Forum Post: poem

83 people died when they stormed the Bastille (a revolutionary poem)

unless you are willing to freeze to death in the tiny square in manhattan, ny you should pack up your tiny pack and go home.

it is not the 900 men and maybe women who won France for france it is the 83 it was their parents’ rage stoked at a funeral it was having somewhere to put it revolution was a box to put rage inside and rage, like freedom is a force almost always won by death

you should know that the Bastille is now only a foundation and a foundation is built upon words words are very important but they never buy freedom and never will

words can be met by words unlike life which can be met by bullets or fire or water or almost anything the Constitution is filled with words, too as all Constitutions are and will be but they are bent like ships ablaze and melting into the sea they are made crooked like arrows when they hit a tree

but, young man or woman, maybe if you make a cardboard sign that reads I will freeze in this square in manhattan, ny come December for freedom then a frozen noose may buy your homeland some air tell then to bury you under the cobblestones there under the bank under the shadow of cross at St. Paul’s then, and only will you have anything in common with the unnamed soldier who died at the side of General George and passed this nation on down to you

it’s always blood that signs a document it’s always blood that wakes an old man from his dream it’s always blood that waters a cactus in another man’s desert it’s always blood bags of it, that keep the banks in business it’s always blood that the legs tend to need and it freezes at twenty-seven degrees.