by Theresa Haffner



to fight the bitter fight


to wage the bitter war


a war waged for freedom
            by small bands of misfits
            with the wide eyes of inspiration and holy sacrament



a war waged with the weapons of poetry, music, drama,
            painting and modern dance


a war waged with spoken word, computers, paintbrushes, video cameras,
            typewriters, guitars, and keyboard synthesizers


a war waged with Jack Daniels, Old English 800, Budweiser, Magnum,
            King Cobra, Cisco, and Thunderbird wine


a war waged with psilocybin, mescaline, marijuana, cocaine,
            methamphetamine, and heroin


a war waged with deviant sex, bisexuality, homosexuality, transvestitism, bondage and
            dominance, sadomasochism, fetishism, masturbation, and heterosexual love


a war waged with mysticism, candle burning, wicca, meditation, tarot cards,
            Satanism, shamanism, and magic invocation


A war waged in the tradition of the masters who came before:


            Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
            Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, and Charles Olson


            Percy Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
            Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams,
            e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Eugen Gomringer


            Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Edgard Varese,
            Eliot Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, and Philip Glass


            Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Piet
            Mondrian, Mark Chagall, Edvard Munch, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso,
            Toulous LaTrec, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Cezanne


            John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Miles Davis, Charles Parker, Ornette
            Coleman, Sun Ra, and Pharaoh Sanders


            John Cippolina, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Ray
            Manzarek, Paul Butterfield, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan


            Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Darby Crash, Keith Morris, Il Deuce, Greg Ginn,
            Henry Rollins, and Mike Watt


a war waged by prostitutes, drug dealers, drag queens, compulsive gamblers, alcoholics,
            convicts, criminals, homeless people, and poor people everywhere


a war waged with word and ideology, and those who lend their bodies to be the weapons
            of the war


a war waged with the common bond of humanity shared by all people


a war waged by those who fell prey to their own devices, in mental institutions, jails,
            prisons, asylums, half way houses, missions, and board and care homes


a war waged by all the faceless unknown contributors and seekers of truth who did not
            achieve fame, who may be judged by society and by themselves as failures, who
            may live in economic ruin, having given everything for the struggle, whose names
            have not been recorded by history, but whose courageous deeds have not been
            without effect.


a war waged in the name of all those who gave their lives through o.d. deaths, suicide,
            murder, and a.i.d.s.


a war waged by everyone who ever went for broke and committed themselves wholly and
            totally to a cause or an ideal


a war of liberation as serious as any revolutionary insurgency against any South
            American third world dictatorship


a war fought without generals, without commanders, without military, without strategy,
            and without guns


a war fought in the name of freedom by such unlikely candidates as S.A. Griffin, Rafael
            F. J. Alvarez, Scott Wannberg, Saint Teresa Stone, Katie Soljak, M. Mollet,
            Doug Knott, and also those writers who have all too often struggled in isolation


a war fought to overthrow world religions, multinational corporations, criminal justice
            systems, television evangelists, old money accumulated by southern plantation
            owners on the slave trade, and any doctrine that insists that it and only it is the
            right way and denies the right of any other to exist


a war waged against the ideology that allowed a government to wage Desert Storm
            against an unprepared, under equipped and disorganized Iraqi people, killing and
            estimated 150,000, mostly civilians, while sustaining only light casualties, some
            by friendly fire or accidental death


a war waged against superstition, supernaturalism, fundamentalism, ignorance, and
            bigotry


a war waged against murder, violence, dehumanization, oppression, intolerance,
            victimization, discrimination, censorship, and the execution of criminals


a war fought that our world be safe for poetry, for music, for painting, for independent
            thinking, for minorities, and for our posterity


a war that each of us must wage within ourselves and one day must take up in the world
            about us


a war for brotherhood

© 1994 by Theresa Haffner

First published in AFTERSHOCK MAGAZINE, May, 1994.
Edited by Theresa Haffner and David Behrens