Really, what nobility is there in remaining
poor when you have the ability to earn more,
when if blessed with a buck
you could bless another brother?
Are you really poor, poet?
And when was the last time you
stared down death?

You mean, if you were blessed with the gift
to pull in bucks, you'd chuck it,
say, "I don't give a phuck if
I'm the next Bill Gates?"

Oh, let the masses starve that might
benefit from my dollars in Amerika!

If you found the winning $2 billion-dollar lotto ticket
in your pocket, you'd just knock it
to the trash bin, right?
Are you under some obligation
to keep the money?
This is Amerika,
you can earn it and burn it.
You can spend it or lend it,
live it up or give it up.

I don't speak of the working poor who
work, pant, work, pant and
no matter how hard they struggle on
American soil can't seem to find one pot to piss in.
I don't speak of the mentally ill dumped homeless
on our streets to fill their bellies with
ham sandwiches discarded in dumpsters,
of the single-mother abandoned by the dickhead
now fighting for a welfare check and child support
until she can find a job earning 15% less than
the dick that left her and the babies.
I mean the educated, liberated, self-righteous,
so-called bourgeois-abdicated authors
who call themselves poets,
but who are more like writers who write well
and preach, carefully avoiding the name of Jesus.

Righteous in self for they preach and
reach and preach and reach
from within, so much knowledge having
puffed up their egos, synapses and neurons,
they've forgotten who gave them brains,
calling down sin after sin
that beat beats upon everyone's head
but their own.

They don't like Russell Simmons.
Can't stand Chris Rock.
Phuck Oprah!—
Basically anyone who
has a flock that pays.
They speak and claim their words "truth."
And well they do speak
for they have practiced and penned to perfection
anti this-and-that sermons. Prating as artists,
they strut, all types of arrogant sluts,
whores to their own voices, vowing poverty.

Despite biggest brains and their hawking CDs,
and chapbooks, they claim
they'd rather be poor
in Amerika.
"For to whom much is given much is required,"
but only words are required of them because
they are called to be poets and seeing only
one side of poetic tradition they
prowl as mad dogs spiking howls,
crucifixions endless, stand on holy mounts,
peaks from which to scratch messianic itches,
voices in the wilderness of their own skulls,
calling them to a calling of poet.

Come, even God laughs sometimes!

So much for stepping out from the crowd,
of being unique and speaking truth.
Activist poets speak hive mind after time,
preach at crowds as homogenized defectors,
hawking one more brand of mayonaise in a drone.
So much for sermons on alternative mounts.
Where's the real fish and bread?
Or is this heresy heard in the
Church of Spoken Word?

And I guess, if they would use those
magnificent brains to earn
and had money to burn,
like Russell Simmons, Chris Rock, & Oprah,
they too would give beaucoup bucks away
as easily as they do their words
in Amerika
for we all know that
words fill stomachs at night
and keep homes warm
in freezing winter.

(c) Copyright October 2004 Nordette Adams

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