TIGER POETRY – now available

George Wielgus’ first anthology is now available from lulu.com

Click on the link below to order your copy online.

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Poetry or Death!

Poetry Or Death!

Up against the wall Mother Hubbard!

This poem is a chance.

This poem is a silver six-shooter

Five chambers empty, one loaded

With a bullet that’s gonna blow the back of your head all over the table

1 in six you will be spooning your brains back in, parts lost forever

Click/click/click/click/click/BANG!

This poem is a decision

This poem is a doublebarrelled shotgun shoved in your mouth

Teeth clamped around metal

One side loaded with a cartridge of lead pellets

The other with words that’ll pepper the inside of your skull all over the ceiling

Forcing you to choose

50/50 chance

Poetry or death?

Chick chack

BOOM!

This poem is unavoidable, unstoppable

This poem is a shank

A rusty blade that I’ll stick in your belly

And watch you spaz and quiver on the tip of

SHING! THUNK!

This poem is bewitchment.

This poem is a voodoo shaman ritual

Where when I find the right combination

Of word and gesture

I will make you my zombie slave

Unlocking parts of you dormant for years

Enslaving your whim to my will

And you’ll never be the same again.

CHICKA-CHICKAH!

This poem is your death.

This poem is the death of who you were before you heard this poem.

This poem is your old body burning on a spirit fire

Your heart eaten by a maniac

Your head impaled on a spike outside your front lawn

This poem is the end of everything you ever once knew.

I’M GOING TO FUCK YOU ALL!

The Thief Of Poetry

I am the thief of poetry

Sneaking into Borders

Loading up from the desolate

Poetry section

Sitting drinkless in Starbucks

And drinking deep

Of the heady liquor

Of dead poets.

 

Rimbaud joins me for a while

And I call him a pompous twat

A hillbilly

Shooting poor Verlaine that way

He scoffs, tells me not to rock

‘The Drunken Boat’

He has some good lines.

 

Next is Baudelaire

And he bangs on

About wine and hashish

And I lap it up

Intoxicated on his passion

Overwhelmed by his words.

 

Bukowski chases him off

Plonking down beside me

Telling me to stop

Stealing his style

Hang in there and

Just be yourself

As if I could be anyone else.

 

Finally, Allen Ginsberg

Mooches in

All stoop-shouldered and long bearded

Howling poems at me

I tell him I used to like Kerouac more

When I was younger

He laughs and says: ‘Me too.’

He flirts outrageously with me

Holy cocksucker that he is

And I distract him by asking

Him to describe the Café Six

 

When they’ve all gone

And I’m exhausted by conversing with ghosts

I stand, and look

At the closed books

To be abandoned in this

Plastic store

Unread and unnoticed

And I imagine a great prison break

Fleeing the store, barefoot

Alarums flaring

Guards pursuing

An armful of tomes

Racing for the monorail.

 

They would all be so proud of me

But I do not

And I leave, emptyhanded

But not emptyheaded

This chained-book chainstore

Is the real thief

Stealing our poets

Claiming them as its own

But we know

Their words are for us

And we are not thieves

But emancipators

Liberating these poor dead bastards

Escaping back into the world

Our heads full of them

Breathing life back into the

Narcoleptic streets.

A Global Industry

In Brickfields

Past the saddest petstores in the world

Where puppies dance and frolic

Pressed against glass walls

Seeking only love

Getting older

Moved from the window

To cages, then disappearing

To be replaced endlessly.

 

In Chow Kit

Through cheap meat markets

Ripe with stench

Where fish thrash in a glaze of water

Gasping, parched

Watching as the cleaver

Claims the head

Guts the stomach

Scrapes the carcass aside.

 

Five ringgit for a shirt

That looks like

A tequila sunrise

Poured into a glass

Covered in seaweed.

 

Then they spot me

“Hey, friend

Friend!”

I smile and try

To flee

I know what’s coming

 

He follows me

Beady-eyed

“You want yanga?

Yanga? Dadah?”

 

I smile, walk

Negative.

He fades away.

Ten feet and

Two seconds later

 

“Hey. Hey.

You want girl?

Massage? Blowjob?

All young girls

Chinese. Malay.

Indonesian. Indian.

You look first.

Then decide.”

 

And in that instant

That’s exactly what I want

The desire is planted into

My mind

But something drives

Me away

 

No, no, no thankyou

Smiling and walking

The matsalleh and

His morality

 

Who am I kidding?

I’d fuck anything

That offered itself

As long as it was

Free and honest.

 

Paying for it is a whole new game.

A different world.

 

The world’s oldest profession

Is exploitation.

 

In Amsterdam

They live in little glass boxes

A tourist site

And people form

Orderly queues

Along the canals

“Fuck and suck,

50 Euro.”

 

Then you slide with the crowd

Down into an impossibly narrow alley

To find the otherside

The swollen, bloated, old whores

Shaking their meat

“I’ll suck your titties,

Lemme lick your pussy”

The Irish guys went crazy

For it.

 

In Barcelona

There’s a street for the transvestites

Who grab your balls

And steal your phone

At the same time

A free service

 

“Ey, ey, let’s go,

Vamonos.”

Next to that

The Russian street

Where I once watched a man

In a wheelchair

Driving from one girl to the next

Back and forth

Waving his money

Being angrily denied

A horny Stephen Hawking

Everyone has their limits

“30 Euro for me,

10 for the room.”

 

Down from there

The Barrio Chino

Right out of the tourist zone

Where the girls carry

Hidden knives

And coffee shops swarm

With Arabs

“20 Euro for me,

10 for the room.”

 

In Thailand

I wandered into a bar

An innocent

And was beset by a legion

Of moon-faced girls

Who all wanted

Drinks

To play games

And something unspoken

“1500 baht

For the night.”

 

All these girls

Had the same look in their eye

A hardness

Like nothing

Or nobody

Could touch them

In the same way

Again.

Matsalleh

She came back and said she had told her dad about me

And he had replied

“So now you are dating that funny looking matsalleh?”

That word again I had heard so often

Accompanied by laughter and soft derision

I am far from home, and this word I don’t own

Fits uncomfortably into my personal composition.

 

(They even call her coconut; brown on the outside, white in the middle).

 

Are we really defined by race?

By the colours of our face?

But they feel the same; soft-smooth skin

And our hearts beat the same rhythm.

 

Her father was unhappy

And now daily tells her not to marry; not to embarrass the family

For I will never be considered their kin

Even if I convert and sacrifice my foreskin

Even circumcised I’ll always be circumspect

Given some respect but always a reject

Simply because of my melanin-defect

For both my race and religion are from the wrong set.

 

It is HARAM. I am HARAM. We are HARAM.

 

So maybe I’ll never get my Bumiputra discounted education and housing

And I might remain a heathen and a sinner

In their eyes

But at least I try to transcend skin colour

At best I look beyond the appearances and the differences

At least I seek the humanity within us all

They are trapped by their definitions

We break free and forge new ones

And when she puts her hand brown in my white

And the two become one

I’ll say to all those name-callers and curtain-twitchers

This matsalleh has his own words for you

And that is

That some sons of the Earth are real sons of bitches.

 

 

 

 

Please Don’t Arrest Me Under The ISA

Please Don’t Arrest Me Under The ISA

 

This is not a poem about Malaysia

This is not a poem about Malaysia

This is not a poem about Malaysia

 

This is not a poem about institutionalised racism

Not about fear, division, hatred

Not about conformity, self-censorship and blindness

This is not a poem about mindless construction and destruction

And slash and burn economics

 

This is not about a one party state

 

Nor is it about theocracy, autocracy, hypocrasy and a complete lack of democracy

About dead Mongolians, sodomy or segregation

About apartheid, 13% discounts or sons of the earth

 

This is not a poem about propaganda, fascism, consumerism or detention

About the disappeared, the Orang Asli

This is not a poem about Malaysia.

 

This is a poem

About the poem

I cannot read out

The words I cannot say

The things I cannot think, or feel

The person I cannot be

Even though this poem is not about Malaysia

 

Tell the hakim

Tell the jury

Tell my lawyers

Tell the people when I disappear

When I am detained

When I am revoked

When witnesses testify I sodomized them

Or drugs are found in my house

Or a bullet in my head

That it should not be so

Because

This is not a poem about Malaysia.

Inside-Outsiders

Inside-Outsiders 

Whatever happened to individuality?

Whatever happened to idiosyncracy?

Whatever happened to unity? Unity? Unity?

Whatever happened to you and me?

 

There’s a war going on in Batu Arang

There’s a war in the Bukit Bintang

There’s a war going on in Chow Kit, Brickfields

There’s a war going down your street

From the KLCC to the Damansara Heights

From PJ to Puchong to Ipoh

Port Klang, Melaka, Penang, JB

There’s a war in your kampong scene

 

You need to get up, get alive and get free

What you see on your TV is not reality

Camera cannot capture a conscious duality

Liberation

I express through creativity.

 

In a society where art is a travesty

Self-expression denied with screams of death to originality

A championing of bland, oppressive banality

Of musical theatre and brash commerciality

I fear the seductive lure of mediocrity

And self-censorship, where you don’t say what you think

(Muffled) People here acting like their shit don’t stink.

 

I call up warriors of words to combat this depravity

Because word sound have power, charged with liberty

Literary emancipators, the inside-outsiders

Introverted heroes of rhythm and rhyme

Extrovert to reconstruct our world with a freedom cry.

 

There’s a war going on all across the globe

You fighting in that war as you crossing the road

The war is for your thoughts, your mind, your desire

From the moment you born to the time you expire

How you gonna get-de-get-de-get-get free?

Buh-buh-buh-buh-break your mental captivity?

For me-me-me-me-me the answer’s plain to see

You gottagot to think, you got to write, right?

Conjure lexical spells to challenge lies and hype

Thinking free and feeling fast

Combat dead futures by remembering past.

 

There’s a war going on in London Town

Brazil, India, China, Japan

All across the globe from shore to shore

Whose side you on in the cultural war?

 

Here is the time you find creative revolution

Artists, poets, addicts in a new art evolution

You can’t see us; we throwing cultural bombs

Art-terrorists, wailing freedom songs!

Storming the barricades of your mind-wipe galleries,

By chanting poems we burn-up those lethargic calories.

Fighting fit, mentally clear

Overcoming the little death of fear.

Guerillas of thought in the jungles of your apathy

Cathartic expression changing lives subliminally.

 

You see our words is weapons

A poem is an army

A poet is an ideology.

Freedom fighters of the mind, born to defy

Heart warriors and disciples of Hakim Bey

The inside-outsiders, we are many not few

Living amongst you

But never of you.

Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience 

Who here can get down with civil disobedience?

Who here can get down with civil disobedience?

Who here can get down with civil disobedience?

Who here can get down with civil disobedience?

 

People protest in the street and they call it a riot

People screaming for their freedom, government try to deny it

They smashing private property, but who own it all anyway?

The same company you sold your life to today and yesterday

They call it private property, but who own it a crooked lottery

Coz when 1% of the people own 90% of the wealth

We know they taking it all through use of stealth

Selling you prepackaged life straight off the shelf

You think the rich care if you get socialized health?

Or you get treated fair by employers or banks?

They too busy reinvesting in bullets and tanks

Protecting they interests, minimizing ours

It’s time we burn ‘em up in they ivory towers

So fight your fear and if you dare

Grab up that tacky plastic McDonald’s chair

And break it over that policeman there

Coz police are the first defense of the state

Brainwash education reinforcing their hate

Of anyone, anything, any idea that challenge them

They authority the face of authoritarianism

Politicians the mouthpiece of big business corporations

Not the public, when you gonna realize there ain’t no representation?

Just a regular process of disenfranchisation

Of misdirection, propaganda and privatization

So grab up your banners and get on them streets in demonstration

Coz the people got the power against dehumanization

Against racial segregation, against corporate sanitization

And there endless delegation leading only to more oppression

 

So now can you tell me you up for some civil disobedience?

Now can can I hear you want some civil disobedience?

Show me what you got with civil disobedience!

Tear it up tear it up for some civil disobedience!

 

“Now hang on there, Jah-J,” I’m hearing you cry

“You have to work with the system, just give it a try.

The government works for us, why would they lie?

You just paranoid, thinking it some conspiracy.

We live in the free world, a capitalist democracy!”

The system? The system? The system?

They motherfuckin’ system total hypocrisy

Your motherfuckin’ system sucking people dry

Leaving old folks on the street to die

Starving refugees born to cry

System all about profit margins, not starving Marvins

Who getting the biggest slice of the pie

Depend on who doing the carving

They got the knife and we get the scraps

Videotaped while we eat em, listened to on phone taps

The system don’t right wrongs, only drop bombs

And you think we gonna change that singing peace songs?

We need to reclaim the streets, reclaim our minds

Reclaim our lives, reclaim our rights

It’s our responsibility, not our parents, or our children, or our government, or our corporate sponsors, or anyone but us.

 

Down with it? Down with it? Down with it? Down with it?

 

So get up wake up live up smash up crash up burn up fire up smoke up toke up punk up kick up drum up shoot up rock up break up take up no fakers no more liars no more dividers no more us and them us and them us and them it’s the system that killing our minds our love our lives our futures so what you gonna do what you gonna do what you gonna do?

Mosquitos

Mosquitoes 

We make love like mosquitoes

Whining in the dark

Sucking at each other’s lifeblood

 

Cannibals of emotion

We devour our own kind

Headhunting for the biggest prize

Scalp collecting after

Ignoble ambushes

 

Pop!

Goes the mosquito

And a smear of

Tangy, metallic crimson

Brushes off my body

And my memory

All too easily.

After The Orgy

After The Orgy 

Twisted, blistered, hamfisted

Mutilated yet still cognitive

A sprawl of mutant indiscretions

Piled upon each other without end

Without sin, without realization

Every drug taken, every liberty taken

Abused, poisoned, misused, intoxicated

Needles out our eyeballs and between our toes

Stacks of fresh human meat

In the shopping centre rows

Every holy place desolate, every obscenity sanctified

Categorized, commercialized, advertised, desensitized

Overloaded, overstimulated, manipulated, condescended

Evaluated and commodified, sold back to us pound by pound

Any and every and all experiences in a Hollywood film

Marketed to us as reachable dreams

Have it all and more

The most beautiful girls, the most erotic sex, the highest high!

Every error paintbrushed out, people become perfect, unreachable, godlike

Smiling from the magazines subtitled in bold type:

“How To Be Happy!”

“Get Lips Like These!”

“What You Don’t Know About Being Beautiful!”

 

Erogenously exploited, they’ve managed to tap into

Our minds, our souls, and begin to fill them

We the human land-fills, deposited with the shite

The trite, the meaningless, the gibbergabber

The sensational, the spectacular!

Spastically tackling each drama in our lives

Hungry, famished, starving

Wastrels and skeletons in our plastic mausoleums

Devouring each other, soaking up every emotion

Every event, the screens plugged into our souls

We read from scripts transmitted subliminally

Our poor degenerate Gods

-         the Celebrity Pantheon –

pity the poor plastic spastics trapped in

Paparrazzi lenses

They are our slaves! Our gladiators!

Our whores and by Christ do we take our money’s worth

They are our martyrs and our saints and our sacrifices

And we are told to idolize them and then we

Gleefully butcher them on the altar of publicity

A week’s media entertainment.

The bloodletting is ceaseless

The slaughter unimagineable

Across the globe, our planet is raped

Dying, we the cancer that is killing it

Yet we continue to fuck and smoke and drink

And party and smile and shit over everything and everyone

Flicking through magazines, gloating over pictures

Of people we know, but have never met

We lap them up, drown in them, resent their success and revel in their dismay

Selfish, senseless, demonic seraphim that we are.

There is no saving the planet. There is no light.

The human race is on a crashcourse with God’s own wrath.

Oblivion.

And we know it.

But we hide behind this infantile, puerile, degrading, demeaning nonsense.

We used to communicate in the language of song

Converse with the trees, the animals, the angels

With our own souls, with each other,

We were understood; we understood.

Now our babel of languages causes only confusion.

 

In the suddenly chilling darkness

I find myself surrounded by sweating, clammy flesh

Anonymous bodies, blank faces

Panting and spent

Drained of all emotion

All desire

All humanity

We look at each other and see

The mound of human debris we have become.

Empty vessels, bereft of God.

We dress, and shake hands. Awkward smiles.

 

After the orgy

After all those perceived moments of fleeting bliss

And ecstasy beyond comparison

Those strata of novae like super-pleasures

After every degradation possible

After we’ve done it all, seen it all, experienced it all

We walk out into the cold night street

We will find

That our world has become a wasteland

Our souls have become vacuums

And we are no more satiated

Than when we came in.