Pope's poetry is slammin'

My friend, Michael Pope, is in the Costa Rican jungle with his beautiful girlfriend and sweet job. Tough life.

He’s a busy guy in paradise, though. Nonetheless, he has big plans for Thought Pollution. We’re thinking: videos of slam poetry recorded throughout the jungle for effect. He needs to do 58 other things first, but it’s coming.

Being the sweetheart that he is, he’s shared some of his incredible word concoctions anyways.

It doesn’t have the bite that his voice gives it, but it still has bark.

Check it out:

Democracy’s diabolical demons
Have descended with such decadence
That we can’t even see what we’re up against
We’ve made it so the only defense of our presence
Lies in our government’s resilience to resist politics
In the midst of a collision
With that demon we call idealism
An evil, which derives itself from extreme religion
Mixed with one part upheld tradition
And two parts maniacal ambition
And our government’s defense alone is just not going to be enough,
The infamous “they” we all refer to in disgust,
Must get help from us or this shit’s gonna bust….
All the signs are there,
But the masses only care
About the clothes that we wear
Not that the stock market’s a bear
That we pay social security,
But soon that won’t be there
And though hindsight is 20/20
Maybe our foreign policy really isn’t fair
And certainly wasn’t there when we needed it
But we were still feeding it – tax dollars
That math scholars cannot even trace
But it wasn’t for waste,
Paying our taxes makes us feel safe
Cause we feel that money now buys our freedom
But money eats itself,
As the deficit proceeds
And we just had a tax cut,
Then triple our self-preservating needs
Whether or not this strains our economy?
I’ll leave to your decision
Because my intention is not to generate criticism
Of our capitalism or their spiritualism
…. It’s too late for that now.
Change, like seasons, has arrived
Change to America,
Should mean change in our lives
So how can we make this work?
There is a theory of necessary
Reaction to this faction’s action
And it is based on the fashion
That we are rationed information
From our secularly sourced media
With an encyclopedia of weasel words
That can mold an soothe the truths
Of the anger in this world
And how our country affects it…
So if this knowledge is left neglected
We will remain inside that clichéd “box”
Easy enough to have said, and even easier to have read
But let’s stare this problem dead in the face:
We are in this place, within this box’s space
Because humans historically cannot handle
The truth of the world’s scandal
…. At second sign, Americans, as a whole,
Become scrambled
And some become vandals
Dismantling the very string
That has woven the thread
In the rope
Our tax dollars buy
To hold us together
So now more than ever we have to prove
That we can carry, with our government
The burden of reality…
…. Learn that this hand-fed benevolence is irrelevant
And it’s too late for blame now, because:
Necessity was definitely a recipe
In all of media’s discrepancies
And Without Our Action
We will inevitably be forced to forfeit
Our civil liberties…
The ones our country had to break free to achieve
The freedoms they fought for
That we now live and breathe
Could be in jeopardy
If we don’t learn how to not overreact
To the spread of real knowledge
About the political enemies we can’t see….
…. but we are up against.

– Michael Pope

Leigh Greaney can be reached at lgreaney@thoughtpollution.com.