my mother turned 75 years-old yesterday
and that’s all i know,
about her
anymore
in mid-July, the summer-resident barn swallows who had successfully raised and launched four fledglings by June 23rd, 2025, attempted to raise a second brood;
while i am not absolutely sure if it was the same set of parents or another in the barn swallow community that utilized the nest — as there is a collective of more than a dozen swallows that visits and assists in feeding sometimes too — it is most likely they are the same parent pair;
this is the second summer the barn swallows have nested here in my barn — using last year’s well-constructed nest which they attached to one of the joists like a balcony cantilevered on a Chicago highrise;
i began leaving the overhead barn door open when i first noticed them circling and investigating the barn a few years back; and i was thrilled last year when they began construction of their nest — they were so very welcomed and wanted here — i now know to leave the barn door raised from mid May through July to give them access.
the absurdity of the beauty of this dawn moment,
the absurdity
of the normalization of any moment or day, in life,
of the uninhibited and unselfconscious public documentation of both the ordinary and the excesses of life
simultaneous to
the People of Gaza documenting
Israeli Zionists
confining, starving, shooting, bombing, maiming, killing
and
incinerating
children,
in Palestine.
Today is both the Western and Eastern Christian observation of Good Friday,
and
I contemplate if a future World— or future United States will allocate for and build Holocaust museums to exhibit and narrate the experience of the colonized, expropriated, interned, starved, tortured, raped, beheaded, bombed, incinerated, genocided, and mass-buried Palestinian Peoples?
If one day, an organization will break ground and dedicate “A Museum of the Palestinian Peoples” in Washington DC followed by satellite museums in every major American city — the first one, in Detroit. So that, we all, may “never forget”, again.
Remember that in these United States, we dedicated a National Holocaust Museum in the Capital of Washington DC, before we had a national museum to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of The Transatlantic Slave Trade — the kidnapping, diaspora, torture, murder, rape, sale, enslavement and lynching of Peoples from West and Central Africa and their Black American descendants. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was one of the two pillars of all original wealth in this nation.
This then leads to the fact that we had a National Holocaust Museum in this nation, before we had a national museum in the Capital of Washington DC to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of colonization, theft, genocide, internment, germ warfare, rape, dispossession and diaspora of Indigenous North American Peoples — the companion pillar of all of this nation’s original wealth.
Continue reading “A Holocaust™️”Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,
the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:
Continue reading “The time is NOW for applied anti-fascist actions of resistance and desistance and acts of courage —firstly, by elected and sworn state and local leadership”
Replicating anti anti-fascist and anti anti-zionist propaganda and gaslighting tactics, the political marketing class and sworn officials of the U.S. and New York State Governments cosplay as integrity police and justice arbiters, and attempt to manipulate both the rule of their false law and their false order to condemn, litigate and abolish the law of the streets and resistance movements for liberation and justice.
They will fail.
Continue reading “the war on anti-terror”“What do you do? You wack the C.E.O. at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,”
passage written in a notebook attributed to alleged Anti-Terrorist, Luigi Mangione
if there was a Mother God,
if God was a Mother,
not “were”
this wouldn’t be
our reality
a dying planet
a deadened polity
mass extinction by chainsaw, net,
bolt-gun or bomb
they said, “96% of children in Gaza feel that death is imminent”
in Sudan, the famine is massive,
oh, this reaper, he is very discriminate
in Congo, there’s mass enslavement for minerals,
see the phone in her hand?! her hypocrisy?! she can’t claim to be innocent!
the Pacific’s so hot,
that it’s killed 4 million murres
while the Indigenous still invoke
“cultural rights” to baby seal furs
therefore,
God is either male — or, truer,
the God who created everything,
was the very first one extincted,
as Nietzsche,
and the german thinkers before him,
all, belatedly said,
i am waiting for the bough to break — or, to be severed by proxy at my behest.
earlier this week on my daily walk-about, i noticed that a primary limb, the major artery, on a nearly 80’ tall and likely nearing 100 years-old, elm tree on the land i occupy, had cleaved and that the fracture was migrating down into the trunk — and dangerously so.
i don’t know the cause: if it was the abrupt shift in temperature to freezing here in southwest Michigan — or, if the tree was stressed from a standing-water-wet spring followed by a very dry summer, or if “it” is simply at the end of their life — all the elms here had unusually held onto an abundance of their prolific leaves until the fourth week of November.
no matter.
the matters:
the massive limb of the elm stretches high and precariously over the old barn, and depending on the wind direction, there’s a chance if it falls, it could clip the back of my house or take the whole tree down with it.
i await the tree surgery & removal crew. i am at their and the northerly and westerly gusts’ mercy.
in the meantime, i have also been wrestling with the possible choice of whether to have the crew amputate just the cleaved limbs — if the tree is in fact salvageable — or, to remove the entire tree at once instead of forestalling the inevitable.
Continue reading “waiting for the bough to break”
“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
Regular firearm, deer hunting season began yesterday in Michigan, United States of America, and the crack of rifles and the blast of shotguns destroy both peace and life.
There is some version of a legalized, defined kill list or belated, legalized “protection list” for nearly every non-human animal being population on Earth. And, for human animal being populations on Earth too.
What defines murder for human beings, of the human animal body?
INTENT.
All Hunting is INTENT – intent to kill.
All animal “livestock” agriculture is INTENT — intent to kill for profit.
Genocide is INTENT.
Continue reading “contemplating intent, consent, kill lists and ceasefire: deer hunting season, regular firearm, November 15 – 30, 2024 Michigan, U.S.”
Which party would be better for Israel?
Red or Blue?
Trick Question!
Both, that’s who!
Which party would be better for The People?
Red or Blue?
Trick Question!
Both, hate you!
Did CRAZY HORSE vote his Lakota People out of Dispossession and Genocide?
Did BLACK PEOPLE vote themselves out of Enslavement and American Apartheid?
Did WOMEN vote themselves IRREVOCABLE Equal and Reproductive Rights?
Have the SOLUTIONS to human dispossession, oppression ever been secured at the polls
with votes of RED or BLUE?
LISTEN:
REVOLUTION has been the ONLY DURABLE AMERICAN SOLUTION.
Yet, childlike, playing at history,
& with the future
You color some ovals, You check a box,
And, deny this
TRUTH.
Continue reading “HOW DID CRAZY HORSE VOTE ? — Joffre Stewart”lilacs re-leaf, re-bloom
in October
hummingbird moths feed,
and simultaneously,
She’s un-be-coming a human be-ing
She’s destined to,
we’re destined to, too
no
need to
tell me, explain
what’s happening
as constant witness,
as constant, remote witness to slaughter,
as constant gardener,
as constant tender,
as constant daughter,
i see.
i recognize.
i know,
Continue reading “phenology II”
This past Spring, I saw a Shepard Fairey exhibit at the local art museum: Shepard Fairey: Facing The Giant: 3 Decades Of Dissent.
Shepard Fairey no doubt has a seminal presence in street art — that is, art in public space — in sticker culture, in wheatpaste postering and in muralism. But, he’s also problematic as fuck — problematic to “fair use”, to social movements — and to art itself. I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness — like a true Mad Men, note Ad men and marketers and PR consultants are not artists: they are not even tricksters — they are influencers, marketeers, cons, liars and grifters.
Fairey perhaps most famously helped to elevate Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign with his iconographic HOPE image — Fairey, (perhaps) like tens of millions of us, including myself, bought into Obama’s community organizer/activist history and “hope and change” schtick back in 2008. The shame and pain of decades of systemic, racialized disenfranchisement and inequity were transformed into an incredible electoral energy that was earnestly and hopefully deposited into Obama’s candidacy and presidency; it was then almost immediately disregarded and wasted — and ultimately, profoundly regretted by progressives. Only after his first term was nearly complete did “we” learn and process that Obama was a neo-liberal capitalist centrist cloaked in folksy voice and progressive-populist clothing — we witnessed him betray us again and again — and become a prolific drone-strike-executioner-in-chief as well as Wall Street’s and Rahm Emanuel’s punk-ass bitch.
I want to be more precise and say: he has an ejaculative presence in art in public space: his stuff is ubiquitously and frequently splattered — and sticky in the public consciousness.
The Obama HOPE image stands as a reminder and a joke of hope placed in any Democrat or Republican politician — any. Thank you for that, truly, Shepard Fairey.
But, some among us may still not know — that Fairey had misappropriated the photograph on which the iconic Obama HOPE poster was based, without credit or compensation to the copyright holder — falsely citing “fair use” — Fairey subsequently destroyed evidence about the actual unfairness of his use which amounted to theft, fraud and obstruction. Fairey settled with the copyright owner and also plead guilty for contempt of court.
Fairey has also reproduced and exhibited images of actual, bonafide Black power and liberation icons (Angela Davis notwithstanding) — and has been rightly interrogated about his cultural appropriation. On the surface, his work may pass as homage to great People and powerful movements, but it can also be interpreted as an artistic “black face” — and as an attempt to co-opt that which is not his in order to elevate his own vanilla, half-woke vibe — and of course, to cash-in. He remains defiant in his approach to cultural appropriation.
they will betray
with their
portfolio and corporate profit-taking,
dependence on and loyalty to government, organizations, institutions and electoral politics,
cultural appropriation, displacement, dispossession, exploitation, and gentrification of the historically and contemporaneously oppressed
greenhouse gas & carbon footprint privilege and exceptionalism,
ecocide by appetite, consumerism, and growth/development — physical, geographical and technological,
ultimate loyalty to the State and its forces for maintenance and protection — of their own wealth and property, and of private and corporate property, and of The System at the expense of People’s liberation and abolition movements
and finally,
by their neutrality to
particular
fascism and genocide.
In a world where genocide unfolds before our very eyes, shielded by nation-state rhetoric and bolstered by the imperial powers of our times, we bear witness to unspeakable horrors. This witnessing is not metaphorical – it is stark reality. To witness now is to be complicit; ignorance is no excuse, and inaction is cowardice.
The global state structure, which dominated the 20th century, not only allows but actively enables genocide in Gaza and elsewhere in this world. Every genocide is perpetuated by a state. This machinery of destruction, guided by settler colonialism, fueled by capitalism, empowered by technological might, and covered by complicit media giants, must be dismantled. We are confronted with ongoing efforts to alienate us from our political agency and the ability to strive towards a moral and just world for all. We ask: If this level of atrocity is now acceptable, then what is deemed unacceptable? We must reconsider what structures national identities have produced and restore our severed connection to the land as a source of our identity and political existence.
The Palestinian struggle and resistance comes to remind us of what should not be forgotten: the people and the land embody each other, in time and place. It is within this unbreakable bond that we envision the future, it is within this bond that we learn from the past, and through it we engage with our present. We refuse the state of the world: the brutality of maintaining the hegemony of the powerful and the complicity of those who turn a blind eye to injustice.
The Zionist state’s atrocities permeate every level of existence. It devours all human knowledge and science by utilizing technology and social engineering to produce killing target and destruction lists. Within these new artificial intelligence technologies, every total meaning can be devoured, every total meaning can kill.
Now is the time for art and poetry. For art
that rejects the logic of prevailing power. For poetry that resists the totalizing narratives that fuel the killing machines of the perpetrator. Art is inherently political-in its message, production, and presentation. It engages with society, assuming a role either in complicity or resistance.
We must defend our agency as political beings,
stateless as humanity itself, collective as what
our societies are, we are bound to organize an
resist on multiple fronts to halt the genocide
and prevent it as a future.
Art and poetry represent our liberated knowledge, freed from the belly of the beast. This moment demands that we reclaim our political agency; in its clarity, it empowers us to turn imagination into affirmative actions, forging poetic structures of collectivity-a return to the essence of our humanity. We belong to the world, to the earth, to the land, and through this agency, we move, act, and refuse to be silent accomplices to the state’s atrocities. We cannot ignore the oppressive conditions under which creativity thrives. Faced with censorship co-option, we must resist glorifying the regime or fading into obscurity.
Continue reading ““PALESTINE IS THE WORLD IN ITS FUTURE TENSE””
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 