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you know what they're gonna do, don't you?
~ michael o'mccarthy ~
they are gonna grab us by our hair
and drag us into the daylight –
or midnight spotlight lit streets
kicking and clubbing and stomping us
batting our lips swollen and bloody
screaming militant, rabble rousers,
misfits, revolutionary, faggot, lesbo,
queer, homo, communist, nigger, kike,
spic, redskin, polak, wop, chink, mick,
just like they have now these
three hundred free years.
they will tear open our stomachs
with bonefish hooks,
tow out our intestines
behind their navigators, mercedes
and escalades suv towing packages
daring us to continue to dissent.
twisting off our sexual nipples,
ripping away our fecund testes,
pulling away our tumescent cocks,
prying off our throbbing clitorises,
filling our fertile anuses with
fast drying cement,
in the effort to render us impotent like them.
won’t you stand up now.
take just one hand.
just one,
and grasp it
and say no.
you don’t have to go anywhere
at first.
just stand there.
let the tears of life come.
begin to hum no.
sing the song no,
murmur no
and look each other
in the eyes
and smile no.
no to the cruel, frigid whiteness of their
thin lipped kaw-kasion drawn skin
covering their nazi death skulls beneath.
no to their jesus who never lived.
no to their god who,
except disguised in the white kaw-kasion
skin of charleston heston,
never cursed humankind
nor bore arms
to murder those left.
or they will summon you
before their shining mahogany desk
housed on the 199 floor
of their new trade center building
seat you politely
and with a disdainful smile
terminate you without pay
or severance or extension
of benefits without reason
except the needs of business,
nothing personal.
call for security and march you
a criminal
down the hall past your
ex-colleagues,
descend you in the elevator
like their god would send you
to hell,
and out of the suddenly silent lobby
standing you in the street
as your stockings
or socks hang below
your ankles,
and your new non-shrink
frilled-necked, appropriate blouse
and business lengthened skirt
or business-dress shirt and tie
shrinks around your shaking
sweat soaked body.
and there you stand
post mortem,
as a promising rigid clerk,
who has never heard of,
much less read,
ferlinghetti, ginsburg, kerouc, or wakoski,
or heard miles, coltrane, sarah,
billie, much less bessie,
brings out your personal belongs
in a brown cardboard box
and sits them at your feet
because contact may be contagious.
either way
what you know as your life
is over,
if you don’t begin to say
no right now.
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