DANGER STANDS BURNING

                          Our pistols are hungry
                          Our tempers are short,
                          We are the cops of the world...

                                                       --Phil Ochs

--danger stands          burning         let's place the

ashes under a rose bush            The "Remembrance Book"

under vigorous attack              smoke curls romantically

from the chimneys of every bedlam-laced "patriotic"

action of "leaders in office"        i.e., ANIMALS THROUGH

GREED & SELFISHNESS DARKLY    & the water is muddied

"ahead of its time"         The circus animals should be

doing the training (braining)      learning that we must

plunder & never remain "lifeless"     (a simple injection

of the simple & effective)          "Should I smile at 

strangers?"    "Desecrate their beautiful landscape?" 

"Consider themselves no better than the milk man?"

"Do you believe that people who have odd or private

interests must be snobs?"     The days of living

"stretched out" far between neighbors with room for

lawns between houses        is over     Humanity placing

its short-term satisfaction ahead of society's needs

"non-socialized individuals increase in number"

ending up in chaos or a police state     Some say

The White House has become a brothel

with the acclaim of its "generous hospitality"

& casserole informality     Where is the intellectual

sterility?       There's gasoline on my hands

The motor inside of my head revvs       prevails in

much of the rest of the country        Others say

that The White House is "haunted"

Sir Thomas Browne said that one could

locate a "ghost" simply because of the

"sulphurious" furious smell            Think of

Carl Jung who adopted Philemon     "servents

of the gods"  in Greek Mythology      as his

"spirit guide" with whom he claimed to have carried

on conversation         just as Socrates did

with his "daimon"   &    Cromwell with his "personal devil"

Is it any wonder that there is such confusion

& misleadings?    A man strolls along           threads through

a block of Marxist engineers who are learning to be ants

learning calisthetics      learning to put together 

their learning: what else?     Rumors echo throughout

the block about a drunk Marxist-Leninist white woman

who is ranting & raving about how her husband 

has been untrustworthy        The entire town is on "alert"

The Commander-in-Chief "makes proper calls" 

from a resort from a hot vacation spot & warns that

the woman may be an "alien with nuclear weapons"

The elasticity of such a "warning" provides unforced

assurance that the odd ominous cries of a loon

from far off may or may not be diluted by

foreign missle-blast-sounds off of our nation's coasts

There was a time where there were tendencies

to prefer an Insider's outlandishness to an

Outsider's merit             Too easy to be content 

to be excluded from what one had regarded as

effete      stagnant      & undemocratic

I dreamt that I visited Seattle          I jumped out 

of an airplane & I still haven't landed

Patterns are set in one's childhood        Those whom are

against censorship often repeat the argument that

no one was ever corrupted by a book                 postcard

beauty of crumbling cities       Must we hammer-out

the remaining coins from the Piggy Bank? 

Something (unseen) in the sky rakes over us 

like lighthouse beams