Was my soul mission to become The Anti-Capitalist?

I reposted at my Facebook page this from the Poetic Outlaws Facebook page.

Song for Baby-O, Unborn
Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.
I won’t promise
you’ll never go hungry
or that you won’t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe
but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever

Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934 – October 25, 2020) was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be Loba, a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998.

Estes Cocke
I have a book of poems written between 1973 and 1985 called Forbidden Fruit. It's a poetic journey through a decade of life where the poet searched for his identity.

Sloan Bashinsky
Estes Cocke Poems started coming out of me in 1991, my 49th year. Lots of poems came out of me into 1995. It felt like they were being dictated to me, or dragged up out of me, by my soul, sometimes, by something else, other times. They, like novels that came out of me then, were about parts of me I had forgotten, lost, thrown away, or never knew were there. Some were cosmic. They all were pieces of some kind of road map or itinerary I was to use to get from where I was to somewhere else, over and over again. The poems were timeless. priceless, sometimes, spooky.

Estes Cocke
Should we share one or two of these delights.

Sloan Bashinsky
Estes Cocke The first, which was on the back jacket of Prisons & /freedom, now a free read at internet library archive, will also provide links to that.

Living Poets

Dead poets are poets who never write

Who obey shoulds and oughts

Who live to please others

Who value money over God

Who die without ever having lived

Death is their mark

Dead poets are remembered by the living.

Living poets are remembered by time

Dead poets never sing their song

Living poets nover stop singing it

The difference between the two is this:

One worships fear, the other life

To be a dead poet is hard

It requires being someone else

To be a living poet is easy

It only means being myself

One choice is hell, the other heaven

That is what is meant by free will

Sloan Bashinsky
Estes Cocke
https://archive.org/details/prisons-and-freedom-revision-3oh-1-compressed/mode/1up?view=theater

Sloan Bashinsky
Estes Cocke The second, which, in retrospect, foretold my becoming "The Anti-Capitalist"?

I happened upon a mockingbird

singing his fool head off.

I asked him how and why he sang?

But all he did was look ahead,

all he did was sing.

He never turned to see if I was watching,

Or listened for money jingling in my pockets,

Or asked if I liked his music,

Or expected a recording contract.

He was too busy singing

to pay any attention to me.

In this way I learned

the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird.

Sloan Bashinsky
Estes Cocke Several geographical moves, I no longer have the luminous and brilliant eulogy poem that burst out of me on 26th anniversary of the day I buried my seven-weeks-old son - I'd never heard of crib death. 26 is the sacred number for God in some circles. That poem blew a lot of people away. He lived long enough to break my heart forever, and perhaps his? The result for me, I was so disheveled that I was never able to fit into any plans anyone, including me, had for me. I became someone I would never have met or gotten to know, if he had lived. I can imagine he might have had something to do with the two poems above, and with others that came later. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Estes Cocke About 20 years after my son died, I was living in Birmingham for a while, and some things happened that caused me to drive to the cemetery and visit him. I had not gone back there since I buried him. I stopped at the front office to get directions to the family plot, and was told his unmarked grave was just in front of my mother's grave stone. As I approached her gravestone, my heart heaved, I lost my breath andI fell to my knees and balled oceans of tears and snot for maybe five minutes. I left and kept coming back and having the same thing happen. I kept coming back until it didn't happen. Then, I went to the front office and ordered a grave marker for a lost child, a woman holding a baby. I told them to engrave on it, "Infant son. He opened our hearts and set us on our journey."

Estes Cocke

Tragic. I wish you and my friend could talk.

Sloan Bashinsky

Estes Cocke my son’s soul completed its mission, he died for me. Your friend may or may not wish to talk with me and should read this FB post and our discussion, before deciding. 

sloanbasinsky@yahoo.com