ENEMY WITHIN

by Raymond Nat Turner

“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable"   — George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

They are the bloodthirsty! Parasitic. Anti-freedom, fascist,

Pedophile, compromised ones. The grifting, gaslighting, big-

Lying ones. Way Back Machine, return to the ‘50s —1850s — ones.

The Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, billionaire “enemy within” ones.

They are the thirty pieces of silver ones, camouflaged in stars and

Stripes! Red, white, and blue-wrapped ones — wholly-owned —

Bought and bossed. The remote-controlled ones — rolling red carpet

On bent knee — servicing strongmen. They are: “The Enemy Within.”

They are the enemy within warring on the working-class! Reich-cult.

Sadist bullies dispatching platoons of masked goons! The worst of the

Worse! J6-confederate-felons, flooding factories, fields and streets —

Redacting 1st amendment — Erasing 4th, 13th, 14th, 15th freedoms …

They are chainsaw-brandishing bandits. Looting, uprooting, destroying things

That work! Thieves turning fruits of our labor into personal ATMs.  Waste,

Fraud and Abuse disguised as Department Of Grifter Enrichment — DOGE.

Rejecting 99 Cents Store solutions — like mirrors — for detecting themselves.

They are an ethno nationalist food truck serving poisonous menu of misery: 

School Shooting Du Jour! War Of The Week! Jobless, Homeless, Hungry 

Government Shutdown Gumbo. Medical Neglect Noodles. Post-Constitutional,

Police State Pork Fried ICE. Doom and gloom, dark, death and destruction desserts.

They are warfare state “Drill, baby, drill!” dinosaurs shaking down with teargas, 

Pepper-spray, rubber-bullet reign, places we live and love. Fox-box foot soldiers

Prancing like peacocks. Transforming our cities into ‘training grounds’ 

Instead of solar-paneled, windmill wonderlands running armadas of electric busses.

WE are the ones we’ve been waiting for! Robust resisters riding in on white horses 

Named Mutual Aid. United Front, Mass Movement Mamas and Papas. Department

Of Solidarity. Door-knocking neighbors, meeting more than four corners. WE are the 

Ones we’ve been waiting for! Street Heat Senators/Shoe Leather Legislators muscling 

Up movements! Robust resisters refusing to slip on elephant excrement-donkey dung — Bipartisan — billionaire bullshit!

Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; Black Agenda Report's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC.

WARFARE IS THE OPPOSITE OF PRACTICING TONGLEN

by Catherine Gonick

Tonglen, or “taking and giving” is a meditation where you imagine taking in others’ suffering as dark smoke and giving all that they need as bright light. —A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment

Asked to inhale

your pain

and to exhale

my compassion

I instead

inhale your righteous

rage

feel fear

exhale my own

just rage in return

and too fast to notice

a fiery fence

springs up

the burning barricade

of exhaled words

that separates

my dangerous pain

and yours

and makes us equal

in unsafety

Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including Live Encounters, Notre Dame Review, Forge, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and in anthologies including Support Ukraine, Grabbed, and  Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. She works in a company that slows the rate of global warming through projects that repair and restore the climate. 

OUTSIDE THE CAMPUS COMFORT ZONE

by Chris O’Carroll

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans. -- New York Times, 5/17/14

It should be noted that none of the schools cited in the Times article have actually implemented a policy that would mandate trigger warnings, and that college classrooms have often served as testing grounds for vital policies that might at first have seemed apocalyptic or Pollyannaish. Trigger warnings could eventually become part of academic environments, as unobtrusive and beneficial as wheelchair ramps and kosher toaster ovens. --Jay Caspian Kang, “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind,” The New Yorker, May 22, 2014


Our syllabi have warning labels now.
We fear that certain stuff in history
And literature classrooms could somehow
Become a “trigger” for PTSD.

Slaveowners, Nazis, and the KKK --
These are a few rogues from the gallery
Of sadists calculated to dismay
Students with special sensitivity.

The cross, the rack, the bullwhip, and the stake;
Rape, warfare, genocidal tyranny --
There’s only so much college kids can take
Of painful truth about humanity.

We warn them and invite them to avert
Their eyes from education that might hurt.


Chris O’Carroll is a writer and an actor.  In addition to his previous appearances in The New Verse News, he has published poems in First Things, Folly, Measure, The Oldie, and Snakeskin, among other print and online journals, and in the anthologies The Best of the Barefoot Muse and 20 Years at the Cantab Lounge.