<PoeticTerrorism>   Body Attributes (  

Welcome to Poetic Terrorism--a new method of communication. A new vocabulary for resistance. We're opening a new front in the war against soundbytes and corporate catchphrases, because it's impossible to think when your words are controlled by discourse that is manufactured by imperialist corporations and sold to us wholesale in our schools and TVs. Bullshit shoved down our throats by government spokespeople and paid advertising--WE (you) have something to say, SAY IT!

Poetic Terrorism is profoundly nonviolent. It is the resistance of our voices. We are controlled by a submersion tank of manufactured ideas--by the media repeating the talking points of the government.

Poetic terrorism is about bringing the art of resistance into every facet of our lives. Live your life loudly. 'There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin--your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.'--Hakim Bey

This blog is open to anyone's words and ideas. If you would like to post, email jed.bickman@gmail.com to let me know--I'll give you privileges and then you can post whatever you want.

Peace and Solidarity,

Jed

Redeye"

P O E T I C T E R R O R I S M

 

[=Archives=]
March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 February 2006


[=Links=]
Students for Sensible Drug Policy
TAZ, Ontological Anarchy, And Poetic Terrorism
The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension


   Earth" Tuesday, March 22, 2005  

This sea of cubicles
this vaulted cathedral of capitalism
defined by fivefootfive fakecloth walls
bosses harvesting the fluorescent fields of the new InfoEconomy
drifting through cubilcles drinking acid coffee
Emptyeyed men blinded by the copymachine glare
caught in catchphrases about productivity
entangled in minderbinder economics,
shoving numbers into crannies;
spirit money that never will exist
is juggled across semipermeable bank accounts
Competative streamlined downsized brains
bicker like snivvling hyenas over carrion
like starving prisoners battling over messhall fare.
Many a good pen died in that fight,
battling neon paper,
jobs outsourced to eye-irradiating screens
White collars tighten, necks bulge, veins cry out for freedom
This is the copymachine slavery of the information economy
this is your life's work,
your contribution to time,
chasing someone else's photocopied dreams
feeling boss watching you waste paidtime.
lost in the trembling cells
you will die here.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 6:57 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Monday, March 21, 2005  

It's very important that everyone (if anyone reads this blog) to go to the Underground on Wed. night at 9:00 pm. Myles Lennon will be rhyming, which, if you've never seen him before, is the most amazing thing you will ever see in your life. I will also do a few poems which I hope will go over well.
Peace
Jed

Clean Elections, Dirty Music and Ex-Cons
WEDNESDAY 9pm
free @ the underground

hip-hop and spoken word spotlighting the Rhode Island Clean Elections campaign and the campaign to end felon disenfranchisement

feat. hip-hop from Broad St. Studio, word! poets and the grandstylings of Andrew Fox

if you like democracy, or are pissed about the fact that 20% of black men in rhode island can't vote, if you don't like democracy but you like hip-hop and talent, if you think corporations shouldn't write laws and that 'one man one vote' should mean more than 'one dollar one vote,' if you like poetry and impassioned people, and/or if you have sympathy for a group of idealistic kids that've been trying to run an all-out statewide campaign out of their own pockets and on their own steam....

then come show support show love.

cosponsored by students for sensible drug policy and democracy matters

for more info call @ 510.914.1200
www.cleanelectionsri.org

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 11:17 AM ] [ ]



   Earth" Friday, March 18, 2005  

And you will be seen
Paralyzed by the teacher's droning voice
These are the best days of your life
forced regurgitation of
propaganda disguised as facts
tests graded by security cameras
Rows of ideas withering on the vine
held parallel by wardens holding your minds in line.
you'd escape,
but you'd starve to death as soon as severed
from the teat of this steel cafeteria.
Here, you learn who the master is-
he wrote your textbooks,
and so he blinds you,
grinding numbertwo graphite into your eyes
his eyes are your shackles because
his lackeys see your every
impure thoughtcrime.
Your history is on loan from him.
Your ink is his black blood
Your ideas are his veins,
Your arteries pump his eyes
Seeing your every heartbeat
walk, chained man, walk.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 3:14 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Thursday, March 17, 2005  

I heard the words on the street, coming out of mouths of two apparently middleclass, middleaged, middlemanagement white guys, simultaneously: "you are Iran."
Fuckina, I ran. I ran like the revolution was being won in my colon.
And running, and running past swimming pools, suburbs, libraries, I saw men in slacks raise their fists.
And running, and running on white clad feet, padded, protected, and insulated, I ran like the revolution could.
And I ran with the revolution, she showed me fear, anger, and how to kill her,
How to run instead of fight
How to rule instead of lead
.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 1:45 AM ] [ ]



   Earth" Monday, March 14, 2005  

On Wednesday, March 16th from 7 to 9 p.m. in MacMillan 117, author and former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown will speak on "New Age Racism" in MacMillan 117 (Starr Auditorium). Brown is the author of "The Condemnation of Little B" and "A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story," and she has worked with and written extensively about American justice on behalf of poor and black children. There will be a question and answer session and book signings immediately following the lecture. This event is free and open to the public, so come early and bring questions!

Co-Sponsors of this event include: Students for Sensible Drug Policy, The Brown Democrats, The Brown Lecture Board, Women Students at Brown, The Undergraduate Financial Board, The Sarah Doyle Women's Center, The Third World Center, The Office of Institutional Diversity, The Office of the Dean of the College, The Office of Campus Life & Student Services and The Center for Race and Ethnicity.

for more info contact Rebecca_Dumas@brown.edu

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 12:47 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Sunday, March 13, 2005  

Dear Mr. President,
What proof can you give me that you exist?
because I've never seen you
fall in love.
And every time you fall in life
your old boys catch you.
Just to get at the black blood of the earth.
I don't care who you are.
Because I'd rather know the person reading this poem
than you.
Because it doesn't matter who you are.
Because donkeys are elephant food
and I'm a vegetarian, anyway.
how do you kiss with that sneer?
You live the history of your skin,
but America wants you to fall in love.
Sincerely,
periodexclamationpoint.!

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 1:53 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Saturday, March 12, 2005  

Friends, the society we live in is nothing if not imprisoned. The last twenty years has seen an explosion in the rates of incarceration, while crime rates have remained steady. At this rate, in ten years, every American will either be in prison or a guard beating the shit out of them. This won't happen because America thrives on the facade of freedom, which can only be maintained if the middle class ignores the penal system. The justice system is racist, classist, vindictive, and unthinking.

To be convicted of a felony in America is to lose all hope. It is difficult or impossible for people leaving prison to find a job, to be self sustaining. Of course, they didn't gain any skills or education in prison. Excons can't even vote--they are systematically disenfranchised and dehumanized. And so, rates of recidivism (people returning to prison after a short time on the outside) are huge and growing. How would you make it on the street after fifteen years in prison, after fifteen years of being a number, a beast in a cage? No family, no job, no home. Back to the joint, back to the cooler.

The first step is to change the laws, especially the drug laws. Prisoners sentenced for drug offenses constituted the largest group of Federal inmates (55%) in 2001, down from 60% in 1995. Drugs? White people smoke, a lot more than black people, and don't worry a damn about getting arrested.

Then, to change what incarceration means. People should be able to get an education, to gain skills, to introspect and find themselves in writing, in art, in something meanigful. Education in prison works--for every dollar spent on education, recidivism rates nosedive.

But it's not about that. It's not about the people. It's about the right of the government to declare a human a beast, to remove their name and their being, to lock them in with a mass of despirate, abusive men and guards to fend for themselves. Sexual abuse is rampant, and is perpetrated by guards as well as inmates.

There's so much wrong with this shit, I've got to stop before I lose control.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 12:53 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Tuesday, March 08, 2005  

This is longish, but worth it:

Holy are the achieving aces
masked hot potato players
blaming eachother’s ugly ties.
learned fashion from an embalmer.
Accounting from a poet, the bard Enron
barded beardly wired wild eyed prophet of eternal profits.
Huge vaults—defined by fivefootfive cloth walls.
The phoenix busts boxoffice records again,
making god into a corporation again,
flying into acid raves and copyrighting ecstasy again.
The pipe organ converts the masses,
the soaring pulpit
whose excuse is to be 25 feet closer to God.
And you build sky-scrapers!

omni are the achieving aces
midwifing the earth with syringes;
drunken ribosomes of wheat
increase yield for subsidies not to sell.

Where are the achieving aces
who leave the work to black spades
covered in tar at the end of the day
from paving the world over
painting darkened poems through cities
through trembling canyons of glass and shit.

Unholy watering: burning bushes of Columbia
men hooded to beasts,
humiliated Christlike Muslims guantanamoed
praying to Mecca McDonalds, facing Miami.

Holy are the achieving aces,
We love you for our umbilical paycheck
predigested food straight into our starving gut
and ferment to make us vomit and forget.
Forbid us our earthly inheritance,
our dirt and our air.
One day the malls will rise up.

here we are:
aces, back to back aces, high
first class jets lousy with ties
semenspreckled underwear
unbelievable pleats irradiated
cotton genome shifted shirt
sound lives iPodified
botox foreheads commodified
grey brains starched and wrinkleless.

Trumphant, these transcend, ascend
on the shoulders of degrees
from ivied masturbation chambers
theorizing while being fed
cafeteria silver spoons flying


Grave Yard Text Books Written In Un See (K)ing Ink
Head Stones Held In Rows Of Ideas Drying On the Vine
Held Parallel By Grave Tenders Just Ifying Us In Death
Hoeing Identical Death Seeds With Ink Bleached Garden Rakes. (You)

epitaphs dulled by incessant rubbings
stroking others dying words
to darken the negative space
telling the hive-mind of humanity
nothing
that couldn’t be better told
by the highwayworker’s spades
the taxidriver’s air freshener,
the trucker’s crowbar
making a living
a corner of society that belongs to them
real estate in ideas.

And so here I stand
sitting in a classroom stuck in gridlock
pergatoried in acid drizzle
my body rots away from under me
my crotch overgrown with moss.
slippery leather insole
surviving puddle after puddle after endless tunnel.
education is priceless in America,
just like Mastercard.
For everything else, there’s your desk job:
tie, watercooler in the breakroom…

Many a good pen died in that fight.
The theater of war:
ink, neon paper,
mostly eye irradiating screens.

and outside the untouched truth
looms over our workday.
the truth that we’ve sold out.
that we do the same thing every day.
the aces have settled down, but the world
is just as overwhelming as it used to be.
we sit at info-mirrors
perhaps working for a cause
which is forgotten after an hour of business-arranging
word hammering
shoving numbers into crannies.

the only thing driving us are pure moments of communication
achieved in life being lived in common.
aces flipping over aces in shared agony.

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 12:55 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Friday, March 04, 2005  

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 12:54 PM ] [ ]



   Earth" Thursday, March 03, 2005  

Welcome to Poetic Terrorism: a new method of communication. A new vocabulary for resistance. We’re opening a new front in the war against soundbytes and corporate catchphrases, because it is impossible to think when your words are controlled by discourse that is manufactured by imperialist corporations and sold to us wholesale in our schools and TVs. Bullshit shoved down our throats by government spokespeople and paid advertising: WE (you) have something to say, SAY IT!


Poetic Terrorism is profoundly nonviolent. It is the resistance of our voices. We are controlled by a submersion tank of manufactured ideas--by the media repeating the talking points of the government.

An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life—may be the ultimate Poetic Terrorism

-- Temporary Autonomous Zones, Ontological Anarchy, and Poetic Terrorism


Poetic terrorism is about bringing the art of resistance into every facet of our lives. Live your life loudly. There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.--Hakim Bey

Poetic Terrorism is a means to achieve ontological anarchy. Ontological anarchy is freedom from prepackaged states of being. Our ontological state is our state of being: the massive, unwieldy lie that is your sense of cohesive selfhood. Every day, you struggle to define yourself in some pattern of relations with the society around you. This occurs through the accumulation of material, exposure to cultural capital (which is today just a Hollywood commodity), and, most of all, confining yourself to the roles that you are TOLD you should fill. Ontological anarchy is freedom from all this bullshit. It recognizes that none of us are unified, cohesive beings, and allows us to be whoever we are from moment to moment without worrying. It allows us to be present in the present, instead of acting from a preconceived artificial state of being.

Until we can start nationwide dialogue, until we can truly unify, create a common consciousness of resistance, there will be nothing but despair in the left. Until we realize how widespread discontent is, we will never be able to create a common vision.

What will this Blog do?

Poetic Terrorism exists to begin building a new dialogue about politics, culture, economies, and the media.

However, Poetic Terrorism is also a place to bring dialogue into real action. Along with a daily update, this blog will provide a calendar of events, issues, and happenings for the politically and artistically active. To submit an event, email the date, time, location, and description to PoeticTerrorism@gmail.com

peace
Jed, Myles, Yesenia, John Paul

   [ POSTED BY Jed @ 8:12 PM ] [ ]