Author: poetryfest

would you kill Hitler? My list is longer
than yours. My best friends
dad, Elon Musk, Henry Kissinger.

Live a little. Tap the portal doors three times
and someone will come take you away. Take it
I think we can find him. The Impaler, The Terrible.

Bundy. I finally bought a switchblade. God, it feels
so good to love you like this. You’re so warm. Alive
just maybe, still sweating. The Young Turks, Aliyev, Erdoğan.

Again, again. Please make it worth something. I saw them
begging for flour today. There is no more food on the shelves
and he has never had to ask. Netenyahu, from Philadelphia. Alive.

Tune in to Fox News. Listen to the Joe Rogan Experience. Conceal carry and always have extra ammunition. Read the Bible. Pray before bed. Work late nights. Work overtime. Pay your taxes. Don’t ask where the money goes. Consume. Believe what your teachers tell you. Believe what your pastor tells you. Say America is the greatest. Say it like you mean it this time. Drive a Ford F-150. Get the tires lifted. Get a Costco membership. Their hot dogs are only $1.50. Don’t forget about free samples. Make sure your phone is up to date and location services are on. Look at this funny meme. Consume. Get vaccinated. Get vaccinated twice. Get a booster while you’re at it. Don’t look up the Tuskegee Experiments. Don’t look up COINTELPRO. Remember America is the greatest. SAY IT! Buy a flag-on-Flag Day. Buy a mattress on President’s Day. Watch more CNN. While you’re at it, stock up on toilet paper. Money is your God. You can’t have enough God. Stop asking about the national debt. Money isn’t real. God isn’t real. Stop asking about
Palestine. Stop asking about healthcare. Consume. Stand up during the anthem. Don’t you dare take a knee. Subscribe to New York Times. Trust the police. Trust the judicial system. Don’t research the prison industrial complex. Blame the Republicans for your problems. Buy one get one free at Sears. Get married. Have children. Raise them to be a good American just like you are. Don’t look into the Gulf of Tonkin. Don’t look into the My Lai massacre. Stay home. Watch Netflix. Consume. Stop asking about the inflation. Stop complaining all the time. You have it so good here. Don’t think about the people who are exploited for you to have your goodies. Just consume. Find a second job. Find a roommate. Pay your rent on time. Don’t ask why it’s more expensive than last year, or the year before that. Don’t listen to climate scientists, but check the weather. Don’t listen to medical experts, but take a pill for your melancholy. You probably should get a divorce. I know a good lawyer if you need one. Buy the kids an iPad and they’ll be fine. Don’t look up the Mayan Genocide. Don’t look up the Phoenix Memo. Football is on tonight and the night after that. Sit back. Order some pizza. Watch the game. Forget about Iraq. Forget about the USS Liberty. But never forget 9/11. Storm the building. Democrats are the culprit. Immigrants are the issue. It’s not the extreme class divide. It’s not BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard. It’s not corporate lobbying. It’s not war being incentivized at every opportunity. It’s whatever the TV tells you it is. Before you go, one more thing. Grab that flag of yours. That red, white, and blue. Tie it around your eyes, and fucking blindfold yourself. It’s easier that way.

A cell inside my body,
A man inside my house,
A house inside my city,
A city inside my country,
A country inside my world.

The world is a reflection of myself,
Like a light trapped in a mirror,
Reflecting into my eyes.

A pearl inside an oyster,
A diamond in the rough.
A baby in the womb,
A body in a tomb.

I am my own company,
Together, alone.
I am an alien nation.

Empowered,
Or a coward?

© 2025
Eugene Samolin

I want to be an American.
I can see it now.
To have a home where I can flourish.
To feel the plush green grass as I step out.
Perfectly guarded by a white-picket fence.
An impenetrable wall to keep the others out.
I’ll know it when I see it.
It’ll feel like freedom.

I want to be an American.
To smile as my children go to school.
No gangs or ricocheting bullets.
Free from indoctrination.
Free from discrimination.
A perfect education.
Unlike back home.
It’ll feel like freedom.

I want to be an American.
Where the government is not corrupt.
Politicians and Police are one with the people.
Under Uncle Sam’s watchful eye,
bribes and deceit are punished,
and the good are set free.
I’ll know it when I see it.
It’ll feel like freedom.

I want to be an American.
Where food is plentiful.
The hardworking backbone of a nation,
laying forth a bountiful cornucopia.
Wholesome and healthy.
Natural and untouched.
Unlike back home.
It’ll feel like freedom.

I want to be an American.
Where fresh water flows to our homes.
Never questioning its purity.
Uncontaminated.
Clear and bright,
like the stars on the flag.
I’ll know it when I see it.
It’ll feel like freedom.

I want to be an American.
I can see it now.
The Land of the Free.
Where eagles soar alongside dreams.
Hope as high as the Rockies.
Horizons ever stretching.
Worries fading into the plush green grass.
I’m just waiting to see it.

It’s started,
the flashes of my childhood
have come to television.
Cinque lives,
reincarnated on the internet.
He hands out flowers
held in the teeth of
a seven-headed cobra.

Patty Hearst is a star
without talent, they will be
coming for her new version.
The funds are everywhere,
black, excessive, and boisterous.
The president will be humiliated,
old, and panicked, he will pass.
The country will be divided
on which story to follow.

The horses of Gaza—the stallions, colts, mares
the donkeys too—and mules, and jennies
who once tugged the people
on their carts, across the streets and intersections
for twenty centuries and maybe thirty,
now they scramble, the neighs, the braying,
the gallop in drummed dune-sand,
where hooves print crescent moons
with horseshoes that endure the bombings
Scrap horseshoes that were not twisted into guns
have the shapes of human jawbones, unbroken
the horses rush together, they are racing no longer
against each other, outpacing shadows
of the sun and of the warplanes,
which cost billions and still resemble
nothing more than dead birds
that fly dead-alive, with wings hardened
by death and jet-fuel
dead birds haunt the sky
because they had no cloud-deep burial,
just as the second world war
had no proper burial and was exported
to loom over the heads these Arabs
and their puny teenagers.
And the horses whose ribs protruded,
whose ribcages were played like xylophones
by Gaza’s screaming children who played
pranks and hopscotch all over the shadow of death,
the equine gallop on the beach,
mighty hooves thud out the sound of mechanical invasion
their hooves match the soughing plumage of the birds of prey
when they shake out their wings after bathing in the water.
The horses are now saddled only by flames,
with only Saracens of flame,
djinn of smoke as their riders
after rolling in the sand,
they douse their hides and manes in seawater,
leap into the coolness of death,
they breed the sea with the sky
to create a new and stolid race
The mares conceive the children of the blaze
2
and of the stallion in their fallopian tubes,
lo their children, soon as they’re born,
will be ready to ride winged foals
a harras of winged stud ponies
conceived in the burn
the only stampede worthy
of bearing the name Pegasus
trample the shadow of death in a quest
for secret lilies
until the shadow-fibers break against the quartz shards
in beach sand, hop over the dome
of the rock (gold-plated kippa
by azure waves of marble worn)
up to the seventh heaven,
drag Moses down for him to see this and to say
“I condemn all of this sordid mess, what sort
of children are they who made this rubble,
I want nothing, nada to do with it at all!”

And the hideous head of the Goliath Netanyahu
will roll
unworthy of a circumcision

Yet even if the reptilian tanks attempt to mate like lurching crocodiles,
even if the helicopters should mate like the dragonflies
whose anatomic design their engineers plagiarized
from the god of the mangrove to forge helicopters,
they will fail,
I know who will inherit these prized coasts
not for a biblical stable
not for a parking lot,
only for the field of plumed
airborne ponies.

This was foreknowledge foreseen
from the moment of their conception,
when the steeds who transported the two-leggeds
of Gaza ran,
manes afire, into that cool wave,
the chain of crests blueblack and bluewhite, the final wall,
always the last fort wall to remain standing
even as it comes ever crashing down
without prediction,
without cement of prayer.

Amiri Baraka
Said, Malcolm X
Was a ‘Fire Prophet’
Much like
Martin Luther King
Junior Had a dream

Equality
Stemming from young Kings
Righteously fighting for
God-given, Birth-given, Earth-given
Rights

A King at Birth
No matter the skin tone,
God placed us on this Earth
With no assigned rank at first

From beginning to immortal ‘ends’
All will joyously hail the most prolific kings
Of all time.

The whole worlds gone crazy
It’s mad and I’m tired of it
I’m tired of corrupt politicians
Lecturing to me about values
I’m tired of nuns, guns
Jesus freaks and new age messiahs/
Here to expound on truth
And show us The Way
Bad faith blowhard risk frauds
Who condemn to death at least
700 good faith clents a day
I’m tired of performance theater churches
Stocked with well groomed and attractive pulpiteers
Who sermonize peace and eternal salvation
to sadly misguided fools for price
And all those phony smiling
Narcissistic bent mutha fucka’s
Who at the start present as so nice
I’m tired of Wallstreet bankers
Government wankers
As far as I’m concerned
They’re all full of shit
I’m tired of it
I’m tired of US federal govt hypocrisy
Their Lock em up and comodify
Throw away the Con along with the key
slave wage labor for profit philosophy
I’m tired of our never ending war based economy
Propaganda disguised as educaton
An uninformed, unconcerned distracted population
Elected officials bribed
By flim flam corporations
Fabricated news spread
By partisan hack organizations
I’m tired of flicking through the channels
And seeing bullshit hucksters on my tv
All those good christian government officials
Spewing racist fictions about brown refugees
I’m tired of the 5 o’clock news
Adds about feminine freshness, dependable douches
And all that I can’t believe it’s a bra shit
Hell, I’m tired of eating fried eggs
I can’t help but think
that’s what my brain must look like

Each march a display of collective strength
shattering bars constructing cages of our own homes

Demanding permission to display inherent skill and
solve equations–to prove the answer of a pay gap false

Channeling fury from the fickle nature of their promise
of a timeless option to abort unwanted constraints

We disobeyed unjust calls to clean and cook
instead boiled up legislation to protect against abuse

Foremothers forged new bills engraved with our names
then etched signatures on ballots with manicured fingers.

Small victories ticked off until race ceased to dictate
ability to advocate for oneself in government.

Our stilettos pierced holes in the patriarchy
then patched voids from positions of power

But what victory is a right to property
when our bodies become puppets
of another

They scuttle, thin-boned sentinels of sameness,
eyes like magnifying glasses,
tongues tasting the air for errors,
fingers bent to scold.
“Not quite,” they mutter,
scratching notes in the margins of my magic.
“Untrue,” they insist,
as if stars must justify their arrangement.

Who are they, these custodians of order,
to call my phoenix
a disguised pigeon
because it roosts on reality’s roof?

Release me from this prison of numbers.
Let clocks spiral backwards,
hands pirouetting to the beat of disbelief.
Why must the ground
stay beneath my feet?
Why must the sky
tattle on the wings of my words?

Let me build cathedrals of nonsense–
arches of implausibility,
stained-glass windows
colored with unprovable dreams.
What harm in rivers that dissolve sadness
or bees that whisper forgotten names?
But no–here come the fact-checkers,
armed with the weights of certainty,
demanding receipts.

They drag me down
with their leaden notebooks and fussy questions:
“Did it happen?”
“Where’s the source?”
“Who saw it, and when?”

What dull creatures,
with spines straight as rulers,
lips pursed like staplers.
Truth, they say, must be a polished mirror.
I say it’s a shadow in a carnival funhouse.
Why must my lies–no, my liberations–
be caged?

Fact-checking is the end of joy.
A guillotine for the impossible,
an autopsy on wonder.
I want a world unmeasured, unweighed, untrue–
where gravity forgets its job
and oceans spill over their edges
to water thirsty stars.

You call me liar,
as if the word could shatter me.
But I am the jester unbound,
the architect of shimmering fictions.
I braid contradictions in my hair,
wear a tie knotted with riddles,
lace my boots with plausible denials.

Who am I?
I am the shadow casting no light,
the smoke wearing a crown.
/ Poetry Manuscript / 3
Destroy fact-checking,
and I am no longer a liar–
I am free.