More Poems By Michael Cornier
FOUR QUESTIONS
Victory, defeat,
Sans hands, sans feet,
Win, lose,
The truth buried in the news,
Overcast or sunny weather,
Who forged these chains to which we’re tethered?
Euphemisms, rhetoric,
The saint reviled as heretic,
Ambition, coalitions,
Beware the man with a mission,
Find the child bloodied beneath the rubble,
What does it take to prick your bubble?
Persuasion, invasion,
Coerced, crippled and cowed by hazing,
Suicide, genocide,
Death preeminent on every side,
Borders, national interests,
What diabolical god did invent us?
Senators, general brigadiers,
Create orchestrations we cannot hear,
Unilateral, bipartisan,
Oceans apart from the hearts of men,
Lives squandered for foreign investnments,
What, finally, is this testament?
ONE MAN, ONE BOY, ONE WOMAN, ONE GIRL
My name is Vic,
I used to drive the big rigs from coast to coast,
Retired a few years back,
Been getting on pretty well,
Keeping busy fixing things round the house,
Running errands for the Mrs. when she needs ‘em,
If it’s not too cold, I take a spin up the old Morley Road,
Get a little fishing in,
Friday nights I play gin rummy with some old pals of mine,
We get a little drunk and share a few laughs. Not too bad.
Been thinking of taking a trip up to Vegas,
Got a cousin who lives there who I haven’t seen in a long time,
Yeah, that might be nice.
Got to admit sometimes the days drag by,
And sitting by the window I get to thinking these strange, funny thoughts like,
“When I’m gone who’s gonna remember me?”
I’m Tom and I hate this campus,
My professor’s a bore and my roommate’s a jerk,
Leaves his smelly underwear all over the place,
Wants me to disappear everytime he brings back a date,
Well screw him!
Of course I haven’t made any friends,
So what? Why should I?
They’re all either a bunch of clueless cretins,
Or else stuck up snobs so constipated they think their own shit don’t smell.
I guess that’s how it’s always going to be.
So what?
It’s all so pointless.
Hell, someday maybe I’ll just jump off a bridge.
Sure, why not,
No one, no one’s going to remember me.
My name is Ida,
Been a house keeper for thirty five years,
Endured a life of sweat and tears,
I raised three kids on my own,
But now I live all alone,
On summer nights I drink cold beer,
Look in the mirror; see the end is near,
And I wonder, “Who will remember,
Who will remember me?”
My name is Sheena,
I have one brother and he’s off at war,
When I was born he was just four,
With that big gun he sure looks funny,
Says he’ll send us lots of money,
But I know he’s not coming back,
And sometimes I just want to burn this shack,
And if I did I wonder, “Who would remember,
Who would remember me?”
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
