The Mining Town

In the crisp mountain air
Up high by the clouds
The dawn is breaking free
From the nighttime sky
As the dusk dies away.

But up in the Colorado Rockies
There is no person that cares
For there is no one here anymore.

The town that once was
Is no more,
No more people living here.
The gold and the whisky
Has long ago run out.

The elk and also the deer
Are the residents now,
Who dwell at peace
Free from the fear of the town people.

The wind blows gently
From the one end to the other end
Of the formerly vibrant streets
That is now forever only animated
With the phantasms of long-ago past
And the once upon a time flourishing stores.

The long ago memories are over
And done with for all time,
Never to return
To living consciousness again,
Forgotten by time.

They are like the ghosts
That is whirling after a gust
Of wind in the dusty streets
Or stay behind buried
In the cemetery plots.

Ghost town

The Last Great Hurrah

We came out of the bushes against
Yellow Hair, their leader and 210 men.
He thought he was going to attack
A camp of women and children
and sleeping braves.

The look on his face was precious,
So many of us that he could not conceive
When we came out from our hiding places.
We circled him quickly and they could not escape.
They grow smaller and smaller
As we continue on through the day.

Strange,
Do not the other pony soldiers
in the area hear all the gun fire?
Yet they do not respond,
Do they want to get rid of Yellow Hair too?

The whites say that revenge is sweet,
But as for me, there is bitterness in my mouth.
It makes me want to vomit,
So much death for nothing.

We could have taught them so much about
How to live in harmony with Mother Earth,
But instead they have us die all the day long.
Instead of living in peace with Mother Earth,
They rape the land, destroying so much.
Eventually Mother Earth will spew them
Out one day and with her own revenge
and revive herself without them.

As we continue on they are now gone,
All of them, to each last man.
For Yellow Hair and his men,
The one white men call Custer,
This was his last stand,
And as for us?
I know that it is
Our last great Hurray.

"Custer's Last Fight," painted by W.H. Leigh, 1939.

How I Hate

Thunder rolled through the valley town.
“So it’s going to rain,”
Growled the old man,
“How I hate rain.”
Pushing the covers back he
Arose from the bed as if
He was rising from the dead.
“How I hate mornings,”
He grumbled as he slowly
Made his way kitchen bound.
Pouring water into a kettle
And setting it on a stove,
He goes to pick up his paper
In his unkempt yard.
The smell of coming rain
Permeated the air.
“No rain wrap on the paper?
How I hate that paperboy.”
Glancing into town,
He could see the blossoms of the trees,
“How I hate spring.”
The kettle whistle sounds,
“How I hate that whistle.”
He pours himself a cup of stout coffee.
Taking a good sip, “How I hate coffee.”
Opening his paper, “How I hate newspapers,”
He reads the local news.
“So old George finally died, did he?
How I hated him anyway.”
Then he pauses his reading,
Lays the paper down carefully
On the kitchen table.
He gazes out the grimy kitchen window
For what seemed like an eternity
At the looming rain clouds.

“How I hate death.”
Thunder rolled through the valley town

The Group

A group was gathered together in a place one day.

A man came along one time
And saw a group of people.
What a bunch of bums
These worthless people are he said.
Nothing but poverty stricken irrelevant
Unemployed scums these people.
Nobody wants people like that.
They will always be like that.
They should get a job, but no,
They are just too lazy to go to work.
I am so glad that I am not like those imbeciles.
We should make some sort of law to stop
These people being helped so they
Will not be out loafing like this.
If they should die,
Then let them do it quickly
And reduce the surplus population.

Another man came along one time
And saw a group of people.
Oh my, he exclaimed,
How absolutely awful for this to happen
In such a great and powerful
And rich country as this.
With the unemployment being so high
How much like them would I have been
If I lived in their overcrowding conditions?
What if I was educated in such a horrible
Poor education system like that school
Over there that is falling down around the students?
How could I ever have tried to get ahead when being
Ignored and treated so differently because prejudices?
We should do everything that we can to help these
People get an even chance to succeed in life.

One man saw lazy bums who refused to work.
Another man saw humbled and
Humiliated people being deprived.
Compassion or scorn?
What do you see when you look?

And Congress fought each other
Over politics and ignored the people.

The Return

I heard the sound of the
Chopper fly by overhead.
It must have been the one
We jumped out of in some
God forsaken location in the jungle.

Go and kill the Yellow man.
That was my first orders after
Boot Camp once I graduated
From High School.
Why?
He had done nothing to me.
I did not ask for our government
To get involved in someone’s war.
It was not my war.
But they drafted me
And put me right in the middle of it.
I honestly do not know how
I have survived it this long.
I was forced into killing people
That did not do anything to me.
Even after the battle, the smell,
The corpses with gaping holes
And missing body parts,
Flies that covered them, us,
The Vietnamese, and the
Vietcong dead remained with me.
Even when I tried to sleep they
Are still there with me.
It is all in my dreams.
Haunting faces of humans
That did not deserve this.
I wanted so badly to go back home,
To be with my wife that I
Married before I left.
I try to imagine holding our new
Baby that she had after I left.

We were out in the jungle
Only a little ways from some village.
The foliage had just been sprayed
With Agent Orange as we walked by them;
Handling the soaking wet leaves
To see what they were doing.
Then we stopped and rested behind
Some bushes in front of the village.

Jack was always the funny man.
He helped save my sanity.
I think I would have lost it long
Ago without his sense of humor.
He was just standing there
With his back to the village.
He started to say something
When a shot rang out from the
Village and Jack’s face disappeared
As he was shot in the back of the
Head by some sniper.
I screamed out at the top of my lungs
NO!
Then I noticed everyone on the street
stopped and turned and stared at me
as the helicopter flew above the town.
My body had made it back home,
Unfortunately my mind stayed behind in the jungle.

The Storm

I stand here in front of a severe storm
Frozen in fear as the tornado sirens sound
And the sky explodes in lighting
Because of what I see coming.
I remember the warnings
Of what was going to happen.
The politicians scoffed so much.
So the corporations keep on churning,
Churning out their dirt into the air.
For no one at all cared.
Why would no one listen?
Why did no one care?
All for the sake of their money.
And now their gold is worthless,
Worthless since it is to late
To stop what they started.
It is too late, too late for us now.
So here I stand watching another
Severe storm coming in yet again
Tonight into my hometown.
As the tornado sirens sound
And the lightning erupts all around,
Frozen in fear I watch because
Dropping to the ground was a never
Known before F7 tornado.

Dance No More

The time was set before the realm,
Nevertheless no one but we showed up.
But all the rest were too terrified
Of what they thought might come afterward.
The heavens were already bursting with electricity
As lightning flashed all around me.
The drums started their beat,
As the Medicine Man I started to dance,
Now the ghost dance had begun.
Around and around the circle
We would dance for the past.
Dancing for the return of the buffalo
When they roamed freely.
Dancing for the return of the great chiefs
And the brave warriors who would come back
To us to show us the way and save us
From our present and coming future.
The beginning of a new era of peace,
For that we ghost danced throughout the nights.
We continued our dance going across the plains
With our hopes of a return to our society,
The society that we all had known before.

The soldiers came one day and said no more,
No more dance, for you scare everyone.
We were on our own land,
We had hurt no one, we kept to ourselves.
Just four days after the King of Peace’s Birthday
In that mourning of 1890,
They took their Hotchkiss guns and shot us down,
To make sure that we dance no more.
Chief Big Foot was one of the first to die,
Already dying with tuberculosis.
There was no mercy, no kindness,
Neither for the women or children.

My people,
My people,
Now they are no more.
They lay spread across the bloodstained snow.

They have now gone to their ancestral home
Just like the great ones that have gone on before.
So now, please, just lay my lifeless body down
With my people in the mass grave
Here at Wounded Knee.

Mass grave at Wounded Knee

Additional information:
The Army awarded twenty Medals of Honor, its highest award, for the action.
Almost all of the troops on the battlefield were victims of friendly fire from their own Hotchkiss guns.

What's left of Big Foot's band

The Land

The captain and his ship returned
With his report after his scouting.
He told us he found the land,
The land we were looking for,
The land where there is sunshine,
There the people live in freedom,
Freedom from the technology.
But no one listened,
Only the seventy of us.
No one else cared.
They lived for their technology,
They became incapable to live without it.
This made everyone too busy living
In the darkness and the gloom of our
Homeland where those rain drops fell.
They lived life as if they had none,
Existing by being bound by slavery to the menial,
Living only for their machines that they created.
They enjoyed their living in despair too much.
They simply did not want to be set free.
There were so bound to their technologies
That they and them were now becoming one.

So, boldly we set sail from the bay,
Despite a storm starting to brew in the sea.
Just the seventy of us in the great mystery ship,
We rode with the captain and his crew
To make our new home in our new land.

Epilog:
I think often about our great journey
With the captain and his ship to our new land.
Sometimes I still think about those left behind,
But not as often now as I use to.
Those that refused to leave their land.
Do they even exist anymore or did their
Technology finally destroy them?
Hail Atlantis!

The Anniversary

I walk alone on a deserted county
Back road deep in my own thoughts.
The trees limbs are bare of green
As an evening fog starts to form.

I arrived at the scene,
the scene that I dread.
I see the girl playing on
The Hollow Creek Bridge.
I recognize her at once
For it is my daughter
Standing on the railing.
I hear the railing cracking,
splintering, starting to give way.
I do not cry out to her? No.
For I know about apparitions,
Illusions and phantasms of the night
That happen since then.
For it is the one year anniversary.

After the Storm

Many times I cannot face another day;
I cannot get out of bed.
I just wish that I and my
Children were all dead.
If only we could die
And get it over with,
We would all be so much better.
I pull the shades down and close them tight,
I lock the door.
I and my children sit in a darken corner
Of the room to hide from the day.

The only thing I am confident about
Is that the future holds absolutely nothing for me.
Every night I cry myself to sleep.
Anguish is my way of life forevermore.
Suffering will be my children’s
Way of life likewise.
All of us are condemned to this horrible world,
Where I abhor every wakening moment
Of my wretched life.
It all becomes so vibrant to me
Whenever I close my eyes,
My horrifying future and that of my children.
My nightmares are nothing more than the
Destruction,
Bodies floating,
Decay,
Death.

New Orleans after Katrina

Do you sit in judgment of me?
My home has been devastated.
All of my belongings are vanished.
My family, friends and my neighbors
Are now gone forever, never ever to return.
I am transported between one run down shelter
To another run down shelter.
I have given up all hope,
The neighborhood will never be rebuilt,
It will never return to normal again.
Never again.

17th Street Canal New Orleans after Katrina

For the Love of War

Berlin, Germany

 

It is not the same as we thought it was.
War was to be for honor
But has now been turned to shame.
All that glitters is not of gold.
We all thought you were of gold
But your glitter was like the splinters of glass,
Sparkling beautifully in the intense sunshine
But passes pouring blood when touched
From the deep cuts that you inflicted
Upon the very soul of humanity.
Once it is chosen and awakened on the earth
It grows into rivers of endless blood
At the very lands that you walk through.
From the very depths of Hell itself,
You brought forth fire to burn unceasing,
Destroying the cities without end.
You were always so quick to kill,
Especially those that were the young and old.
We marched out brave and proud
In pageantry and uniforms of such beauty.

Nuremberg, Germany

Only a handful of the broken ever came back.
We can now only hold our heads down in shame
As the dying, the lame, those torn apart,
Look at us with accusing eyes closing in death.
Even the screams of the children are drowned out
By the howls of your insane laughter.
As you devour all that there is
With your incessant appetite for obliteration,
We can only now wait for our own end.

London, England

The Water Fall

Tonight, thoughts are like a waterfall,
Washing over the mind of
Flooding images of the day.
All the bad and the horrifying,
All the vile and filth,
Becoming a river of sufferings
That is now a swift current.
Then finally coming upon the edge of a great cliff,
The river carries its anguishes over the falls.
Surging downward.
In a seeming never-ending plunge,
All of the pain,
All of the hurt,
And all of the sickness,
Flow over the waterfall
Cascading into an ever downward spiral,
Smashing them upon the rocks as it descends.
The remains collect at a small pool down below
And then they are carried away,
Away, away from here,
Into the darkness of night.
Finally,
Free.
Free from pain and fear,
Free from sadness and all that hates.
It flows into the oblivion of eternity
On the river’s continuing journey
Into the pitch black of everlasting night.

Donar Reiskoffer at Plitvice lakes, Croatia

Simpler Times

Afternoon shadows grow
From where noontime sun
Rested over clouds.
In the local clothing store
Revolving ceiling fans hum
In late summer’s warmth.
Choice refined shirts stacked
Gracefully in each ones bin.
Women’s cotton dresses
Neatly arranged by ten.
Dreaded winter coats only just arrived.
Customers given individual attention,
Buying what they might need,
Chatting for a time with the help.
“Would you like it delivered?”
Courthouse bell strikes,
It’s five o’clock one more day.
Alas, yet again, it’s time for closing.

Outside late summer’s warm evening air,
Not as hot as dog days of summer.
Birds sing their delightful melodies.
The emerald leaves faintly awakens
In tender gentle breezes,
While smugly showing off
Before changing colors set in.
Fragrance of deep fried chicken,
Home backed apple pies,
Saturate the neighborhood.
White picket fences line walks,
Journey homeward is satisfying.
Soon snowfall will be too much
To stop and talk with neighbors.

When dad arrives
The family will shortly congregate,
Surrounding family meal
Mom has faithfully prepared.
Table cleared, dishes washed.
Sun’s setting to western sky complete
Bringing twilight’s advance
Along the eastern horizon
Spreading across the heavens.

Nights grow cooler now
Before cold of winter.
Swing on front porch
Again tonight’s focus.
How long can an era like this last?
But at least for now,
Myriad thousands of stars
Will shine brightly,
Tonight,
One more time.

Circumstances

Each person who lives dies as an individual.
We are each born into certain circumstances
That are unique only to us.
Some may be born into an easy life;
Some may be born into a hard life.
Some of those that may be born
Into an easy life will not become anything,
While those born into the most difficult
And hardest of lives will become great.
We may not have any choice into what
The circumstances are that we were born into.
But whatever circumstance it was,
Whether it is good or bad,
This is what makes us who we are.
How we handle these circumstances
Is the determination of what we become.
It is this handicap that each of us have to overcome,
Or it will overcome us.
For each of us are headed into
The finality of our end.
Each one of exists as an individual and are one.
It is not that the world knows
Our name or not that makes greatness.
Indeed, what makes greatness is that we have lived
Our lives to the best that we were able to make of it.
In how we loved others, in how we served others,
In how we gave of ourselves to others.
To overcome our circumstances, this is greatness.