Joey Cloudy online

Poetry in the Time of Fascism  

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death,  

but the valiant taste of death but once.”  

-Julius Caesar  

-for Federico García Lorca  

and the revolutionary spirit in us all.  

Lorca fearlessly fought them in Spain  

a poet standing against Francos  

Nationalist power  

in the end, he took one to the head for the cause  

and (“3 in the ass for being a f@ggot.”)  

(Note: this is a quote from memory of an older translation  

of the same incident I read in 99-00.  

Robert Cochran or Kyle Vaughn  

must have given me  

the book I read this in.  

Or maybe it was in one of the little poetry magazines  

I used to read in the sitting in the aisles  

of Paperbacks Plus bookstore?  

I know Robert talks about this in a poem.)  

We talked about the tragic deaths of the poets  

we loved all the time,  

as if death were a prayer to be answered.  

Radnóti a bullet to the brain on a death march,  

poems found in the mass grave  

skeletal corpse still hiding the notebook in his coat pocket  

His widow had his final poems  

(I need the title.)  

All written in death  

camps, work camps, and  

on the death march  

… published posthumously  

I was thinking about Miklós Radnóti  

the entire time I was  

writing the first drafts of this poem,  

He has been on my mind a lot these days  

with the Latino prison camps  

set up at the southern border, the police state,  

The emboldened oligarchy, nazi apologist  

on every news program. I do not have the luxury  

of those with no skin in the game  

like Bukowski of ignoring the politics of our time, of our nation.  

I see the wind up of history at its most horrific  

preparing to repeat the terror.  

I need to get my people out of here.  

I want to go home.  

walk the streets without being profiled,  

I don’t want to die in this shithole  

built on an Indian mass graveyard.  

I will get a passport, take my reparations,  

and exercise my right of return to the Motherland.  

I’ll look to the distant glow over the western horizon  

and watch the whole shitshow burn,  

while I sit sipping tiny umbrellaed drinks  

from the beaches where my ancestors were kidnapped. 

I am.  

I have a dream of “Villon penniless in the streets  

of Paris, anonymous, alone in his poverty.”  

(“my fear is my only courage”  

-Mandella Syndrome  

“my feet is my only carriage”  

-Bob Marley)  

The soldier who murdered Lorca later bragged he  

“fired two bullets into his ass for being a f@ggot.”  

this is from the March 19, 2009, article in The New Yorker  

“Lorca and the Gay World” By Katherine Ryder)  

I guess we know what they hated  

most about him.  

I am not so brave  

So, poverty has taken me as its vow.  

Perhaps it is time to end  

The silence of this poet  

Behold, as the talking heads  

of our multinational media conglomerates  

lament the fall of an almost  

great nation.  

Horseshoes and hand grenades,  

Don’t drink the red, white, and blue  

“Hey, Kool-Aid!”  

Dammit, Jim Jones is the president!  

News cycles lost in the fog of perpetual war  

lamenting the albino glare of the rocket  

like rise of the all  

singing, all  

dancing, all  

right, alt  

American, neo  

nazi, all  

asking the same idiotic question  

over and  

over  

to know one and everyone in  

particular. “Why  

is there so much racism in  

21st century America?”  

And I and eye American as apple pi  

I’ve heard it said by the Oracle, wise  

ones that “racism is the DNA of America”  

and in that moment, everything and all  

made sense; they come by their bigotry honestly  

As an incestuous baby’s hairlip, it is in the end inherited.  

We know where they shoot niggas like me  

one to the head for freedom, for the cause…  

They never found the poet’s body.  

I will only taste death once.  

Do I look ready?  

I feel ready.  

Headshot,  

death of the author.  

-about the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals; Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, Tx.