2012
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. ~JFK
updates & such
Happy new year from the guerillas! We’re in hiding at the moment it seems. BT is working in the lab on a number of new pieces and jordan is just out of sight and Tobias is six pints in to burning his work and artist Tim is finishing murals and Moses is out of sight but EE is nearly done with something to post (that may be the neverending sentence)…but 2012 is upon us here at the guerillalit and expect something soon! Best of luck to you and yours in the new year.
-cheers, gl
The Mick
If this doesn’t up your sense of nostalgia, I’m not sure what will. Guerillalit artist Tim Townsley has painted the image of a vintage Mickey Mantle baseball card. It’s currently on display in Bergamot Station at the James Gray gallery (in Santa Monica). Check it out, and the rest of the pieces, if you’ve got the time. In the meanwhile, here’s the image.
-cheers, GL
Black Math Blues
It is August lastlight, that broken
deck used now for coasters
& bookmarks. A stay in the course
of days. A jack of spades as
signpost, directions despite the
mathematical certainty.
The closest of Jupiter’s moons spills
magma gained solely through gravity
& compression.
As if spandex were enough.
The man on stage splitting the 32-20 blues like
an ingrown hair knows the truth of it,
& wears it like scar tissue, calloused
like volcanic ash.
_________________________________
2.
The executioner left the gallows when he found
Staggolee’s neck unbroken despite
the hanging. Mars is a dead planet though
its valleys belie a narrative
as yet untold. Patton
was killed in a jeep driving 10 miles an hour.
Isolated instances,
perhaps, but the certainty
of history. The collection of facts nothing
more than the building of a case
already won.
Economists claim that abortion
reduces crime thus the church demands
humanity at the expense
of humanity. All the better to sing hymns
for an eternity in his name, unless
you get that name
wrong. There can be
no mistaking
certainty.
_____________________________________
3.
Marx claimed All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, as if
capitalism were merely matter like
the rest of us. He foresaw and underestimated
the efficiency in our ability to compromise
one another, a flaw in his humanity. The blues
does not make the same mistake.
You lock a man out of his house,
he breaks down the door. You stop loving a man, he tries
your sister. An atmosphere is like skin, thus pierced
altogether pelted with rock enough to scar
the surface. The defining nature inside us &
the universe the card unturned
& full of gamble.
_____________________________________
4.
Summer has broken & with it
a burning sphere
backlit now upon the green felt
of the stars & their whirling suites of
worth. Fall has set his foot in
the doorstop and denies closure,
the expected intruder still
yet to deal.
My son scored a goal yesterday
the ball curling inside the far post
like mathematics expects
while my dog barks into the darkness
at what she doesn’t know.
-BT
Tim Townsley Show
The Choice
Aggressive Apathy
There are lessons being learned
in London tonight that neither Adam
Smith or Karl Marx prepared us
for. And lessons are a thing without
grace or humor or
sedatives. And it will be publically denounced,
the riots, as some youth experiment
gone awry, some angry gangs
(since loner won’t work), some cautionary
tale on minority entitlement.
The one-sided missive will be
in print, in your face
today and tomorrow and to when it loses interest
when the water-canons open up
and the gangs have lost the fire to put out the water
and go into hiding, back where they came from the cracked wall
public housing, the welfare entitled to them from grandfathers
who fought for you (and you for them?)
we will see who
believes. The Molotov
Cocktail that smashes the window
And sets alight the floorboards
so tonight I may see
the animal boy
with no agenda no endgame
but to tantrum
as a diamond-ringed woman
looks over the bull’s balls on a menu
somewhere in Montana.
China is increasing its baby food demand by twenty-one percent.
I like my supermarkets to stay open.
I like my electricity to work.
I tolerate tea baggers patronizing places like “The Anvil”
where they can talk about UFOs and Jesus
and the stupid race we are
bashing down its own walls
the bureaucracy that ideology beheads
the light under our asses, in our holes
everythingterrifying
and the only thing
that matters, bends us over
in sympathy like the incestuous uncle
whose inheritance we will never see
like a Fitzgerald novel we torment ourselves in
again and again.
But that is London.
Our grandfathers did things they never told us about
to get into and through
the depression, and here we are
complaining about bankruptcy
and spoiled promise. America
is in the steel bolts of skyscrapers
and the grease of classic cars. Our
bitching is a disservice to every
ancestor we never liked. Every
hero we failed.
Yet they riot in London.
Not here, in America.
Here, we are too obese with the process of food
to walk up subway steps.
We have enough to eat, even if it comes fast.
We have places to stay even if we haven’t made a payment in two years.
And we look like what’s in magazines.
There is a spell among the poor in America
There is a spell among the poor in America
there is something stirring
burn down the satellite feeds
burn down the mansions of stone walls, of the ones that control your contentment
and squeeze out what you owe them, the “man” we sing songs of
and fear. Perhaps we would riot under these lines
for something at the end of all the destruction and murder and death and rape and pillaging of the electronic stores for worthless plasma televisions , the ipad between our legs, dripping want, want, WANT
for an endgame that burns out of control
in London
and plays out the hand that we, the masses of desperation
have no hope in taking over anymore. It’s exactly what you want to hear.
And exactly what you won’t do.
1984 came and went but Orwell
got it wrong
they don’t need to watch over us without us knowing
we give it away freely
for the newest cell phone. We don’t need to be fooled again.
We are the fools everlasting.
This is about London,
and here, and the world.
The connections therein and
the xenophobes arrogantly
focusing on borders.
Spare the rod, spoil the child
Spare the rod, spoil the child
We are the spoiled children.
They are rioting in London.
We are the global village. Beware the global village.
-EE
Waiting on a Train
308
The rooster was calling forth the virgin birth
of sun, or vice versa, the dancing girls
snoring as light unwrinkles the
landscape like sight itself. The digging
must have taken a sum of effort,
hours lost
to a hole.
A whole world in the digging
up of rainlessness
this week, this month
this time of year
overflowing the open doors of the village
medicine man
while bones like fossils unearthed
for the nonbelievers
the uninitiated
the naïve and otherwise
occupied. Each available
to an ordinary morning,
shaving and shitting.
And the farmers, and the merchants and migrants
with their arms folded over their chests
and rivals of the men who would change you
and the faced down women, who one day
a time ago, dreamt of being of noble blood
bending over the low tide for mussels.
And now the digging continues
a modern excavation of bullet holed bodies.
Nothing available
to redeem anyone.
And so they swallowed their sighs in
regret and pulled loose what came. They
sung heartful upon the anonymous
with shame soulbent for the loved ones
missing. Some stopped and bent
choking in tearful lament for
a ring recognized. But always more
hands, more rings.
And the exhaustion of the bodies with badges
digging on, thinking to find the devil itself
into the rabbit hole
as medicine men shake rattles to stop the bodies from showing
down deeper they dig.
How many are buried into the abyss
generations of the abyss
without a Moses or Clint Eastwood to save them?
Not the Yanks dropping bombs over walls.
And just maybe the raids that dig the holes
come from foreign fingers and cash and sex and holes.
Each person pulled loose with a lostness
of past and identity like stray paragraphs
without the context of what surrounds them.
It is nonsense, each of them thinks but
somehow biblical, as if the seen world
were replaced by something akin to
Lucifer’s playground as the sun beats down
upon the topsoil.
He used to think tribal existence was wiped out with Manifest Destiny
and somehow, as he circles the widening gap in the earth
his gps to headquarters, he thinks, “I am part of a tribe too.”
And thus spited the land, spited everything he was against,
what he was for, because it made no difference to damn any god
for the mass graves that bed the planet
308 this time
279 in Durango
116 in Matamoros
227 in Srebrenica
7000 and plus and plus and plus and plus
In Mabanza
and each of us
the gift of moonlight and sunrise and pig scraps.
Some swollen light
something given back, offered to the earth
amid the digging of these
modern excavations.
-EE
Warrior People
I am a warrior poet
And sing praise to the warriors
Accolades to their devouring
For we are war starters
War fighters
War enablers
War finishers
I sing to love of women
To love of men
Within rain stamps on city gardens
flooded fields along the Mississippi
And sitting at cafe
In these ever times of warring
When our plans are on hold
Houses falling
Bread too expensive to buy
Millions of brothers and sisters out of work
A million more eventually returning from war
Some of them in pieces, parts
Our plans are on hold too
With some of our insides
Age and crumble
Weight of generations
taxes
We too pay for war, at home
And far away from war
Is where I stop on the avenues
In the center of New York
And embrace my warrior brethren
Making killing their business
Mixing peace with the paper business
We work out on the Street
Singing around the fire, together
–Tobias Deehan
Spring
let us explode
let the mad-buggers take it to us
let it come quick and in surprise
…those wanting to explode
let it come and crack our sleep
let it explode unto us
like a violent lamb
and if we are the fortunate
we will feel it all
-Tobias Deehan




