THE WAY IT IS
J.W. told me tonight
that Mitch the Chippewa
died two nights ago.
“Over-exposure and drink.
39 years old.” “And he had
a bad ticker,” said Gyzmo’s
friend, coming into the Bar
mainly to whisper some stash
of a deal into J.W.’s ear.
The Tenderloin Times says
108 or 109 died homeless
this year, but we know many
more simply could no longer
bear the excellent San Francisco
food fare. They preferred
choice cuts of wrist or night
dives where you’d never hear
the bodies hit the water, or just
wasting away till they were
nothing but filthy cardboard
itself that the garbage men
slap together and fling into
they ass of their truck, never
knowing they’ve just liberated
even the dead from an American
concentration camp, all things
being equal in human beings now.
*********************************
THE TRUMPBENIK ARCANE
1.
Here’s what happened
on the Internet,
which is what we have
to call life by: I ran across
some words
of the Trumpbenik
to the effect that the most
disregarded, misunderstood man
in modern times
is Joseph Stalin!
And the next day
when I looked again,
though I Googled and Binged
high and low for them
I couldn’t find them,
as if they’d never existed
or the President
had given orders
they be removed,
they were Fake News,
or one of his fascist
anarchoid buddies
like Bannon in a payback
for having been forced out
of the government,
or some joker of a Trotskyite
who wanted to undermine
the image the Prez was daily
tweeting and whipping
Donald Trump on his rump,
because one thing’s sure:
between the billionaire
thuggery that that ass
in the Shite House
has accumulated at
the expense of the exploited
American working class
and the daily poverty
that the leader
of the Soviet Union
and of the people there
who destroyed Hitlerian
Nazism at the cost
of millions of lives,
an abyss exists,
an abyss that includes
the revolutionary study
of Marxist and Leninist
writings, the organization
of the robbery of banks
to help fund the new
Bolshevik party with
the money stolen from
the people by likes of
the rumpy Trumpbenik,
who wouldn’t know
what a real street was
if it upped and stepped on
the curb of his lip.
2.
I’m laying it on the line:
do you think that
second-rate teevee clown
knows the first thing
about the revolutionary
ideas of Karl Marx?
He knows Nothing,
which has made him
all and everything
in his own mind.
He’s narcissistically
Nothinged his song,
which has been his
singular gift:
Divide! And let me
rule in a land where
only money’s ego counts.
Divide and rule! Divide
and conquer by tweet,
by poisonal penning,
rheumantically dead schmalz.
Like in the 2nd Debate
when after stalking
the Clinton dame
he was asked five questions:
by a Black citizen,
a Caucasian citizen,
a Chicano citizen,
an Asian-American citizen,
a Native American citizen,
and he answered not a one.
He no sooner began his
responses when he shifted
into a personal attack on
Clinton, so that anyone,
after such dismissals
of his brothers and sisters,
who would vote for him
was simply stupid
and that’s why, given
the stupidity ruling
this country damned
to endure the monstrosity
of a lieing clown who
has nothing to do
with the dignity
of the American people—
Oh, Melania, before
we start calling you a slut
of sluts and a sucker
of billionaire cock,
Presto the Generalissimo,
who’ll make sure real
laughter rules again,
from CNN to the butterflies
fluttering out of the mouth
of Huckabee. Stalin affirms
the People in knocking off
this flock of white supremesists
and the thug-hustler Nazism
that’s stinking up the land.
*********************************
THE BLUE XUL ARCANE
1.
Yuri with the perpetual scowl,
chain-smoking Yuri with
sapphire-blue pupils beneath
beetling eyebrows,
Yuri in double-breasted suit
white shirt and tie, war medals
pinned over his heart, a lover
of cats, with impish flashes
of humor, who asked comrades
to call him Don Jorge for he felt
Mexican at heart, who was death-
threatened by a paramilitary
fascist grouping when he came to
Guatemala in 1990, had to go
underground, escaped some days
later, and died alone of pneumonia
in a corridor of a Leningrad hospital
a year before the new Millennium.
At 30 he’d cracked the Mayan code,
a year before Joseph Stalin died,
and yet for more than 20 years after
was savaged year after year in print
by the leading Western Mayanist,
James Eric Sidney Thompson,
whose scholarship and sophistication
were so winning, they hid his virulent
anti-communism, who read the glyphs
of the stone trees simply as hieroglyphs.
2.
Time is a sound, Yuri said. Time is a
sign, said J. Eric. No sign without its
relation to a phonetic, Yuri said.
- Eric called him a Red, he couldn’t
be right, couldn’t have broken the code.
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was a
Red menace, a Soviet communist, his
breakthrough a Marxist hoax,
a propaganda ploy which he discovered
nestling in the lap of Marxist philosophy.
Thus J.E.S.T. Thus Thompson whose
myopia kept Mayan decipherment
20 years in the dark through the sheer
force of his mystical will, wit and scorn.
Even “King” Solzhenitsyn, interviewed
on the bench outside the church he’d built
for himself in his massive New England
garden, decried the Soviet landscape in the
‘70s, which was still dotted with “’little
stalins’ like Knorozov.”
In this dark time, which poses itself before
the mirror, which is lemo’, that also means
the word, reflecting its greed, which it denies:
Te-Tun,Te-Tun, Stone-Trees, Stele you that
have mouths that like strong drink and the sound
of words, sound an Izibongo for one of the
splendid heroes of the mind’s eternal quest to
root the seen in the sounds they were born with.
3.
Kin
Tun
Katun
Baktun
itz am
na C
I the
new mu
sic thir
teen tones
sur pass
sing the
B U
T full
mount ain
Kin
Tun
Katun
Baktun
ca tu
quix cur
chah haz
ca me
quix tu
bu cur
ho gua
ca ma
ya chah
Kin
Tun
Katun
Baktun
And Cuceb Gilgul, the revolutions
of Jaguar Thunder—B’alam Toj—erupt
with the monster Earthquake running
around loose all over the planet:
dam tzfar
dey ah
kin im
ar ov
de ver
sh’ khim
bar ad
ar beh
kho shekh
ma kat
b’kho tat
Kin
Tun
Katun
Baktun
XTAAAAAAAAAA!
TAAAAAAAAAAJ!!
TOOOOOOOON!
TZAAAAAAAAM!
JO’!
*********************
THE BLACK FIRE ARCANE
In Memory of Nelson Peery
In black fire
in white fire,
the name of one
who moved me to
unite with him,
his Sue Ying,
and other comrades
who formed in the ‘70s
the Communist Labor
Party, Presente!
A principled, courageous
troupe of Marxist-Leninists
refusing to not read the
works of Joseph Stalin,
teaching them as well;
and when the CLP dissolved
voluntarily in ‘92 becoming
for the next few years the
National Organizing Committee,
Presente!,
and I got down trenchwise
with Sarah Menefee and the
homeless and the poorest,
got busted a bunch with Food
Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails,
with poems and sales of the
People’s Tribune of the soon
to be League of Revolutionaries
for a New America (LRNA),
ever Presente!,
that enduring comrade,
the one who, even before
I’d met him (he was but ten
years older than me, like
these ten-lined strophes
hopefully inscribing a dignity
and boundless respect for one
so magnificently present),
lived through WW 2 with
his youthful Black fire,
his radical Black fire, this
African-American mensch
(as Tony Ryan calls him)
of a mason who’d have
fought with the Huks in
The Philippines after WW2,
if they hadn’t told him to
return to the States, organize
a resistance there. Where he
became an authentic spirit of
dialectical materialism
in action, a humanely
sage communist writing
the true stuff ‘til his last
day at age 92. So this isn’t
some eulogy mourning him
who passed away, because
he hasn’t—not last week,
not next week, not next year
or the next generation.
May to peery be a new verb
in our language, meaning
to give and receive the
respect of all human beings
as equals and manifesting
everywhere in New Class
consciousness bound for
transformation and the glory
come from such a one as
Nelson Peery, Presente!
*************************
THE THROUGHTH* ARCANE
*an aspect of the etheric double
1.
The death only this kind of living lives now:
Party of the third part,
voice in the handwriting
amid cricket-cry,
cock-crow,
the stream song running through my palm
into the ink,
your clairvoyant cough upon the page,
son of a running brushstroke
and the starry body of Kim Van Kieu,
with your small rattan suitcase,
your traveling inkwell and papers,
on the other side of death’s cheekbones
and the kaka of the narcotic cry
of the world’s trade, where you emerge,
etheric double:
Nguyen Sinh Cung at birth,
Nguyen Tat Thanh at 10,
kitchen boy and pastry cook in Saigon
alias Ba, the cabin boy in Marseilles
and Africa, crumpet-maker in Soho,
scrounging for crumbs in Harlem,
for francs you could scrape together
in the Bamboo Dragon in Paris:
You who wish a living remembrance
of your parents, have your foto retouched
at Nguyen Ai-Quoc’s. Handsome portraits
and handsome frames for only 45 francs.
9, Impasse Compoint, Paris, dix-septieme.
The Black race in Moscow two days
after Lenin is gone.
Father to no one. The open-toed sandals
of victory. You change your name
in China to Tong Van Sox,
known to the OSS as Ho Chi Minh.
2.
Desinence upon the end,
Desinence upon the double entendre of the End,
desidence upon the paradox of freedom,
who played the dangerous game
only a true poet could,
to lighten the darkness at home,
to free Kim from the 2,000 years
of the rotting piastres of reincarnation,
to raise the dark fist flowering in the face
at the showers of bombs from the Red River
to the Mekong:
two rice baskets with mountains poled between
that the whole world shoulders now,
like the coolie Ba,
like Nguyen, defender of Connolly in Ireland,
like Tong, imprisoned with his poems
and a mind that could talk to itself
in French Russian English Mandarin and German
yearning for 30 years to cry
Doc-Lap! Doc-Lap!
Independence for the poor
through the walls of cyanide and dead money,
for the small shoots of Spring
in a whirl and vortex of dance
across the parallels north and south.
3.
Your death’s the mingling stems
seeding somersaults and high-binding
leaps over and into the seasons
of the smuggles of love,
with transmigrating hearts
recollected collectively,
passing through stone without
any either/or but at the speed
of ether now,
of the essence of our fathers’ brothers,
of the essence of our brothers
Roberto and Udi Adiv and Rene now
in the rain of sunlight bowing
the knot of wild gauchos, mad bonzes,
and the 79 Springtimes of Santiago
seeing through, singing Throughth
to the man within, and the woman
within your death petaling petaling
outward the bicycles whose wheels
are roses red and black blossoming
in your exile home.
*******************
THE SOVIET
CENOTAPH
ARCANE
1.
When my eyes fell
upon their tears,
they couldn’t keep
from remembering,
and I stammer at the
memory of my own
beholding it, what I’d
never known about,
never saw a mention
of—not a one—in
my 34 years in the
communist movement.
No article I’d ever read
referenced it, neither in
Russian nor in German,
and not in American.
What I’d seen on May 8,
Liberation Day, in that
shrine 10 hectares long,
created collectively by
sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich,
architect Yakov Belopolski,
artist Alexander Gorpenko,
and engineer Sarra Valerius,
was: my whole life, from
before I even was born,
and then, having been
born in 1933 to destroy
the bestial force born that
same year, a power which
mocked,
derogated,
maliciously dismissed,
trashed,
imprisoned,
tortured and killed
not simply me when
a child or adolescent,
but even now and
into the future:
“I was and I am!” and
this isn’t some esoteric
Arcane, though the
memorial Cenotaph,
with its drop-mouth sheer
size and perfect symmetry
intrinsic to its form, is a
schrei of silence, a mysterium.
2.
Past time one wants
to redeem is the future
one is present for. A
foto can’t capture it.
Absolutely cannot!
Nor can photos of the
statue of Motherland
grieving for her dead
sons near the entrance,
or photos of any of
the sarcophagi reveal
the feeling of the Park.
You may google them,
computer images, even
videos, will appear but
they’ll mean very little.
You must go there!
I’m not pitching a tour!
You must go there
to feel and understand
what your life’s about,
what’s happened to it
and all you loved since
Yevgeny Vuchetich
completed the towering
statue of the soldier who
saved a tiny 3 year-old
German girl from death
in the battle and today
carries her at his shoulder
high over the stairway
and Grove of Honor below.
You must go there
with me, now!
We’re going to see
a hymn,
a socialist realist
hymn,
perhaps the most
extraordinary work
of sculpture fused with
a threnody of stillness
creating an apotheosis
of modern classicism.
3.
You’ll become originary
in this solemn ground!
Time will stop for you.
Uhr will doff its cap
and, with a good and
gentle smile, will be-
come Ur in you as
it’s made me become
so ontologically
intense, as after the
death of a friend,
when life insists,
as if he were still
talking to you, on
continuing, but—
after this, which is,
after all, after that
which, immeasurable,
is still resonating so
—differently.
And I write here and
now KEHTABP in
the Cyrillic letters
I’ll forever love,
the first word I wrote
in Russian one night
in 1976 in Specs Bar
in North Beach, San
Francisco, California,
the United States, the
World,—finished my
first poem in that
language and for the
next 11 years wrote
a poem in Russian
between two written
in American virtually
every single day,
I’m pleased to say,
and to the: Why?
Because the weight
of death is heavy, the
Soviet Union had be-
come champions of
sacrifice in defense of
the Revolution its 16
republics had sustained.
Because a pack of bigot
political whores, year
after year, decade upon
decade, had poisoned
the minds of my own
countrymen with filthy
hatred against Russian
people and even against
the Soviet government
that had been born to
lead an international
charge. From the very
start its Revolution
had been mocked,
denied,
maliciously
dismissed,
invaded,
comrades jailed,
tortured,
killed—
so, yes, KEHTABP for
I love a centaur image
of half-man half-horse
and would lay there
in my unconsciousness
as a boy mythologizing
it in mind. And maybe,
when I wrote that first
poem in Russian I was
thinking not only of
Kent State but Kent
McCarthy, barman
in Specs who’s long
since died of a rotten
hotshot overdose he
accepted one sleazy
early morning: so yes,
fuck you, capitalist U.S.,
for him, but not only:
for the millions upon
millions of dead, near-
dead or anonymously
dying souls in this den
of drugs run by pukes
of runaway rotting
greeds, Wall Street
mafia crapshooters,
markets with golden
oil pissing out of corp-
orate penises jammed
into global butt-mobiles.
And for East Berlin and
Peace rallies after 1945;
for Joliet-Curie, whose
sister was blessed with a
radiant soul for a brother;
for Paul Robeson, noblest
American artist of the past
two generations; for Terri
Winter, my adolescent love
who opened my eyes to the
whole dream for the first
time; for Pablo Neruda, poet
who’s remained with us all;
for the Associated Press tele-
typist in the execution room
weeping out each letter,
taking a lifetime, no, two
as life was taken out of the
Rosenbergs: the copyboy
tissues with the story on
them that I had to spike
on the editors’ desks
around that vast office
arrived wet with tears;
for René Depestre, all
of 19, with no alas to his
name then, who was a
Haitian comet; for Steve
Nelson and the Daily
Worker and the Jefferson
School; for I.F.Stone; for
Jennings Perry (google him,
he’s here too); for the many
Nedicks workers and those
in the Automat, and those
in Unions kicked in the teeth
by a fascist Taft-Hartley Law;
for masterful comrades like
Nelson Peery, and Fran Furey,
bus-driver Bobby Jordan, who
in truth’s time never swerve;
for Charlie and Miles bop-
ping on 52nd St.; for every
thing making me curious
and opening wide; for the
women in the sweatshops
on 149th St. in The Bronx
before there was sex, or
just as girls were beginning
to be afreud, and shrinks
got under the masses’ skin;
for the Communist Labor
Party and Sue Ying, and
Willie Baptist in the Tom
Mooney Bookstore on
Valencia St., where I first
asked for the poems of
the man known as
The Devil
The Monster,
The Serial Killer,
The Destroyer
of Communism,
The Worse Than Hitler
Twice Over,
and whose words on each
of the 16 sarcophagi in this
Soviet Cenotaph, written
in stone between 1947-49,
—texts you can’t find on
any google file, words and
ideas un-censored only
by going to the Cenotaph
itself—are the reason the
Event of the Park known
as Ehrenmal Treptow has
been removed from your
humanity and overlooked
as if it were nothing more
than propaganda etched
in stone for the curious.
4.
Through the arched entrance
on Pushkin Alley: a distant
statue in springtime in snow
in lightning rain or sunshine
of Motherland seated, raised
up on two granite plinths, her
head lowered in grief, her left
arm ending in a clench of her
cloak over her heart that’s also
her courage and resolve, Along
an avenue of birch trees then
you come to a wide portal of
two huge red granite pylons
in the form of soviet flags and
beneath each a young and an
old soldier, both kneeling,
helmets in hands, heads lowered
as solemn guardians of the way
to the Grove of Honor some
steps below. Under its grass
the 4,800 Red Army men and
women are buried. To the left,
a series of 8 white marble
sarcophagi, each separated by
about 100 feet, showing aerial
attacks on Soviet villages by
“Hitlerian villains who wanted
to enslave or eliminate peoples
of the Ukraine, Belarus, Baltics,
Crimea and the Caucasus.”
Showing also seeds of partisan
resistance, the contribution of
workers to the Red Army, the
unity of army, the people and
the Party, rifles raised to the
distance under an image
of Lenin. Extolling defenders
of besieged Russian cities.
And then the battle of Berlin
and the courage, sacrifice and
sorrow of the Red Army. The
act of liberation contrasting the
Soviet ideology of harmony
among peoples to the Hitler—
fascist ideology of bestial
nationalism and race hatred.
And the final sarcophagus
evokes a funeral ceremony
for a fallen soldier who
fought for the liberty and
independence of the USSR:
Victory, and Heroic Death,
with texts written into the
stone on the spine of each
bas-relief in Cyrillic by
J. Stalin,
which texts are translated
into German and appear on
8 marble replicas on the right
side of the Grove, the total
of 16 representing all the
republics that comprised the
Soviet Union. In the center
of the two series of sarcophagi,
up the steps of the kurgan, an
ancient Russian burial mound
under which 200 more Soviet
soldiers lie buried, where you
can look through a window
silled with flowers on this Day
of Liberation and see the 16
Union republics’ delegates
in a semicircle in the many-
colored mosaic mausoleum,
all eyes upon a radiant blue
ledger in which is written
the names of all the soldiers
buried in the Grove and under
the kurgan hill. And from the
roof of that mausoleum, which
is a huge pedestal, the giant
figure, nearly 35 feet high,
of Nicolai Ivanovich Masalov,
holding the German girl on his
arm, his sword lowered, his foot
stepping on a broken swastika.
5.
Slava! Slava! Slava, Geroiam!
Slava! Slava! Slava, Geroiam!
I declaim it as I’ve sung it for
a generation, the triumphal
Requiem of R. Rozhdestvensky,
a summit of song on the Orphic
mountain of the truth of life that
Rilke understood as “Gesang ist
Dasein”: Song is Existence; and
because, when I ask myself and
am asked by myselves: What’s
the most significant historical
event in the life of the 20th
century to now. the event which
all subsequent events—wars,
murders, suicides, natural
disasters— resonate with?
From the mountain’s height
of song, the Park of the Soviet
Cenotaph below, —its shape
a long coffin where the body
of your life is lying in a state
of soul enclosed by trees with
leaves of grass all around—
the second generation since the
end of the war 66 years ago
lifts its voice and sings its reply:
Slava! Slava! Slava, Geroiam!
__________________________________________
Jack Hirschman is a prolific revolutionary and communist poet, painter, writer, agitator, multi-lingual translator and culture-maker. Hirschman has written more than 50 volumes of poetry, translated dozens of work into English and was named San Francisco Poet Laureate in 2006. Generous with his poetry and art making, Hirschman is a human force for deep social justice and revolutionary consciousness; he is a leader in the Revolutionary Poets Brigade and
Read “Chorosho! An Auto/Biographical Sketch of Jack Hirschman” here.
Photograph of Jack Hirschman at the Caffe Trieste by John Perino.
