The resistance poet in Poetry Chef Michael Dickel wields his frying spoon with that amazing verve of a militant word-master and that astounding zeal of a chronicler cum griot cum protest poet. He fries and roasts the 6th January American political gaffe into a beautiful poetry gourmet (fusion of visual arts , graphics and poetry) as perpetuated by the tyrant and autocratic regime of Donald Trump at Capitol Hill. Archaisms and political corruption that has since plunged the once all powerful US into the status of a Banana Republic hovel, a war-mongering nation and a military state on record as lecturing several countries across the globe on ethos of non-violent elections, freedom of expressions, human rights and democracy. Dr. Dickel uses powerful grim visual imagery, sorry historical allusions exposing the stark nudity of a system that have thrived on punishing other nations through perpetuation of wars, life-biting economic sanctions and other threatening vices.
Every resistant poet is a rebel with a CAUSE and with this Poetry Chef Dickel bravely speaks truth to power and he rebukes dictatorial organizations and autocratic clubs to repent and toe the democratic line as their devilish machinations has since plunged the world in turmoil’s of terrorism, war, hunger, disease and global decay. Dickel is a prolific master of letters, a Dexter of poetry, a literary arts scholar. He writes beautiful poetry on the rough pleats of political denims. This article is adapted and is originally published by Dr. Michael Dickel at his web-journal. Poets are pen messiahs using literary consciousness and poetic dexterity to heal the world blistered with scars of war, boils of racism, wounds of political violence and blisters of tyranny.
Dear Fellow Readers—please visit Dr. Michael Dickel, Meta/Phor(e)/Play blog-Zine to get a full experience of this submission on your computer and you are also supposed to move your mouse-cursor over links and some of the images*
VICISSITUDES — JANUARY 6, 2021
i
I am weary of riding on this
blistering train wreck in slo-mo po-mo
as each car accordions in cacophony.
JFK, MLK, Jr., RFK assassinated
John Lennon on the streets of New York
Apartheid, Berlin Wall, USSR collapsing
Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin,Tet Offensive, My Lai Massacre
Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Movement, GLBTQ+ Rights Movement endlessly debated
Fall of Saigon, Afghanistan War, Iraq War, Iran unrequited
I tear my eyes out but can’t turn away,
in fear of the dystrophic waters that flow
below the trembling bridge that crumbles.
Birmingham Church Bombing, Watts Riots exploding
Fred Hampton, Chicago Eight, Kent State calamities
Air India Flight 182, Lockerbie, Bombay, Angola lives torn asunder
Jonestown, Oklahoma City, Tiananmen Square thunder
9/11, Camp Speicher, Congo, Sinjar, Sri Lanka deaths beyond number
Mogadishu, Trujillo, Karrada Bombing, Gamoru Ngala too many to consider
Each rent metal frame scratches deep
my retinal consciousness
like fishhooks in flesh
Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima nuclear winter
Polio, AIDS, Coronaviruses infection rates soaring
Charlie Hebdo, Manchester Arena, Paris 2015 mass murder
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd police killing
Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump rape with impunity
Nixon, Clinton, Trump, and Trump…
I am tired of sludging through history, its vicissitudes
impinging, vicious études unhinging—this
transcontinental chugging and lugging to ruin.
ii
With barely time left, I smash through the window,
gaze up and down the oppressed-laid lines, manufactured metal
that trends to inevitability. I pull myself out to see,
tumble down into the slough. Trudging toward a muddy shore
from below the mountain of train shriek and colliding-car drum-beat,
I see colorful hints of wild flowers struggling for succor—
dark hyacinths, pale daffodils, bold crocuses, bright anemones.
With these colors, I want to illuminate the massive wreckage around me.
America a Prophecy, plate 10, copy I. Relief etching with white-line etching / engraving, 9 1/4 x 6 5/8″ (23.5 x 16.7 cm). Etched and printed 1793
Orc, the spirit of revolution, announces the renewal of “fiery joy” in the text, but his words are written on a cloud between the dark waters of the Atlantic and the domineering figure of Urizen, the creator of the fallen world and a Moses-like promulgator of its laws. He is a skygod “who sat/ Above all heavens wrap’d” (plate 18). His name puns on both “your reason” and the Greek word for “horizon,” respectively for Blake the primary mental and physical limitations encumbering human vision. Urizen’s cloudy realm is at once both material and insubstantial, like the abstractions of rationalist science and natural religion Blake abhorred.…Essick, Robert N. William Blake at The Huntington. New York: Harry N. Abrams. 1994. p. 40
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Michael (Dickel) Dekel has authored six published books and chapbooks (pamphlets) of poetry and short fiction, and published over 200 individually published poems, short stories, and non-fiction pieces, in addition to book-reviews and academic articles—under his birth name, Michael Dickel. Nothing Remembers, his most recent poetry collection, came out in 2019 from Finishing Line Press. For Fisher Features, Ltd, he wrote a successful NEH film-development grant and the script for a documentary film on Yiddish theatre. He works as a freelance editor for publishers and individual authors, co-edited Voices Israel Vol. 36 (2010), and served or continues to serve as an editor of one sort or another for several print and online literary periodicals. He has taught writing, literature, and English language in higher education in both the U.S. and Israel. Michael publishes an online blog-Zine, Meta/phor(e). He is the past chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English. He holds a Bachelor’s in psychology, a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing (Fiction and Poetry concentrations), and a Doctorate in English.
