have you ever played that game, the one where someone writes a couple of lines of 'poetry' and then folds the page over so that only the last line can be read and passes it to the next person to write their couple of lines (and fold the page so the last line can be read and pass it on)?
we played that game at the end of david rovics' workshop last week. i'll claim credit for instigating it, and thank sharon for encouraging it .... it's something my university chums sometimes used to do while sitting in the uvic student pub, felicitas, named after a janitorial person who used to work there, in between classes. i figured it'd be fun to gift david with something collectively from the group he'd just spoken with for a couple of hours about songwriting and life and all that sort of stuff.
david has enthusiastically agreed to put our poem to music and perform it for us next time he's in town. there's no doubt it'll be a huge hit on clear channel.
Have you had a good time
At the workshop?
with so many friends
of conscience as their beat
And sweet sweet words of hope and rage
Shimmer and rise from off the page
get down to it, feelings from music
Writing the words, bio-degrade the turds.
Ideas with friends, connections and tunes
Birds singing in trees, insurrection in June
Salesmen dance hornpipes, while the goose-step of war
Marched relentlessly on, heedless of voices
That spoke of the alienation of past conflict
and caused him to write of what, knew he not
but, thrust upon him by the breathless cherry, his cherry
bore a seed, germinated, grew a tree. on
Ft. Street, bore fruit that people ate, and stopped buying
Stopped buying, and planted gardens
Dug up the streets and opened the soil to the sun
mycelium running fruiting
spores flying
landing here
on their victim’s bodies
