Something's Wrong

I feel like talking a bit about poverty
Which in my opinion
Is addressed as a problem separate
From many others, but in actual fact
Presents some ugly faces
Of our Hydra, history's
Monster of too-many heads,
Thousands of the heads' faces
Hidden, covert, millions masked
While billions should have basked,
Plum overt,
All over the world today:

Ugly faces in your face!
Wherever you turn.
Face it!--a sickness with one
Grunting body out there,
Our great susceptible host.

I heard a speaker describe cancer
As something like 200 diseases.

Something's wrong. Oh,
Some things have always been wrong, or
Wrongness has run through it all,
and I'm not even saying
that this, now global in scope is extra wrong--

Or that humanity can banish its devils once and for all, of course not.

But if I were "humanity" as an entity,
and perhaps I am,
I would say we have come down with something,
and it's time to come up with something.
Something's wrong!

Alarm bells are ringing, everybody I talk to
hears them,
and many I read, especially since the beginning of the Nineteen-eighties.

There are grass-roots movements afoot, groups,
networks trying to apply values
other than the competitive exclusionary
capitalist axiomatic,
Both in their internal politics
and in the politics they strive
Though dialogue and debate to promote,
And practice in the public spheres.

In crisis, people reach for each other,
Rather than act as individual heroes
and now many are reaching--
The Net is buzzin with a million arguments,
Debates, ideas
toward this reaching. The pot simmers,
There is confusion (meaning "pouring together").

Many "leaders" admit they themselves
Are searching,
They model good listeners, do not have the answer,
They encourage the shy and hesitant to speak,
they get people to tell their stories,
Answers, changes, a shift of spirit,
a change in the wind,

A sea-change, a star-
change, a god-
Change comes, proceeds from soil built
Out of listening and talking,
Plus silence between
Betweens and amongs.

By paying tributes to inclusionary
Strategies, experiments,
and, because these are extraordinary times,

The songs that are sung.
Attend carefully to the marginals,
The hermits, the "insane," the poets, dreamers, the geeks, the losers, the fat boys and girls.

Everyone knows the symptoms,
Partakes of them
both in the psyche of societies and "individuals"
and the body of the biosphere:

something toxic, something manic,
something bloated, something overly contrasted,
something enraged, something bitter,
some lump in the breast,
some deep trouble in the lungs,
something dull and heavy in the heart
something numb, something bored,
something exhausted from trying,
something too damn tired
something desiring, wanting.
something lost! something gone
something leaving a hole
That is not satisfied to be a hole; that hurts.

What about some goodness abroad,
to match the badness?

Something other than the everyday
Love of kids by tired parents,
Animal friends by "owners"
Fields by swallows,

Other than the groups
Sharing info, statistics about the badness. Where is the health of the world?

Is it where we race frantically to catch it?

Is it where we slow down to let it catch us?

Is it what we have to pay for the morning

After after

Paying for it with money the night before?

Is it for sale downtown or in the malls?

Is it a nutritional deficiency?

A Benzodiazepine deficiency?

An electro-shock deficiency?

Would paying off the national debt revive it?

Is the exit from hell its deepest Marianis trench?

Is it just me? Is "any and every view of the world both anthropomorphic and autobiographical"?

Should I shut up about the public sphere, and politics
Til I get my own shit together?

Who has their shit together? Well, I read a book that said
Guru Maye has her shit together, the
Siddha masters, the Buddhas, the Boddisatvas.

Buddha preached a technique, not a philosophy or ideology.

Jesus presumably said "seek first the kingdom"--not "seek first the democracy"-- but he was a poet, not an ideologue.