Friday, March 7, 2014

When The Corporation is a Person, F O'H's "Personism" is Corporatism


(possible prelude to a post-Citizens United Poetics...)

When A Corporation is a Person,
What does it make the rest of us?

When the corporation is a person,
You have to be a corporation
To be called, and treated as, a person,
And be granted those rights
In the eyes of the law.

They say the corporation is a person,
And they say that doesn’t really change
the meaning of “person”
You may say “oh, they don’t really mean it?
It’s just the law.”
Just the law….
Just the language….
But it changes the meaning of person…

If the corporation is a person,
Then every so-called SELF-HELP Book
Is really a Corporation Help book--
self-as-opposed to other (non collaborative)
Helping the corporations crush
Who we really are, what we can be…


So how are we going to get through that,
Get around that?
Can we take back the P-word?
Do we even want to take back the word "person"?
The word “person” was always rooted in mask…
And some could speak through it,
But others only got 60% of it, three-fifths,
So never got the right to speak and be heard…

Put a corporation next to a person,
The corporation is going to win.
Put a lot of people who aren’t corporations together,
And maybe they can circle the person,
Gang up on the self
At least until the corporation tells us
That “we’re self loathing, self-hating.”
And maybe we are…

What if enough of us got together
And refused to let anybody call us a person or self?
As if calling us that were the worse racial,
Ethnic or classist slur?
And started using the word “person” as a put-down..
Fuck you, you’re acting like a real person, a real self,
A real anti-democratic prick of a corporation!
Worse than being a “pig.”
Change the language--
Make their words meaningless, change the reality

And when one of their doctors
Writes us up some prescriptions
Because we suffer from the disease
Of hating ourselves,
Can we say or sing
“I do not hate myself. I hate THE SELF.
YOUR corporate-ass self.?”

(to be continued.....
In search of COLLABORATORS....)


Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Poem KPOO


Poem (part 1)

If I ever teach a course
In contemporary American poetry again,
I must include KPOO
Even though it’s officially
A radio station more than a poem…
Do you already understand this?
Do you want to know why this
Makes sense to me?
This poetry course
Wouldn’t have to exclude
The things you include
In your definitions of poetry
But it could include
Much more of the essences
That have been excluded
By these definitions….
Do you already understand this?
Can you consider this?

it's the epic, lyric, 
anthology,
polyvocal play of 
the decentered multi-media
intersiciplinary self as community
etc...