Marching...

We marched by multitude
of Wall Street Banks
Some got arrested
for occupying the inside
of ATM
large burly white men,
not a brown face
among them and I looked-
hard.

Funny that,
because this was the
most faces like mine
I’ve ever marched with
in hundreds of marches
during the previous two decades.

This Day…

(a postcard poem)

I walked the picket line with a dozen or so
striking Verizon workers, community members, and grad students
today doing “5 times a year” service to others in struggle.

I lifted free weights
and did 120 minutes with the hand fashioned theraband,
too much in retrospect.

I organized my Texas shipment,
and at suggestion included a portrait.

Bending the Arc of the Universe

(a postcard poem)

Assistant reconnects dying desktop
so I can migrate data. I make $43.
Break even, marking a better day than most.
Listen to memoir of trans
woman's childhood, adolescence, adulthood-
self finding era by era .Dare to
wonder if I will ever be that brave in telling
my own story.

Tomorrow, I have a fund raising e-mail to write,
and a Verizon to picket as part of partnership
with Jobs with Justice.
I take my “I'll be there five times a year”
in service to justice very seriously;
After all, I've called on that network
more than a few times myself.

My plans are a chagrin to my layabout assistant
who wants to nothing more than lay about on a Sunday morning.
But she knows that giving up a chance
to give corporate big wigs what for
is never on going to be on my agenda
and opts not to argue the point.

In Praise Of

(a poem for the Northeast Organic Farming Association)

All People who know
that livestock aren’t units,
that everyone deserves real food
whatever their income level,
that the revolutionary and the farmer
are more kindred spirits than enemies.

On this annual weekend,
let us rejoice, bond, network
to the consternation of those
who would rather us do anything but.

Ire of the Righteous

(due to purposed cuts in California’s home care budget people with disabilities have established a tent city called ArnieVille)

They are camped out in Sacramento
as I write this,
already damaged bodies calling cement
tonight’s sleeping quarters.
One night’s tossing and turning
will hopefully preserve hard won gimp liberation,
whatever the Gubernator’s intent.

I sit inside
my warm, enclosed apartment
writing a poem to some women in Texas
and praying for justice.

Choosing Different

(theme "not looking back", 20b on poetic asides)

I refuse
now that I have
decided to forgo
Boston activism
in favor of my grandmother’s
85th birthday.

I will not look back
and wonder if I made
the wrong choice.