dead’ is not a progressive anthem, but a rallying cry for actual death, is interesting as it takes a conservative theme I’ve seen, that we have killed God, and either takes it further or – to another place entirely. I mean, in some ways, you are very, very conservative since you want humanity, I think, to return to something very ancient and before language. In that way of thinking all human revolutions or “evolution” that appears to have created “progress” are not progressive at all. In this worldview we need to go back, very far back — and things have to be brought back to extreme basics. Of course, that makes you more of a revolutionary, but in an interesting way. Anyway, show more, tell less. Try different voices or ways of showing, and maybe when you do tell, try something playful also. Anyway… thanks for showing me this poem! Very interesting. Here’s that Kipling poem, ironic I would think of him — but there you go. Poetry is a place of strange coincidences and odd conflations. Any way, take care — have a great day – Max V.

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm

Killing God

by Comrade Black

Every day we kill God

Vivisect, dissect, and sterilize

Colonize

Our culture has been killing God since before humans nailed a living man

to a dead tree

for saying we should all get along

And claiming to be one of God’s children

Born of love

And daring to live outside their authority
So they tortured him

2000 years of mistakes

12000 years of domestication

Civilization

The domination

and attempted control of the wild

And what is the world we have created?

Every day we get up and go to work collectively killing God

Killing every vestige of divinity

Destroying every sacred place

Chopping down every living forest

Habitat to an entire community

Of life

Poisoning our own bodies

Our own water

Air

Food

And spirits

So that all we have is pavement

Drugs

And tailings ponds

It seems the very idea of life

is a threat

To our culture of death

A world of parking lots

And graveyards

Full of toxic embalmed corpses

While we dig up ceremonial burial sites

Of someone else’s ancestors

To create another exhibit for our museums

And replace their resting places

with shopping malls

Come see the cultures of old

On display, today!

From back when they still believed in something

Or at least come see their death

Now under our control

And behind glass

What does it mean in this culture of death

For man to stand up

Like the sermon on the mountain

And arrogantly declare “I have killed God”

Like a proclamation

Or triumph

If God is just a word

A synonym for life, love, and creative energy

For all things wild

What we label “nature”

Then what kind of a world is left

When we’ve killed God?

0 ReWild

December 7, 2013
by Comrade Black
· Columns · PE Web Zine · Radness

by Comrade Black

I hate cement
A concrete statement of the hatred of life
that your world is built on
Paved over earth
worms
life
Yet you cannot kill the wild
that grows
even under the pavement
habitual wildness
as civilization
cracks
A plant reaches for the sun again
Anarchy!
Uncontrollable
Feral
Wild
Life!

2 Never Been So Lucky?

November 9, 2013
by Comrade Black
· Columns · PE Web Zine

by Comrade Black

All my life people have been telling me how lucky I am.

There was a time in my life where I was jumped by 3 men, who held my head to the ground while one jumped up and brought his foot down; all over a hundred or so dollars. I tell people, and they tell me I am lucky. Oh so lucky to have survived. Or the time I was hit to the head with an aluminum baseball bat. So lucky.

If this is what luck is I wish I would quit getting it.

Recently I was approved for PWD (Persons With Disabilities) after years of struggling through the hoops of bureaucracy. Sometimes when I tell people this they reply “wow you are so lucky.” “I wish I didn’t have to work for money, and could get a BC wide bus pass, free camping, and ½ off at the ferries”

Yeah, lucky…

I wake up in pain, nearly every day. When I awake my feet ache from sleep, and my back is often sore too. I deal with crippling spells of fatigue that shut me right down. If I walk too long, or go up too many stairs my knees remind me of when that drunk driver said to the cops “no, I didn’t hit him, I just drove up and he was laying here.” At the hospital as I came back to consciousness the nurse said to me “You are pretty lucky… It was pretty stupid to be riding at night without any lights.”
Dumb luck.

I deal with 4 different conditions that each manifest as different forms of chronic pain, AS, fibramialgia, soft tissue damage to my knees, and migraines. At least one of them I was assured will only get worse throughout my life, and likely will cripple me permanently. Eventually. All products of poverty, and living in the disaster we call civilization.
but hey, its ok cause I get a free bus pass… Well, actually it is $45, but still, so lucky.

When I was a kid, I was bullied in school. Although bullied doesn’t even begin to describe it accurately. Terrorized would be more honest. Daily I would get my ass smacked, or my crotch grabbed, while I was called fag, tripped, spit on and they would destroy my locker so I had to carry my binders with me all day in my book bag. They even once tore my pants off my body, in half. Tore them right off of me, and laughed. I was suicidal until I was in my mid 20s, and still struggle with depression and anxiety. When I tell people these stories they often tell me “man, you are lucky you got out of there alive.”
Apparently choosing to hitchhike across the country and live on the streets to get away from there had nothing to do with it…
It was just luck.

I find the word luck dis-empowering.
Luck implies that fate or random chance of the universe just fell in my direction.
It takes away all agency, and neutralizes participation,
As if nothing I did had anything to do with why I survived, and even thrived despite it.
I don’t think I have been lucky, I have been unlucky. But I persevered, in spite of it.

My life has been a struggle, it hasn’t been easy. Sure, I wasn’t a child soldier, or sold into sex slavery, so many others have definitely had it worse – but that doesn’t undermine my own struggles and hardships.

I survived because I fought, and had the support of friends, allies, and community.
“You’re so lucky to have such a great community.”
No, sorry, I have to disagree.
I have community because we have put in the work to make it a reality.
To build and maintain those relationships which are important.
Community, relationships, they don’t just happen accidentally.

I once read a article about sexual assault, where the author meditated about how almost every woman she knew had bad it done to them
and she kept saying “I am the lucky one, lucky it never happened to me.”
Like the drunk driver who ran over me, or the people who assaulted me, the perpetrators in her story didn’t do anything, the women were just “unlucky.” Where the fuck is agency?

We live in a world, where species go extinct every day, where forest get paved, where women are prey, where most of the world (human) population lives in poverty. Yet we are constantly told we are lucky.

Fuck luck. We need action, compassion, and empathy.
We need to quit giving up our agency, and most importantly, to take responsibility.
And never be so lucky

0 Thinking Outside The Bars

October 28, 2013
by Comrade Black
· PE Web Zine · Video

poem by Comrade Black

by Comrade Black

The grass IS always greener
When you’re standing in a desert
That use to be a forest
Like the Fertile Crescent
Or the great Scottish rain forests
You know, where now what we call the Moor is
Or parking lots and paved roads where the meadow use to live
But you see the trick isn’t to get over to the other side of the fence
But instead to tear it down altogether
A world free of false man made borders
Walls and fences
Cages are for captives
And we are meant to be free
As all life is meant to be
I hate walls and all the people who love them.[i]
I hate bars and prisons
And bars built to keep people drunk in
Captives to their own inebriation
Wasn’t that drink suppose to give you escape?
But there is no escape when the whole world is our prison
Just another bottle do drown in
Not until the people have risen
To tear the oppression down
Bring the bastards down
No crowns
Royal or otherwise

[i] This line is a play off a line from anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba “I hate wars, and all the people who love them” from the song Here’s The Rest Of Your Life from their second album Never Mind the Ballots

1 Caged Dreams

October 1, 2013
by Comrade Black
· PE Web Zine · Radness

by Comrade Black

Are you in prison, or locked out?

A cage is a cage
Is a cage
Is a cage
Is a cage
Whether barbed wire
Steal bars
Or build of addiction and fear
It’s the same
Freedom knows no boundaries
Walls
Borders
Or
Shame

A cage is a cage
Is a cage
Is a cage
It’s the same
Human are animals
We all deserve to be free
Not one set of limits for you
And another for me
No prisons, or mink farms
Jails or zoos
No Pet stores
or backyard chicken coops
no psych wards where inmates are held without consent
No ant farms
Or cattle barns
Or pens to breed animals in
Liquor stores or beauty norms
or other forms of boxes to keep people IN.

There is no justification you can give to me that is good enough to continue with this
No matter how many walls, cameras, or cages
We will always resist

Keeping any living being captive without its consent
whether it is to punish them
to eat them
to pet them
or to use their labor or bodies for our needs

A cage is a cage
Is a cage
Is a cage
It’s the same

There’s no walls in a forest, desert, or stream
No bars in the oceans, the sky or in my dreams

0 Free Nyki Poetry Contest!

October 9, 2012
by Comrade Black
· Events · News · Radness

A year has passed since the free Nyki poetry contest. The contest brought hundreds of poets together from across the globe in support of wrongfully convicted artist, poet, and community activist Nyki Kish.

Nyki is still in prison awaiting her appeal and as we wait each day to get her back, she strives for social change from behind prison walls. Art and community are tremendously important to Nyki, lets show her once again that they are important to us too. Submit up to three poems of any length and style before November 1st to freenyki.now@gmail.com to participate.

Approximately 15 poems will be featured in bound for Glory Magazine, a Hamilton Ontario based arts and literary publication, as well they will be published in a contest anthology, which will include last years featured poems as well.

All authors whose poems are featured will receive a copy of bound for glory.
This years top three prizes include a one of a kind hand bound version of the anthology as well as a copy of Nyki’s own anthology.Again,

Submissions are to be sent to freenyki.now@gmail.com

Deadline is November 1st, 2012

Previously published poetry accepted
While we reserve the one time privilege of publishing submitted work in both the magazine and poetry anthology, the author retains all ownership/copy-right over all that they contribute

All poems are considered by Nyki, names of the authors are removed prior to consideration, and while this contest’s coordinators cannot afford to award every contributor a prize, every poem is valuable and a winner in Nyki’s eyes (she even asked that we try to refrain from terms like ‘winners’).

Please do know that every poem serves to brighten Nyki’s day while she struggles through the dark day of prison to get her freedom back.
http://www.freenyki.org/

2 Sprintime is for lovers…of anarcho punk poetry.

April 14, 2012
by stinkbot
· PE Web Zine

Hello poets. We are looking for works of angry, beautiful, enraged, psychotic punk rock poetry.

You game? Write and send it to… zine (AT) profaneexistence (DOT) org

We’ll put it in it’s rightful place. Fanks.

The People’s Poet.

The legendary crust classic is now available once again!

We are happy to announce our next new release

WILT – “Self Titled”

Here is a track from the upcoming LP

“Sermon for the Bootlickers”

Tag: Poetry

0 Pink Cells & Blue Pricks – Thinking Outside The Bars

0 Killing God: Reviewed by Max Wolf Valerio

0 ReWild

2 Never Been So Lucky?

0 Thinking Outside The Bars

1 Caged Dreams

0 Free Nyki Poetry Contest!

2 Sprintime is for lovers…of anarcho punk poetry.