this is our revolution

for a first entry I can start with what brought me here. life. my life. and the reclaiming that comes with being born in the west. my anti-capital, anti-consumerist mind had been dwelling in classrooms for far too long, and I wrote a first poem in May 2008. my mind became consumed not with (things), or image, but rather with the art of life. so not so slowly, but everso surely, I drew my attention towards what plagues this world, and shortly thereafter, what could be done about it. as a political science major always sitting in the back of the classroom, waiting for my upper (there is no middle) class peers to slip down the slope of americanist ideals, so I could pounce on the chance to be right, I found myself drawn to Black Studies. Took a course with an old friend and fell in love with the Black Panthers on spring days stuck inside institutions strung out on prescription medication, rather than being out in the thick of it living. school was just never enough, so I moved back home and poetry began to spill out on pages, with one of those fist journal entries being, "onwards to Portland", well before I met any of the people I would later fall in love with and move to that very city with on a church bus I would spend a book's worth of time and effort getting home, if I were smart enough to write books. Sometime during summer, I traded my mini-fridge, a last of the possessions I still had from those beer drinking, pill-popping times in Columbia, Missouri for a bass guitar, one I would let sit in an ex-band mates dorm room for 5 months before reclaiming it. I rapped in the band. I met Sean, the drunk-poety type poet, at the Franklin House, around the end of summer, and we been caught reading and writing together ever since. Months later and I live in that house, with most of the loves of my life, turned onto ideas and more importantly actions I used to only read about in Abbie Hoffman books as a teenager. We've enjoyed protests, trips, shows and even arrests together, all as some kids who just want their lives back from this casino*town/saint loser crap of a culture.
A soon-to-be published poet now, I play bass in a band called Holy!Holy!Holy! and we're going on 2 tours across the country in that church bus, our own end-time prophetic ministry. Carnivale, of sorts. I work 2 jobs to help support this habit of playing my favorite music with my favorite friends wherever we damn well please, which for those who know me, is enough to both drive me mad and put a smile on my face. I dropped out of school, officially, for the time being, time being the constant enemy of my dreams. I rarely make sense to most others, my actions a recurring hallucination to people who have seen me rapping naked at bars or stripping at local poetry slams. I love to dance, and this music is built for kids to lose their minds dancing to. Killing our pasts with every waking breath we take, but never forgetting those who have shown us what they've shown us. Our history says now! and there are no greater people I could dream of to share the roads with this spring and summer, including the people I have never met before with whom communities will be built, as we lose ourselves in days of war and nights of love. This would be a battle of good versus evil if I believed in dichotomy. so e-mail us, leave us comments on blogs or voicemails on telephones, talk conspiracy theories with me (I am open to all), come out to shows, download this revolution to ya ipods, but also become vagabonds lost in IS. come out and dance, not like monkeys for the corporatocracy, but like human beings, screaming at the top of lungs:
I AM ALIVE!.
holy! is the eternal isness,
jake (as fuck)

letter in the form of a manifesto, manifesto in the form of a letter: version 1.

....as to what gets my blood pumping, well: writing, art, and life, and a bit of reading thrown in there too for good measure, i used to be a complete bookworm but have since come out of the closet and into the light...anyways it seems almost silly for me to separate these subjects as they seem so well engrained together for me at this point. writing is art is life is life is art is writing is is and so on. i like to get caught up in some metaphysical bullshit once in a while. i used to seriously contemplate whether or not i was a buddhist and decided that i could never be any sort of religion but that there must be some sort of essential unity within the life process and i find both a lot of fields of science and a lot of forms of advanced spirituality concur with me on this one. i dont mean this in any new-age freakish sense of the word but merely that life is a tapestry and we are all held together by intertwining threads. or something like that. strangely enough its this quest for a more pure form of being that finally lead me into being somewhat of an activist. i always considered myself a free thinker and a bit arrogantly presupposed that this alleviated any sense of social responsibility. i knew war was wrong the government was evil and all that and my mind operated as such that i could free myself from these evil impositions any time that i wanted.turns out i was wrong.
the political struggle is the most real of all and it is the hardest fought. there are 1.3 million dead iraqi civilians b/c of our government's recurring habit of conquest and genocide, yet the best of us still sleep at night. what the fuck is going on? the only alternative, i am realizing more and more, is a type of beautiful creative desperation. we are born to a special type of slavery the moment we are slapped with a birth certificate and condemned to be citizens in this home of the slave. everyday human communication is reduced to utter and total mind control. it is in the midst of this context that i find myself growing and melding more and more as an artist and a flat-out anti-authoritarian. i sometimes get content as an artist but as an activist and general human being i always feel the need to do more, and i think this is the proper way to be, always growing, where evolution could take us if we focused on positivity, alas, we don't at the moment and the voices of the dispossessed are growing frustrated and gasping from being so close to strangulation...good pure free art then, as the closest we can get to purity is the best form of resistance i have and what i choose to spend that last gasp on.

Zapatista Anthem

In 1994, on January 1st, the world was introduced to two new movements. The first being that of globalization, a neo-liberal idea of free market economy that rivals that of their conterparts (not counter points, rather those who work in collusion from the other side of the face) on the right. Massive corporate take-overs of public land, the commons, and private agricultural land and resources were taking place the world over, one land of which was Mexico. With the Bush senior written/Clinton endorsed NAFTA, Mexico was being treated as a new frontier for business, an undiscovered land, despite the millions of people who have lived there since before white men came and destroyed all they could. Agriculture means more than the production of food for these indigenous people, it is their life base, the birth place of their stories, of their culture. It was up for sale to the highest of the low bidders with american business licenses.
The second, and much more notable movement to be born, was that of the EZLN, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or The Zapatistas. I was 15 years old, living in southern arizona, going to school and punk shows. I remember clearly the feeling we all had when reports came through underground zines and touring bands about this anarchist band of farmers, armed with guns, pitchforks and ski masks, taking back their lives and demanding true democratic action. It was both invigorating and harrowing. It was exciting to know that somewhere, somehow, the people are standing up and fighting for their lives, in the name of love of the land, not of the country, and it was dually disheartening to go to school each day and to a show every weekend, being surrounded by fascist cops and greed driven school administrators, and to take it all sitting down. The next year, I left school, and learned something about life. The zapatistas have been instrumental in my growth and understanding of necessity over ideology. This is their song, we are merely the tellers of their tale, but one day will be true comrades in the battle against those who wish to control us.



Zapatista Anthem
Ya se mira el horizonte
combatiente zapatista
el cambio marcará
a los que vienen atrás

Vamos Vamos Vamos Vamos Adelante
Para que salgamos en la Lucha Avante
Porque Nuestra Patria grita y necesita
De todo el Esfuerzo de los Zapatistas

Hombres, niños y mujeres
el esfuerzo siempre haremos
campesinos y obreros
todos juntos con el pueblo

(Se repite el coro/repeat chorus)

Nuestro pueblo exige ya
acabar la explotacion
nuestra historia dice ya
lucha de liberación

(Se termina con el coro/finish with chorus)


Now we can see the horizon
- Zapatista combatant -
The change will mark
Those who come after us.


CHORUS:
Forward, forward, forward we go
To take part in the struggle ahead
Because our country cries out for
All of the efforts of the Zapatistas

Men, children and women
We will always make the effort
Peasants and workers
All together with the people.
CHORUS
Our people demand an end
To exploitation, now!
Our history says... now!
To the struggle for freedom.

Fuck Shit Up!