The American Spectator

Last night, I had my feature at the Stone Soup Poetry Reading Series at The Yarrow Gallery in Cambridge.

I debuted a poem about the Occupy movement. There were a number of Occupy Boston people in the audience and suffice it to say they were less than amused. One man, who was sporting a witch hat, stood up and declared that I opposed democracy. These people are absolutely priceless.

The Void

It was Winston Churchill who said, “A man who isn’t a socialist has no heart

A man who is still a socialist at forty has no head.”

When I look at those occupying Wall Street, Dewey Square & elsewhere

I see a coalition of people too young to know any better

And too old to have learned life’s lessons

I see people who rally against the deadly sin of greed

While committing the equally deadly sin of envy

I see people who claim they represent the broad range of the political spectrum

Address one another as comrade

I see people who think the world owes them a living

I see people who think the rest of us should just roll over & play dead

I see people eager to tell me what my needs are

While having no clue how to figure out their own

You don’t know what you want and you want it now

I see people who think the butcher cuts meat, the baker makes cake

And the brewer fills his keg out of benevolence

I see people who wish to share and march for life’s glories -

Bread, roses and The Apple iPhone 4s - preferably in black

I see people who think they are doing something new

This isn’t the first time a group of people with Bohemian roots

Has blamed one percent of the population for all the ills in the world

So it comes as no surprise to me that the great-grandchildren of Adolf Hitler

See fit to embrace you as you sit and wait for your Fuhrer to arrive

I see people engaged in a social experiment that is doomed to failure

To paraphrase Churchill on democracy,

“Capitalism is the worst economic system

Except for all those other systems that have been tried.”

If you think this is your finest hour the clock has only begun to tick