Deep Green Rising
by William P. Benz
"We who have remained in Madrid are still eating." ~ reply from the Communist Defenders of Madrid to Socialist Prime Minister Caballero’s request for the silverware he left behind in his hasty abdication preceding the City’s Siege by Fascist Franco, November, 1936.
Beneath a threshold of sensibility there drones a set of electromagnetic frequencies, cleaved & pigeonholed into doing the Work of the so called, Commonwealth. Which now, is neither Wealth, nor Common. Cramming airways, it saturates what’s left of our Heartfelt Tangibility —dowsing our Bodies with pulses & oughts. Our Blessed Body, ripened in the Late Pleistocene to sniff & smell & sup & taste, to sniff & smell & hump & baste, & NOT obsess, or think, or meditate our selves apart. Transfused within this Storm, our cells are flooded daily by trillions of flashes from CNN, modulated by crooning popsongs extolling a cartoon version of Love & other comic forms of Ass Deadening Fantasy, Layered with mindless communiqués —the ETAs of strung out truckers wired on whites, the incessant yabbering of SUVers wired on cellphone tripe, —dispatches to Police & other Sweepers of the Street as to the whereabouts of the Most Recent Roadkill. Electrons, divergent & spewing forth the slip & rise of stock & bonds that float Inanities about a Wealth, hollow to its very core. So how do we Amplify ourselves Above this wasted current & tune out the Sitcom called Prosperity & exit the Superhighway leading Nowhere, fast? Should we Compete in Kind by Jacking up to a Feverish Pitch? To oscillate between smashing a storefront, here, setting fire to a dumpster, there? Or letting some plastic bullets black & blue us? Or getting gassed, pummeled by Masked Men wielding Batons, promoting compulsive shoppers? If we do ourselves in only doing that the Citadel of Culture will remain intact as we mimic our own unraveling and further forget Our Basic Naked Truth. It’s this Hunger for that Remembrance which allows us to refuse their Menu for Revolt —crammed with pre-ordained entrée, Lusciously complete with all the seditious & insurgent trimmings. Pushed into our Hands before the Warmth of Our Fingers & Connecting Breath can draw us through the Hidden, Swinging Gates, As the Paradigm that dominates, supplies the Scripts for Revolution, insuring no one slips out the Corral, Scripts to Vent our Rage & exhaust our meager resources. Scripts to enforce the Habit of Acquiring Power, & thus, ensure our Flaccid Demise. With CNN cued to pixilate the color image & flash us back as News to ourselves. So the next morning, the Sleepy Courts can process the Newly Captive. So Judges & Jailers & Probation Scabs can herd us through Judicial Feed Lots to be fattened into Criminal before butchering our meat To serve as tidbits, Rewards for those still huddled together, Obeying their Law. To truly liberate ourselves we must know what we are not. No need to tear down walls already stinking from internal rot. To truly liberate ourselves we must truly know what we are not. In knowing that, this Smorgasbord of Uselessness becomes something we can eat. A Meal, to satisfy our flesh & blood not only in the particulars of yours & mine, but in the Forgotten, Collective OUR. The Collective OUR that never needs to catch the Evening News, or Search the WEB for feeble versions of what it Always Knows. A Meal of Knowing we All turn on a Single Orb, By Day, to Feast upon a Rising Sun. By Night, to clean our Silver Plate by lapping up the Light together & Howling beneath a Remembered Moon, whether visible or not.
Dedicated to those who gave their lives on the banks of Fuentes de Ebro, 1938, to stop the march of Fascism & to my Sisters & Brothers who live their lives today doing the same.