RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Mother T Go Home (Tropical Bunga in Reverse)”

Mother T Go Home (Tropical Bunga in Reverse)

Necessary victims of the freeze dried

The white ice of deadly progress

No harpoon redress

Trust only hastened the inevitable

Amongst mineral rights and the Sovereign

And commercial Arctic Ventures

Spouted from dollared dentures

Accompanied by expanding markets

Fishing guidelines for the sub 49er’s

Searching for char

Presents of sealskin dolls

Fabricated at venerealized encampments

Foistered by fiats of ministerial hacks

White sympathy

Tempered by budget allocations

Remainders from ministerial vacations

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “Job Interview”

Job Interview

Yelps and barks of circus seals

Tenuously balancing sparkling balls

Adequately

But

Not dangerously ostentatious

Don’t ruffle the placid master

Your audience

But then don’t underplay

Even though

Regulations and conventions dictate a certain humility

Statutory interpretation on the trapeze act

The tumble can be wicked

Return to delaying promises and options prudently promised

Optionally false for the survival of the dream bureaucracy depends on that illusion

And the salaries of the wizards and silver haired corporate beggars

Rattle tin cups against the rages of the market

Discretely of course

The pounding on the door louder of nespotitcless victims

Who contemplate the tragedy thought personal

Yet almost universal

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: That Oft Used Parental Expression “When I’m Dead….” (Georges Simenon)

“This was the first time since I’d been with you in the room where you were slowly dying that you spoke, even indirectly, of death. When I was a child and then a young man, you often spoke of it, I’d almost say with satisfaction. ‘ When I’m dead children…..’ Or: ‘You’ll understand when I’m gone……”

But that was more than fifty years ago. Now that death is lurking in your room, so as to speak, you don’t say a word about it. You don’t seem to fear it. I imagine that you accept it and that sometimes you’re even a little impatient to find it so slow in coming.”

Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.

RKS Literature: What Else Could it be But Hatred? (Georges Simenon)

“When I speak of hatred, I’m not exaggerating. True, I wasn’t there. But when a husband and wife living under the same roof get to the point where each does his own cooking, each keeping his provisions in his own locked food cupboard, and one waits for the other to vacate the kitchen before getting his own dinner, what other explanation is there?”

Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970.

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds):”Casino COVID”

Casino COVID

Caught in slot machine blur

Praying for the jackpot of herd immunity

Big Pharma legislated impunity

The three cherries of hurriedly tested vaccine untested for the long term

Could be worse than the germ!

RNA concoctions messing with our genes

Holy shit where are the simpler days of captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans?

Displaced by the politico-medico teams

Opening, closing, duplicating and replicating surges and waves

Killing and maiming more?

Similar to an infected whore

Misjudged again and again

Ruining the economy and the health of all

Crazy focus on a virus but in a casino you know who always wins?

The house

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: Merciless Judging of Parents by Their Children (Georges Simenon)

“Today I realize that a couple with children is not just a couple. And sometimes they forget it. Near them in the house, almost always present, there are children who watch them and, in the measure of their own intelligence, judge them.

The parents think of themselves as simply a father and a mother. But they are wrong. They are two individuals whose every gesture, word and glance are judged mercilessly.”

Georges Simenon, “Letter to My Mother”, 1970

RKS Poetry Anthology (All We Get Are The Coffee Grinds): “The Unofficial Mission”

The Unofficial Mission

Sleek

And silent

The 52 birds knife up through Da Nang tropical air

And when over their target

Spawn the hot roe of doom

Upon the suspecting unsuspecting below

Leaks to the Fifth Estate

“NAPALM BURNS AND MAIMS 700”

In a private conference the generals and politicos are Most Disturbed

Shouting “God damned press bastards”

While millions with temporary interest

Gobble down the evening meal gawking the evening news

And agree with the generals

That it was the gooks, commies, Ho and Cong

With their propaganda machine

Smith and Jones thought it all deserved less attention

After all war is war

So open up another can of beer and switch to Hogan’s Heros and Rat Patrol

Where was and will

War films fun and

Painless

Robert K. Stephen

RKS Literature: Harlem’s Sense of Community Before Its Collapse (James Baldwin)

“When I say I was luckier than the children are today I am deliberately making a very dangerous statement, a statement that I am willing, even anxious, to be called on. A black boy born in New York’s Harlem in 1924 was born of southerners who had but lately been driven from the land and therefore was born into a southern community. And this was incontestably a community in which every parent was responsible for every child. Any grown-up seeing me doing something he thought was wrong, could (and did) beat my behind and then carry me home to my Mama and Daddy and tell them why he beat my behind. Mama and Daddy would thank him and then beat my behind again.”

James Baldwin, “Dark Days”, 1980.

RKS Literature: Can a White Person Ever Know What a Black Person is Talking About? (James Baldwin)

“I hit the streets when I was seven. It was in the middle of the Depression and I learned how to sing out of hard experience. To be black was to confront, and be forced to alter, a condition forged in history. To be white was to be forced to digest a delusion called white supremacy. Indeed, without confronting the history that has either given white people an identity or divested them of it, it is hardly possible for anyone who thinks himself as white to know what a black person is talking about at all. Or to know what education is. “

James Baldwin, “Dark Days”, 1980.