Irises

Welcome, this web site’s purpose is to develop the themes of freedom of speech, 
political oppression and other contemporary social issues, using poetry, in its 
broadest sense, as a means to do so.  It is produced in the great tradition of controversial 
literary journals of the past formed by poets, philosophers and free thinkers, in an 
attempt to get their works before the public.  Remembering that the responsibility and 
function of a poet in society is to serve as a conscience, for the society in question, 
always speaking the truth, and to develop the poets art aesthetically, in this instance 
free verse with a emphasis on lyricism and strong visual imagery.  It is my intent to update
this websight on a monthly basis.  If you enjoy the contents or find them important:  
Please pass it on!


LESSONS IN BRUTALITY
Hope, you promised to protect her,
to hide her, so fate would forget.

A shattered windshield
tenaciously clings to a lock of her hair,

it ripped it from her skull,
as it smashed into her face
almost breaking her neck;

now rainbows of color,
surface and slowly spread over her
badly bruised body;

morning dawns black and blue,
involuntarily she feebly moans
each time she moves:

the entire world has gone crazy!

Its ok though -
the persons who deliberately did this,
to hide their sins and shame
have prayed for her.



I AM
Before I became a name on a list:
I was already a fully developed individual;
a certain manner of thought;
an infinitely large and complex
collective frame of  reference;
a choice between styles of clothes and types of food.

One grows used to the idea
that one’s life, really is their own.

Darkness devours today.
It is cold; I choose to go for a walk.
The side of the house looks down shivering.
Should I continue walking, or stop now?

("He’s walking North on 33rd.")

In the distance the city seems silent.
A frozen rain falls
filling the vastness of space with its insistent sibilance.

I am, the sum of my economic choices,
a psychological study for future reference,
the product of a special environment
representing the infinite moment,
an integument for a certain number of years,
a perhaps useful set of facts
for tomorrow’s serious student of history.

Then something comes along and your gone.
The thoughts and choices that you are-
cease to be.
And you become merely an extension
of somebody else’s will.
A living corpse, who waits
to be embraced by eternity.



Mercy
Gold glinting cross in the autumn sun, small
the shiny forest is ominously silent.
The frightened child
peers anxiously through the wall of leaves.

The rustling in the woods?  What is it?
He lives here, he’s large and covered with fur-
Noooo!  A vicious wolf slinks crouched
between the fall colored trees.

It quickly licks its sharp fangs,
the gold cross covered with shadows,
considers if the small child is still on the trail,
the little boy with large horror stricken eyes.

Mommy!  Daddy!  But Mommy is by the lake
listening to the radio talking with her friends,
and Daddy is out on the lake fishing with his buddies,
and the wolf’s brown eyes are happily burning like fire.

What a terror to stay frozen, waiting,
more terrible to run.  God, where are you?
Why don’t you see?  Send help, a miracle, an angel,
save me from the wolf: please have mercy on me!



LITTLE ONE’S
They have taken my little boys
away to school, and I worry.
I don’t want them to turn my boys
into brainless autotons,
so they will never run into
my arms and sit on my lap,
or they would sit in front of T.V.
and learn how to echo instead of  think,
where we would not share
the wonder of the coming of the night.
I don’t want them to turn my boys
into brainless autotons.

I don’t want them to make
my sons into only computer specialists,
sitting for hours in front of internet,
how could we play ball in the park?
And in the evening they would
sit in front of the terminal
instead of laying down beside me
and hearing me read about Peter Pan,
Tom Sawyer, Dandelion Wine and Under The Willows.
I don’t want them to make
my sons into only a computer specialist.

And even less do I want them
one day to turn my boys
into liars and cheats,
or a spy on their so called friends.
And, when after school lets out
get them to be male prostitutes;
so I could never feel comfortable
innocently holding them
on my lap.
No!  I don’t want them
to turn them into any of that



OBSCENITY EXPOSED
Obscenity exposed, under achingly empty skies,
among fragrant rows of raspberries, while picking berries
carefully concealed from the fiery blind unblinking eye;
when, suddenly there appears a Father and a group of children,

"Why don’t you take your top off?"
croaked dirty Daddy artificially loud,
rotely reciting his carefully contrived phrase
polished by practice to boring levels of redundancy,

like a lousy actor, in a bad play written by idiots,
vainly striving to entrap me, his captive poet audience,
with a bait of live virginal flesh
sprung from the seed of his loins.

He castes a quick glance to see
of under her soft eye lashes
the house lights have dimmed on her innocence
and the stage lights of recognition illuminate the sordid scene.

Her delicate loveliness, fresh as the dew washed day,
her limbs thin, in their pre-pubescent form,
radiate health and goodness,
as she stands sweetly before him

patiently waiting for the answer to her question;
while he now stare over at me with hate glinting eyes
the way a wolf stares at its prey
circling having already torn its flesh with its fangs.

Arrogant in his pride the complacent power erect
before the intended victim, savoring
the repressed perversity of the anticipated victory,
he lewdly says thinly feigning, as a vulgar joke, his insidious intent,

while the older children twitter in naughty laughter,
"When you get your drink
why don’t you eat a winnie…?
Searching her earnest little face with his eyes


for signs of the sexual titillation
which shines on flushed cheeks
like a lover’s involuntary moan.
But his audience is already departing,

receding through the blue flame day
leaving his sad malice behind, my attention flying
to the edge of the berry patch where invisible in the trees
a flock of birds is mocking and being conducted by fate.

From his row comes the fury of frustration, sinister silence!
Thwarted in the suppressed perverse desire
of making someone more miserable than himself
he stalks off scheming endless schemes of entrapment!

But, I am grateful,
I have no regrets repudiating him,
if only there were something 
that I could do to help him and others like him.

Yet it troubles me too
that they should so foully abuse their loved ones,
hurting them and themselves
while viciously trying to hurt others.

A black spec appears in the blue eye of heaven,
I observe with great misgiving the dark specter of their growing power
a corrupted, beckoning host trying to lead people
down gilded paths stained the blood of sunsets.

What have they become is it something wicked?
How long will this travesty last?
I become nauseated when I watch
their self-proclaimed avenging angels fall from grace.


How much does it pay to be a pimp, a whore,
a subliminal rapist, a house breaker, a peeping Tom,
a narc?  Is it really tax-free? 
What about the bounties and bonuses

are they tax-free non declared revenue too?
I choose to have no part,
even if it means my life becomes a target
that leads me to my doom.

Their response is swift and absolute,
glaring hatefully they reply arrogantly,
as if speaking for God itself,
"How dare you disagree with us this way?

We curse you, you miserable dreaming miscreant;
and, you will come to curse the day
that you first entered into this endless maze
trying, in all your folly, to enlist

morality, goodness, and honor to right our wrongs.
Whoever tries to expose us,
and apply the healing light of reason,
will never know a moments peace!

Go now - soon you will find that in spite of yourself
you will sit with your eyes unfocused
limbs languidly dangling in defeat-
all your features subliminally entranced with voluptuous apathy.

You will be seduced by some stupid boy or nasty girl,
and willingly give your heart to their licentious lust;
then, when its too late, filled with remorse and repugnance,
beg us for forgiveness, your life a shattered ruin.

But you can not turn back!
Watch as we revel in your misery,
the open wound that is your life:
there, where your heart once was, will be a great void!


Still, we will not be finished with you!
Nothing will satisfy your technologically induced monstrous tastes,
nothing will quench the burning desires
that diffusely course through every fiber of your being….

Try to hide your most intimate moments
vainly seek after illusionory privacy
behind closed doors and turn out the lights!
There must be a reprieve from the tireless onslaught.

See you sacrifice your reputation
on our whores beautiful ripe breasts!
Lose yourself as you caress the hair lined furrow
with your serpentine tongue, clitoris a rising beacon shining cherry red.

And then soft moist flesh, swirling vortices
where you sink between two loins
teeming with shoals of laughing silver fishes
pulling you down and sucking you in….

Downward wretched victim!  We will expose all:
except our part!  The path of infamy,
the graveyard of your dreams,
where crime spawns crime - we drive you on.

You will writhe scourged by thoughts
that never saw the light of day
down frantically you’ll fall
into the arms of our implanted desires.

It is then, that we shall have our revenge
and expose you!  The trap shall spring
shut as it has so many times before
our pleasure will be your punishment!

Down the slippery slope you will accompany us
as we drag you with us through subterranean caverns
see how we seethe feverishly festering in sunless realms
until we catch fire like incendiaries-

Welcome, to our own little version of Hell!



FALLEN ANGELS
The moon shyly peeks around
the black clouds which guard her
sending a shower of moonbeams
down dancing across the Earth,
who is wrapped in its dark cloak.

In the shadow of the room
sleeps a person so young, innocent
and fair that the moonbeams
with special care gently caress
her snow white cheek.
Around the room are still signs
of a childhood recently left behind,
a favorite doll now retired to a shelf
waits next to the new stereo,
a gift from her grandparents for Christmas,
which indifferently squats at rest.
She is young and buds into womanhood
pure and serene and good.

But, in the other room a poor mother and father,
who are both out of work,
are being talked to by a "friend"
one with children of his own,
who suggests that children like their daughter
have a price worth lots of money;
and, they could secure both their own
as well as the girl’s future, if only they would….
Besides, it would be doing the community
a real service by turning her
into live bait for some targeted undesirables
(later, after she’s already been corrupted,
they will turn her into a right-wing-whore)
and earn for them money;
how much depends, on to what extent
and what services she performs.

Oh, yes, their might be jobs found for them, too.
Not mentioned, at this point, is the fact
that the friend, and the friend’s friends
all will receive their percentage
of the take - tax free.

And where was the young girl’s guardian angel,
when the silver moonbeams fell
across her sweet, sleeping face?
It turned its head and bitterly wept.

Don’t tell me any more-
I understand the calumny of the World:
I retired from it.
It was enough to make me sick!



FATHER OF DESIRES
Father of desires, absolute master,
your approbation spawns my pleasure:
remember the lingering caresses,
the empty house and tempting night-
	father of desires, absolute master!

Evenings illuminated by the flicker of a T.V. screen
and the engulfing darkness of your easy chair, blue Winter mists
silently rising up sylvan draws, your throbbing heart,
the hard lump in your aching lap, where we first practiced the eternal pledges
	evenings illuminated by the flicker of a T.V. screen.

What a conflagration the evening sky, how snug and warm our bodies,
how immense the night: its as though our souls are one.
Being held so near, my most loved- no honored!
I could smell the fragrance of your after shave-
	what a conflagration the evening sky, how snug and warm our bodies!

The darkness congealed into a vast abyss
and I couldn’t see your face
as I felt the warmth of your breath in my hair: tender!  fire!
and your large hands gently caressed my little limbs and body:
	the darkness congealed into a vast abyss.

I’m a master of the fine art of sexual satisfaction,
and I recreate the moments nestled in your arms;
for satisfaction now only comes as a right wing whore
who entraps, in my venomous embrace, my next victim:
	I’m a master of the fine art of sexual satisfaction!

Those moist, warn kisses, polished promises and ardent caresses:
am I never to experience them again
from out of the pit of night, like dawn newly washed with dew
that evaporates in the sunlight?
	Those moist, warm kisses, polished promises and ardent caresses!



QUEEN OF SINS
You sleep with anyone they tell you, you whore!
(Proof of how bored you’ve become and proof of how
cruel and brutish, boredom and greed have made your black soul.)
To keep your talons razor sharp
for your self-serving sporting events
you practice daily your trade of….human flesh!
Your eyes light up like store windows at Christmas
to entrap your victims, insolently you abuse your stolen power
and never realize, blindly groping in the dark,
what an affair of honor really means.

Blind and heartless instrument of torture,
my exalted parasites, how can you not notice
in every window and mirror you pass
your beauty turn grotesquely ugly with shame….
How can you keep from grimacing at the scale
of all the harm that you knowingly perpetrate;
when you abuse Science, noted for its great technologies,
which gives itself to you, "Queen of Sins"
to you filthy animal! - the fruit of its womb?
Impoverished virtue….Bankrupt self-respect!



OUR DREAM
In the beginning there was the abyss,
then the World was silver, with soft light:
and all because of you: and the paradise of we.
The all obliterating parched passion of your lips,
and the all consuming flames of our desire.
So what did the politics of terror mean to us,
these whispers of tyranny which were not ours?
Your glance would set my soul to trembling,
and infuse fire throughout my veins.
When we embraced I became hope’s fool.

This was our reality, this was our sweet dream.
Before the World’s sorrows and solaces settled on us,
the fractional interests had stolen our birthright:
dark days were forged in furnaces behind thunderheads at sunset;
blighted petals began to whither and fall.
I saw blood drenched bodies in parking lots,
extortion and intimidation practiced in the streets.
I went to the stores and saw right wing extremists’
temple whores and bounty hunters.
And thought that this too, needs telling; for who has seen,
and not felt the pain- but, what should one do,
when even to do right is to help to do wrong?
I look at your devastating beauty, and my heart becomes a thousand sparrows.

Still, the shadow creeps across the garden wall:
the misery of the World haunts me,
the precarious path that I must follow, through this long labyrinth of years comforts me.
Years where our love and your suffering merge with those of the World.



THE BAD INFLUENCE OF POPULAR RELIGION OR, POPULAR RELIGION GONE BAD
A little piety is a dangerous thing,
for in every religion, one can’t help observe,
the vast majority of adherents
do not seek their divinity’s favor,
no matter how exalted and wonderful,
by either virtuous behavior, or exemplary morals;
but rather, they pursue the perfect being’s blessings
by caprice, by expedience, by frivolous revelation,
by extremists’ acts of zealotry, and by believing in 
absurd mystical mumbo-jumbo and ridiculous opinions.

The most important part of Christ’s sermon on the mount, 
or any other great religious doctrine,
resides in their moral teachings;
and, to our everlasting misfortune,
they constitute that part which is least observed and most neglected.

When the religious radical right covertly subverts with terrorist attacks,
they never consider the resulting misery as a by product of their malicious stupidity,
or see the error of their ways, so blinded are they by pride,.
They never think that their greed, avarice and lust of power
are the primary problems confronting the World today,
and have destabilized and reduced to peonage once affluent nations.
They only wish to usurp liberties and seize power,
in order to further their own self-serving agendas.

This tragedy, is one of the great paradoxes of life:
the bad influence, on virtue and morals,
that popular religions intermittently exert.
It is sufficient to note the violence and prostitution
that their brazen practices openly embrace;
and that degrade the concept of God,
to the lewd levels of debauchery and the cruel barbarous bigotry
that they have reduced themselves to,
to see that this is so.
That this has happened repetitively throughout history is scant solace.
For there is no one so stupid
that, with the application of their reason,
they can not see the harm done in all of this.

Who among us, does not feel that honesty and other virtues
are good qualities to posses; and, further, feel that those who have them
should be held in high esteem?
Why shouldn’t our religious practices,
be subject to the same elevated standards of conduct?
Why should our concept of God, be less that than the best in man?

All the misguided fanatics who ever were,
 and all their extremists rituals combined,
are not sufficient justification,
to explain away today’s transgressions.
The rising tide of ignorance is horrible to behold,
and, like tower sitters of another age,
erroneously thought to bring one closer to God.
Tolerance and charity and peace and love are viewed as vice
by the credulous multitude, who make their absolutist pretense
to religion into another pseudo apocalyptic rage.

The bell shaped curve has been mutilated,
and Bedlam has taken to the streets.
The clarion call of revolution is in the air.
Severe religious asceticism and the old fashioned good morals
are now no longer enough;
superstitious zealots seek, in their opinion,
to endear themselves to a mysterious divinity,
by ever more extreme measures
that promise self-serving advantages;
an antidote to boredom, jobs, financial rewards, social status
and travel, and eternal salvation in the world to come.
It is no revelation that superstitious beliefs married to self-interest
soon warp morals, and that the stern faced virtues
like truth, honor and integrity
are left to the care of oblivion’s dust.

In all of this, the ignorant crowd never considers 
that a loving and just God could only want happiness,
and that happiness is a purely personal thing.
Their false devotion rises to feverish pitches.
The most heinous crimes are committed
and shrilly justified by emotionally charged rhetoric,
vacuous propaganda and brute force-
all of which must be believed, or else their empty edifices
would fall like a house of cards in the wind.

New inventions of sin, such as Communism,
intoxicants, environment and abortion
have to be constantly discovered;
and new acts of violence, like drive by shootings,
rapes, bombings and murders contrived,
in order to perpetrate the fraud,
and divert public opinion.
A public opinion that consists
of the views of good and decent private citizens;
who, if left alone, would never dream 
of such horrible things on their own.

Nor do the efforts of the radical religious right stop at our borders.
In Columbia, through their surrogates, they began running Cocaine,
and soon converted a self-contained social phenomenon
into a highly profitable public problem,
and then used it (their own contrived situation)
as a justification for pursuing a policy of genocide;
and, to secretly help pay for Central American Wars,
and revolutions and terrorist attacks through out the World.
It was so successful that they tried it again, 
on the opium and heroin trade in Kashmir
using the proceeds to finance North African, Indian
and Middle East terrorist activities;
thereby increasing their influence,
on legitimate governments, 
and furthering their goal
of World wide dominance.

The media, in varying degrees of duplicity,
acts as an accomplice; sensational stories,
to increase circulation of audience share,
are all the rage.  They can only run a short while though
and can never be fully developed,
for fear of becoming blasé.
Reason, never warms us with its smile;
because, then, the phantoms of fear will not appear.
And, in a perpetually agitated state,
we are subjected to every caprice and cruelty
that the unnatural tyrants suggest.
Even religious leaders join with bogus Gantry crusades,
instead of correcting the depraved extremist elements.

The more Evil the pretended sin,
the more necessary to abandon mere reason
and yield our liberties, to the direction
of God’s special agents- them!
And, in their darkened wake,
incredibly degenerate and depraved measures
are implemented against the imagined proliferating threats,
without the censorship that cool reflection,
or critical thinking would bring



RIGHTS OF SPRING
Spring has come once again
gracing the land with its loveliness,
and with it the vanity of hope
blossoms in every human breast.
Trees are either sprouting
tiny translucent green leaves,
or bursting into various colored flowers.

Surrounded by all this beauty
its hard to believe,
what I’ve been told,
that halfway around the World,
in Geneva Switzerland, 
God’s self appointed surrogates
have created a market for heroin-
that’s right purchased, transported and sold it-
to created  leverage on the Swiss Cantons
to investigate secret bank accounts:
everyone’s bank accounts but their own.



A WAR LIKE HOST
the war like host with burning zealots eyes
depart for yesterdays littered with clichés,
 women bearing brats whose loud braying greed
is satiated only with a never ending stream of sacrifices;

besides their Winnebagos transporting their broods
the men come carrying their virtual reality technologies
first they smile which transforms into commands,
their expressions turn vicious for having lost their visions of paradise.

The song bird in its unadorned coat
sings more beautifully than ever when they pass;
a steady rain makes their dessert days bloom,
while blighting it for the rest.

and where ever they go development metamorphosis the land,
these wandering hordes, in front of which
roll redundant histories of conquests
and empires of black night.



POETIC THEMES
How do you write a poem?
How do you right a wrong,
when the theme is economics?
Do you pick a poor person
and expose them in their extremity 
Baudelairean style, or, extole
an extremist doctrinaire like Mayakovsky.

But what about today,
when the Republican right wingers
along with their 5th column Democrats
want to take 1/3 of social security
and apply it to the stock market year after year.
Or, expand the number of years
to calculate an individual’s social security.

Now there are poetic themes!
First, the argument, fairly presented:
it is supposed to keep the social security system solvent,
without it the reserve will run out
of money in about 30 years.

Second, what will the effects be
that the public is not told about:
it will reduce the amount
of the payments to the poor;
it will provide welfare, to the tune 
of hundreds of billions per year,
for the mutual fund owners 
and the rich people who own the vast majority of stocks;
and, it will help destabalize the economy
during the inevitable periods
when the stock markets decline and/or crash-

these periods have always happened
to market driven economies,
and will always continue to happen;
unless we start living in a totalitarian state,
and then, of course, things will become much worse.

Social security is designed to serve 
as a ballast, to help stabalize 
the economy in troubled times:
not as a public trough for special interests
to avariciously gorge themselves!
This is not sound economic policy,
this is Ebenezer Scrouge greed!

Why were the Republican’s eagerly willing 
to incur well over 4 trillion in debt for bombs,
but are not willing to float any debt,
for 20 years while the baby boomers pass.
A short term debt to pay for
the economic well being of its citizens!?!
A debt that could then easily be paid off
in 5 years or less, and leave the social security system intact.



 If you are interested in any other poems by the author or would 
like to constructively comment on any of the poems presented here 
please contact me at my e-mail address:chuang_tzu@hotmail.com in 
the meantime.

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