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A Pamyat Manifesto
and The New Economics of Child Labor
two poems by Jeffrey Bohan

A Pamyat Manifesto

The evening was a festivity of love and gratitude
For each of us, life is a blend of the two
The difficulty manifested itself at both ends of the process.
An ultimate nonsensuous unity in all things
We could only influence the general trend of becoming.
The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress were so great.
Then I suddenly saw clearly that I was leading a strange life

The artifical paradise of mescal
I was full of ennui, full of misery, full of death
In the teeming anonymity of the urban slum
And now I realized how little individuality my soul has at its deepest reaches
Being breathed by ones' own breath
A minimal amount of trust was essential, but absolute trust was desirable
When the body has perished all that survives is the name

They had not deemed it advisible to shock me back into consciousness by violent means
The pursuit of love became more frenzied
Beliefs are a luxury we can get along without
Common Intention or Original Inspiration'
Not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself
With new joy I entrusted myself to life around me
In an ocean of technology and normalcy, I face up to Being
And there are forty or fifty years ahead (If the bomb doesn't fall)

The New Economics of Child Labor

So I have been hanging out down by the train depot
Hands trembling in growing hunger
Watching advertising puffs
Enjoying short-term relationships
Developing computer technology that comprehends healthier adjetives
The Chinese know themselves intergrown with all creation
Military experience without mutilation
Forming a Direct Democracy
Keeping in tune with the War Powers Resolution of 1973
Writing subsequent treaties, verifiable and enforceable
My head is a circus wheel of analogies
I'm the king of mega-phone croners
A Dumb glutton
The Technocrat suffers from myopia
Walking along a nights river
Playing with frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness
Like Oliver Cromwell, the dour zealot
Planning genetic modifications of city streets
Using Planar structure taken from Cubism
Winking at the Plural elites that govern our cities

Attempt to exorcise omnipotent officials, then making a hasty retreat

As I begin my exorcism of the pentagon
long-haired warlocks count large numbers
watching the molecular chaos
form a natural alignment
toward three-dimensional balance

"you fool your love has destroyed
your good sense"
screams the mint eyed technichian
scattering his statistics and values

Ignoring my space-time relative position
I run to the Riveria, I hear it's become
the resort of rank and fashion.

Strapped wooden sandles
Tanned lips quiver under the buzzing stars

My ego-ideal is my dynamic reality.

Jeffrey Bohan says he enjoys reading literature, watching films, and counting leaves on trees.