yeah, i poemed

in reponse to this lovely bit on Terri Windling's blog; here is a bit of what I was replying to:

"Art slips through, and us with it -- slips past the border police and the currency controls, to talk as we've always wanted to, about matters of the spirit and the heart, to imagine a world not dominated by numbers, to find in colors and poetry and sand an equivalence to our deepest feelings, a language for who we are." -- Jeanette Winterson, published in The World Split Open

Art Slips Through

there are always cracks
no matter how high the wall,
how strong the barricades,
no matter how carefully written
the unjust laws, how many
faceless soldiers they find
to enforce their brutish rule
(the soldiers are not faceless,
the blockades always leak;
we always find a way)

art slips through.
graffiti'd words on an underpass,
spoken word in a underground cafe,
scrap paper woodblock printed
or run off on an old ditto machine
(remember the smell?
those things last forever
it's a good thing;
we use what we have)

art slips through
secrets coded in woven fabric
a call to resist in the words of a song
a new way of looking at the world
in stories told by the old
(never think that revolution
is only the province of the young
we come in all sizes, all ages)

art slips through,
through the gaps in the canon stories,
the only ones that are authorized,
that only the authorized may tell;
through the quiet between the songs,
the only ones allowed to be played
on the only radio station
that's allowed to broadcast
(good thing we had
that pirate radio station
back then,
it was good practice)

art slips through.
there are always gaps,
always cracks.
there's always an underpass
nobody's watching,
always a soldier
(not faceless at all)
who'll let that whistled tune
slip by,
always a place
you can leave your stack
of scrap paper,
hand printed zines,
where they will be found
by those who need to read
the things we are writing.
there is always a way.