Global Voices Radio Spoken Word Lab American Sentences
American Sentences
Organic Poetry
Because we Couldn’t Stand the Grief

Because we Couldn’t Stand the Grief

 

Cool, he’s Miles cool, he’s Coltrane cool

he’s Sidney Poitier cool, he’s armani,

cool, he’s raybans cool, he’s black man

cool.

 

No need for gulags, for

snarling dog torture, for

other hung up in hoods

cuz humiliation’s never

cool.

 

Thriving middle class

cool, green economy

cool, health meals

for poor children,

cool, money for mass transit

cool.

 

Nobody looks cool

on the aircraft carrier, no one

cool ordering the bombing raid

not cool commander in chief

lying.

 

Lying about the bombing

of innocents, lying

for Hallburton and Enron, lying

about the cigar

in the honey pot,

the blow in the nose,

My Pet Goat, plumbers

in the Watergate, troops

over the border again, lying

about the mass destruction

weapons never there.

 

Orange alert

and the tactic of fear,

totally uncool.

 

He’s take you to the hoop

cool, he’s sneakin’ a smoke

on the jet cool, he’s south

side of Chicago cool, he’s

peace is patriotic, cool, he’s

 

give the fundamentalists

fits cool, cuz they know

he loves Jesus cool, just not

as they do, with all that

uncool hate caught

 

in the depths of they gut.

He’s Hawai’i cool, he’s

black man at Harvard

cool, he’s

 

stare a dagger into

the eyes of a Cracker

cool. He’s voodoo

cool, who do

the lynching NOW

motherfucker?

 

Ain’t that the thought

caught somewhere near the back

of that tiny lizard brain

you got?

 

Not Obama.

He’s cool.

 

Paul E. Nelson, Auburn, WA, 9:51A – 11.3.08