The Straw that Breaks the Camel's Back

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I paid twenty-five dollars for a comfortable old wicker love seat.


The rasta man has his LP's and books displayed out on the sidewalk near Grand Army Plaza subway in Brooklyn. He's often there at the entrance.

It was back before the turn of the century when I lived in that storefront on Vanderbilt Avenue. He just sits back in his beaten up old chair through all kinds of weather as the Park Slope crowd stream past.

Streetwise. Street smart. Making a living. Hurting no one. Waiting to make a sale. So he can eat. So he can survive. So he can live. So when the rasta man saw me riding past on my bicycle, riding slow up the hill with my garden tools, he just walked out into the street and stopping me cold said:

“You know me man.
I'm no beggar man
but I need some food
some rice and beans.
Can you help?
Police have shut me down.”

There's a thin line between civil society and revolution and sometimes it's more civil to revolt. What is it that keeps us down, compressed like this? How are we able to just watch as our liberty, our humanness is eroded piece by piece? How much will we take? What was it that gives Timothy McVeigh the freedom to kill or the suicide bombers. When rage become too much? How much is enough?

The poet Robert Frost writes:

“One summer day, while I was
walking along a country road
on the farm where I was born,
a section of the stone wall opposite me
and not more than three or four yards distant,
suddenly fell down.

Amid the general stillness and
immobility about me the effect was
quite startling... it was the sudden
summing up of a half century or
more of atomic changes in the
material of the wall. A grain or two
of sand yielded to the pressure of
the long years, and gravity did the
rest.



How long does it take?
How many days?
How many deaths?
How many lifetimes? 

The straw that breaks the camel's back. 
The straw that breaks the camel's back.




Oklahoma Oklahoma where the wind blows swiftly 'cross the plains blowing tumbleweeds and topsoil
and memories from deep far away blowing in the wind. Blowing lives away. Blowing notions of a safe heartland away. Blowing freedom blue sky high. Blowing my heart away. 

Scattered dreams and debris broken bones and broken hearts.
Jack boots marching down my spine, nitrogen dreams and blood behind my teeth.

Ashes in my ears. Enola Gay apologists. Vietnam. Napalm. Coca Cola wars. Disneyland Pocahontas.
Playing on the astro turf. Central Park gang-bang. McDonald's minimum wage. Walmart and rain forests smoking, stink of burned Yanomami and papal incense.


The rasta man just walked slowly out into the street and with a voice as smooth and soft as silk
asked me to help him live:


"You know me man.
I'm no beggar Andrew 
but I need some food
some rice and beans. Can you help?
Police have shut me down."


How long does it take?
How many days?
How many deaths?
How many lifetimes?

The straw that breaks the camel's back.
The straw that breaks the camel's back.

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