[Newspoetry] Re: June (Crossing) Jordan

[Donald L Emerick]

June (Crossing) Jordan --
An Activist Immemoriam

There's safety in numbers
in hiding out in a crowd,
standing out in the same,
by not standing out at all,
but by being its sameness,
bland and indistinguishable,
a leaf on a tree,
or a tree of a forest,
a hair on a head,
or a head of a crowd.

Those who live by blades
of grass will die by them, too,
and so they should,
for who would die for an oddity
for an offense against sameness,
like you or I?

Except for some head
at the head of a crowd
the crowd would be faceless,
lack the certainty of direction,
have no place to go,
but could go possibly anywhere,
without that head ahead of its times.

I was standing back,
behind the leading few rows of  heads,
whose backs were all turned toward me,
as if to indict me for not being there,
on the engaged front lines,
as if to indict me
for not having pushed ahead,
forcing my way to the front of the line,
to be served first, ahead of the others,
by serving myself.

But the line ahead thins
for those who wait patiently,
as well as for those aggressives
who push ahead unnaturally.

Standing in the lines of a crowd,
you always run out of time,
and come up against the front,
the emptiness that stands clear,
the void before the crowd,
the abyss of an adventure
into a destination unknown.

I heard the words
commanding the crowd,
ordering its demise,
before they spoke to me,
personally,
ordering me to obey,
and I died when they said,
"NEXT!" as they looked at me
and looked for me to follow,
to lead those behind
on toward certain death.

What could I do but resist,
to refuse to follow blindly
the orders of the bureaucrats
of a death machine immemorial,
the guillotine or the gas chamber,
the surrender of life to murder most foul?

Turn away from the maddening crowd
and turn toward maddening a crowd
enough to riot and rebel and stampede,
to overturn the skidrows of slaughterhouses,
their gated communities of passive death,
not to go peacefully into any good night.

Thanks for listening,
which always would be a thinking,
opposing the dangers of accepting,
by endorsing the joys of rejecting others,
as you would do to yourself, first.
Donald L Emerick
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20020617/ff23338d/attachment.html