Fablespinners: Literature's Online Open Mic!

by Victor Om Shanti.

Well the revolution came.
Oh, by the way, we didn't win.
I'm pretty sure, as,
I saw the factoid on CNN,
That Purple Berets were on sale,
In the Napster discount bin.

Remember back when
The people's army
Seized the racists' armored car?
You gotta remember.
It was back in the day,
Before you armored your
Mercedes-Benz.
You know back before you became
A poetry whoring recording star.
Around the same time fans
Could still be counted
As friends.

Well the revolution came and went.
Heard they held the whole incident,
In a media circus tent.
Showed it between commercials on B.E.T.
That Japanese corp.,
Which goes to prove,
Niggers weren't scared of revolution,
after all;
Nor were niggers afraid of change.
Why niggers changed to niggaz
And stopped fucking to knock boots.
Changed from fucking over their women,
To knocking up dey bitches.
Then bling-bling laden bastards
Of dey babies mommas,
Proclaiming emancipation from forgotten massas,
Changed from revolutionaries to revolting.

In Chocolate City, where our folks rule,
Mommies wrapped in kinte cloth
Gave props to da mayor for representin',
Keepin' it real, as he kept on keepin' on,
Keepin' drugs outta schools by presentin'
One spoonful at a time, up his nose,
Put down dey crack pipes long enough,
To high five misunderstood Marion Barry,
On the way to looking down on bootblack shines,
When looking up to O.G. pimps and mules.
They stopped being ashamed to be on welfare,
To swelling with pride that their president, Bubba,
Hands free of condoms, with his party of suckers,
Found them constitutionally overlooked
Slave-chain entitlements,
Martha Luther King, never could have dreamed.

Hell yah! the revolution came.
I remember, well, the Tet offensive
sloganeering campaign -
"Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn.
Ho Chi Mihn is gonna win!",
The kids on campus sang.
Now, that Amway, is huckstered in Vietnam,
We discover that Eldredge
Was one of Ho, Ho's downline.

Digame la verdad, Comrade Venceremos Brigade,
Minds of gusanos who digested your guano,
Got to know, por cierto:
Did Malcolm X die,
Did the Symbionese Liberation Army fry,
Was it required that in Oakland, Cali,
A gang-banging, trey-eight shootin', thug slay,
Black Panther Minister of Defense,
Huey P Newton, who,
With his life, had to pay,
Through the barrel of a syringe, prior to the gun,
So that African-Americans can
Charge chicken and waffles, with Courvoisier
Ribs, slathered in Bobby Seale's own
Burn, Baby, Burn, Barbeque Sauce,
In money green and blood red flava's,
On American-Express gold gilt cards,
At authentic hundred and twenty-fifth street,
Corporate subsidized, ghetto-themed, bars,
Never stained by visitation
From the first nigga president
Who jes happened to open an office
in the hood, 'cause he read your lyric 'bout
how soothing on the nerves was nigga poon-tang?

When the Dominicans, (not the nuns),
Done took over Morningside Heights,
Jesus Christ opened a bodega temple in
Co-op City's slum, converted from a mosque that
useta be a synagogue,
I knew then,
like I know shit from shinenola,
The revolution had been co-opted.

Fo' shizzle! Just down the interstate,
From where the salt 'n' peppa three
Were mayhemmed by the triple K,
Then buried together in a dam,
Pushy, rainbow flag clad, uppity niggaz
Were heard to bleat,"Fraud, fraud, stolen election!"
Their right to vote, they were told, was disenfranchised
When a door to a voting booth
Was hidden by a Bush.
"We're not permitted to escape the seventh
level of hell, by the man",
Questionably ordained,
Stone extortionist,
Ministers preach,
When they expect us to read ballots
Before we can cast our votes,
By pulling a lever, by hand!

In that same political season, African-Americans,
Who, while at home to watch,
On commercial laden, cable TV,
Behind a banquet of watermelon and R C
Channel surfed, sufficiently long, from
This week's episode of "Pimp My Pride" to peep
Women in Fallujah walk miles to polling places
Defying threats of assasination
Standing in slow moving lines
While motar shells fell
Stepped over bodies of fallen martyrs
To finally flaunt, blackened pinkies
On sad, damned, hands
In order to prove they'd executed,
Their Yankee won right
To decide, inshallah,
A self-determined way to Nirvana.

Last week, my mind drifted back
To our days of revolutionary zeal
When I was rushing to close an arbitrage deal.
Saw you sitting in a cab
on the way to your loft in SOHO
Just outside the range of the falling ash
(Do you still broadcast drive-time jive, during the week, ..
or have you moved to the anchor chair?)
Whatever! I knew it was you from the Newyorican accent
underneath Ivy League veneer.
You were fuming that your president, and mine,
Was not pressuring friends of friends of Islamic assholes
(No, not the F.O.I. - that would be a whole other issue)
Enough to make the subways safe for decent folks.

"What the hell", I'm sure I heard you snivel, "are these young punks
spewing that they'll die for their mental masturbation cause.
Just because they'll get a crack at some gash."

On the web, recently,
In the PETA-leaning blog,
"Free Hooey!",
The internet chat reported,
so I know it must be true,
That first, a poet tried, at last,
to kill a poet prophet
'Cause he thought the brother tried
To kill his profit;
That was just a tiff over cash.
It was, then, I knew the revolution's time,
not to mention our own sense of revelation,
Had done come to an end, not with a tick-tock,
But with a plain crash...

It's an oft repeated paradigm
"It's an ill wind that blows no good"
What blew in from the East Wind
Blew in the same ole shit.

Oye! Felipe. Holla!