With Apologies to Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Populist Manifesto No. 2016
Democrats, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,
down from your foothills and mountains,
out of your teepees and domes.
The trees are still falling
and we’ll to the woods no more.
No time now for sitting in them
As man burns down his own house
to roast his pig
No more chanting Hare Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse approaches
eating light, heat & power,
and the clouds have trousers.
No time now for the liberal to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our little literary games,
no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,
no time now for fear & loathing,
time now only for light & love.
We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at Democracy readings.
Democracy isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening & rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth & Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your mouths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Democrats of the Cities’
hung in museums including myself,
All you Democrat’s Democrats writing Democratically
about Democracy,
All you Democracy workshop Democrats
in the boondock heart of America,
All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out freaked-out cut-up Democrats,
All you pre-stressed Concrete Democrats,
All you cunnilingual Democrats,
All you pay-toilet Democrats groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,
All you eyeless unrealists,
All you self-occulting supersurrealists,
All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,
All you Groucho Marxist Democrats
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day and talk about the working class proletariat,
All you Catholic anarchists of Democracy,
All you Black Mountaineers of Democracy
All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of Democracy,
All you zen brothers of Democracy,
All you suicide lovers of Democracy
All you hairy professors of poesie,
All you Democracy reviewers
drinking the blood of the Democrat
All you Democracy Police -
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great’new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relations to it -
Democrats, descend
to the street of the world once more
And open your minds & eyes
with the old visual delight,
Clear your throat and speak up,
Democracy is dead, long live Democracy
with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open Democracy
with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’
with other subjective levels
or other subversive levels,
a tuning fork in the inner ear
to strike below the surface.
Of your own sweet Self still sing
yet utter ‘the word en-masse -
Democracy the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it
Democracy still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men & women still walking there,
still lovely creatures everywhere,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.
Read the real poem here:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/populist-manifesto-no-1/
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