Ol’ Red Jack Hirschman: He Weaponized Words
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” —Percy Bysshe Shelly
I.
Death comes in 3s they say. So maybe 6
months of San Francisco Poet Laureates
Ferlinghetti,
Mirikitani,
Hirschman
checking out counts as three???
I can’t quote Jack—except for, “Can’t speak
for all, that’s the whole first point—” Yet, I
can wax into the wee hours on his arms
Embracing me as enemy combatant vs capital
II.
The rat-ta-tat-tat-tat of his typewriter weaponized
words enforcing dialectical laws… "Any means necessary:”
paintings, poems, collages, translations in Haitian Creole,
Russian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, French, Greek, Italian,
Albanian for foreign fighters daring to don red badges of
Resistance…
The rat-ta-tat-tat-tat of his typewriter weaponized
words ricocheting off Wall Street and Washington
warlords. Words echoing in hearts and minds of
of auto and postal worker children—paychecks
away from zoo bellies, no soap-waterless weeks
accompanying cardboard mattresses and tents
Revolutionary Poets Brigade internationalist
commandant, North Beach head dug in at Café
Trieste, his guided missiles questioned lunacy.
Some even struck where little cable cars climb half
way to the stars, carrying confederate sympathizers
belching benzene, coughing COVID droplets on operators
Revolutionary Poets Brigade internationalist
commandant, North Beach head dug in at Café
Trieste; Fishbowl escapee drinking cigarettes/smoking
Jack Daniels, living hand-to-mouth on poet’s minus six
figure salary
No mas… Red Jack Hirschman—Presente!!
© 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.
Former forklift driver/warehouse worker/janitor, Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at:
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-town-criers-big-tooth-fund
PayPal: paypal.me/towncrierRNT
This is a brief reflection on water, swamps, bayous, wetlands, and Black life in the United States, and the forms of freedom and racialized unfreedom that these ecologies have facilitated.
We are reprinting Glen Ford’s 2019 article on Venezuela not to demonstrate that he was prescient on the issue of U.S.-Venezuela policies, but because it is still relevant and demonstrates the t
Security forces trained by the CIA and the UK's MI6 use the "war on terror" as justification for killing and abducting Kenyans. In fact, the US/EU/NATO axis wage a war of te
Black people give great attention to certain court cases in hopes of receiving justice when the system is designed to be unjust.
U.S. actions around the world seem mysterious unless the commitment to white supremacist notions of domination is clearly understood.
