Late Night Confessions: by Henry Rollins

Look, I'm a huge Henry Rollins fan. Those who know me often recognize the Black Flag t-shirt I've worn into near oblivion. Black Flag rules in a way only Black Flag is allowed to, but Henry Rollins... he's smart, he's constantly boiling over, the sinew in his neck constantly twisting and turning his head in such angrily determined gestures intended to scare people have given hints to who he really is.
He's a little boy. He's a little boy who scares the other kids into liking him. Sure, he's good, great even, but is that why he has such a strong following and has had for thirty or so years?
Okay, yeah, maybe, but how many within that following are willing to say what everyone is dying to get off their chest?
He's an arrogant bastard, forcing us to laugh at his dick jokes. Yet, he has taken that dick joke, put it in a way that makes us laugh at it, to think about it. Isn't that, in its own way, truly poetic?

Rockets still fly and children still die (continuing the Gil Scott-Heron tribute)

There was more to Gil Scott Heron than just revolutions. There is a relevance to his poetry that even the staunchest of pigs cannot shake. He didn't write for black folks, he wrote AT black folks. He wrote to white people not believing they'd hear him, but hoping.
Hear him they did, and the Man has done everything in his power to delegitimize everything about him, turning him into a sideshow, a freak, a joke.
Are you laughing too?
Do yourself a favor and accept this Gil Scott-Heron slap in the face.
You deserve it.
Everyone deserves it.

"Gil Scott-Heron is dead" brought to you by Coca Cola.

It ain't cute, and it's even less funny.
No reporting has been released as to exactly how he died last week, but we can bet how it happened. Gil Scott Heron was a severe drug addict/ alcoholic, having fallen victim to the heaviest weapons in the Man's arsenal, dead at 62. He became the classic representation of what his poetry was about, but he was no punk. Did he know? Did he know he was walking through Right Wing Whitey quicksand?
Of course he did. He just lost hope.
Just look at us. Just look at America. What was left for a man like Scott-Heron to live for?
What are you proud of?
What is your positive take on America?
What's the other side of your argument?
Do you know what the fuck you are talking about?
Probably not, because after all, you're an American.
The revolution has not, will not, and cannot be televised.
Why would it be?
It's on fuckin' Facebook.

This is the poetry the lunatic, murderous, hypocrite right wing is bitching about.

The other day the rapper Common was invited to a poetry reading at the White House. Like most rappers with any cred at all, Common raps about things that make him, as well as anyone with a brain and a heart, angry. Apparently that's more than the right wing, and especially Bill O'Reilly can handle. In some of Common's poetry he talks about using a gun to make the cops run, and it has the pigs in a tizzy. In their opinions anything that comes into the Whit House should be censored thoroughly, therefore Common should have never let anyone into the White House.
I hereby challenge my reader(s) to find how many ways this is completely hypocritical, because, first off, they have automatically insinuated that killing Muslims is okay to talk/sing about, but not cops. That's bad. All the country music hillrods that had their own revolving door in and out of the Bush stolen White House were a bunch of racist inbred morons. How was that okay?
I think we all know that it wasn't, that is, it wasn't okay IF what Common's poetry said was not okay. Censorship sucks no matter what house it's in.

Sometimes, you just gotta chill, baby. Langston Hughes makes it easy.

I've never posted music on this blog before, but there's a first time for everything. I knew that it would just be a matter of time before I did, because sometimes we forget the old cliche that rather than simply hearing music, we need to listen to it. We need to feel what the musician feels and to take in the author's message. If you take the time to listen to any blues at all this year, listen to Langston.

Megan Lane: brilliant poet, gifted musician, on what it's like to be gay.

The gay community around the world is constantly faced with disapproving eyes of the ignorant. It's viewed as a "choice" and unnatural. So, many take it upon themselves to make sure the gay community knows just how bad they are by backing them into corners, away from being able to turn not only the children of the ignorant into "gays", but the ignorant themselves.
It seems the most vocal, the most outspoken against the gay community are the most needing of a good long look in the mirror. Let's face it, these people are likely gay themselves. For them it is a choice, but it's not about being gay, it's about being straight. So many of these people are living a lie, acting out on their natural urges in secret at night, while during the day screaming about hellfire.
Remember Larry Craig? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/08/larry_craig_still_not_gay.html

Anyway, listen to Megan. She's just got a way of puttin' it.

Revolutions just aren't the same through the TV.

It's easy to watch these things on the television, to allow the talking heads to tell us what it's about, what the word on the street is, but these places are real. They're full of real people with actual eyes who are truly watching and feeling what is going on. To us it seems unreal, but then again it's more real than anything. It doesn't matter what it's about, people coming together, revolutionizing, and changing things his how humanity marks time. It's what makes time relevant at all. Isn't it?

Edgar Allen Poe was not a happy man. Lucky us!

Edgar Allen Poe, an American icon and powerful descriptor of the darker side of human nature, and the heart, writes in his poem "Dreamland" about the forces of nature, their beauty, their danger, and the fact that we humans are doomed to give in to their fury. Yet we will never understand it until it's too late. Once we're dead, the true meaning of his writings might become a little more clear.
There are no shortage of "ghouls" and "ill angels" in Poe's writing, but he seems to have had his reasons. He was, again, not a happy man, but he seems to have believed that he had some sort of special connection to the afterlife. History has portrayed him as a lunatic, but as many lunatics are, he was a true genius. Any other interpretations of Dreamland are, of course, welcome.

Amir Sulaiman takes the truth and injects it into your heart.

The poem starts out slowly, gradually building power in sync with your heart's pounding.
Many of us are lucky to live in such sheltered environments, in places where we think we know what pain is, but really don't. Yet we are unlucky to believe we can actually empathize with those who struggle when we have no clue.