For the 99%, for art, for artists, for all. - Blog - A Poem by Joy Leftow

For the 99%, for art, for artists, for all. - Blog - A Poem by Joy Leftow

I am proud the above poem was published by Occupennial Art Database for OccupyWallStreet artists and art actions.

Zuccotti Park & Occupy into week 4

There's an excellent energy down at occupy wall street and finally demonstrators and occupying citizens are being taken seriously. No one goes hungry and even the homeless have joined them.

The first time I was there, I'd just lost my health insurance because my ex dropped me when he lost his job. We'd both signed our divorce stipulation where he'd agreed to cover me until the divorce. Without telling me anything then, he dropped me when he was fired from his job. I went down to the employee benefits board on Rector Street and explained my dilemma as a retiree. They agreed to reinstate me from the first of the month when I explained my concerns that I had seen several doctors that month already without realizing that I wasn't covered. After finishing I decided to walk about since I am rarely in that part of the city. I looked at the world trade center and decided to get a salad. After finishing my salad I looked out the window and saw there was a crowd in the square facing me.

Entering the square I looked around me and it seemed the park had been overtaken by homeless. I found myself standing next to a young lady with blond hair who appeared very business like. I started a conversation. "Are there a lot of homeless people who have moved into this park?" I asked, this only being day two of the occupy movement and not knowing anything.

The young woman who was dressed in a plain gray skirt and blouse with a jacket looked at me and laughed at my question. "We are demonstrating here," she said. "We're the 99 percent who have nothing because the 1 percent have it all. What better place to protest than here where it starts? I guess though to answer your question, there are many young people who can't get work and since they can't get work they figure they may as well get a head start with claiming a spot since pretty soon there's going to be a lot more of us homeless than before with degrees and all. So many have moved here so they have a place to be."

We discussed the possibility of a performance space since I always think about poetry and performance. I promised to research their since I liked what I heard. I hung out for several hours walking around and checking out the boobs which were nice to see and wrote down the website, occupywallstreet.com, intending to google it when I got home. Over the next few days I kept expecting to hear something on the news but it never happened. I decided to revisit and bring my poetry hoping there would be a performance space. And it just so happened that The People Staged was on when I got there. I signed my name and performed. The audience was great and there was no one drink minimum or entrance fee and they all screamed "encore!" For the first time in years I felt hopeful about our political state of mind. The country has turned into us the worker bees, being peons, and the big folk take everything we earn except leaving us enough to be strong enough to work for them.


Below are pics taken today.

Below is G. Wagner who displays his sign along with his art and support. Occupy Wall Street is inspiring artists.

David Everitt-Carlson 
a homeless blogger getting his point across.

Good writing graffiti by homeless blogger.

We asked for change, we prayed for change, we looked for change but there's been very little.

Don't box us in. We need space and freedom to grow.

Don't give to the greedy, give to the needy - yes indeedy! We will overcome!

Jamming the day and night, to bring about peace and change. Occupy all day all week!

This man works as a home health aide but still has to live at a shelter. He works so doesn't qualify for health care or food stamps. When I told him about the "medicaid spend down" he had no clue what  I was speaking of.

The smell of people, incense and pot permeated the air along with hopes and dreams.

Yom Kipper and Russian Bluetry

 Oh my father - please rest in peace - you never had any while you lived. A musically gifted prodigy forced to leave school behind to go to work everyday - forced to help support his family and still to this day, it irks me when I hear people say Jews are rich.

A musician who loved learning, a cruel joke in life - your entire life lived in fear - the world a dangerous place. Eleven years old - forced to leave school and work; you looked for places to recluse yourself inside your head you hid from the world by living in dreams where you played your violin instead.

Father I feel for you, a young boy told, "Son, we’re sorry but you have to help support your family. There are six of us,” his Dad said, “so you have to work to help pay the rent and buy the food we eat.”

Forced everyday to work in a drug store in Harlem and of your own device going to school at night so you could finish your Latin and math and be a real pharmacist not just an apprentice. You figured you’d get a pharmaceutical license if you finished your physics and math so you did it. By the time I was born you'd lost your focus trying to stay alive and support a wife and four children. Your temperament led to arguments with bosses. Then you gave up and stayed with the apprentice license even though you performed all the same tasks. You said you made medicines from scratch using Latin formulas.

One night you were forced to work late –ordered to close up all alone. That night there was a violent riot in Harlem- forced to work late. Climbing up high to a small hidden window near to the ceiling saved your life you said. Otherwise you would have been dead. A man outside the store lay dead while you waited inside until the noise in the street died. You waited over 10 hours you said, hidden behind a heavy black curtain in the storage room, wondering if you’d get out alive.

Terror and frustration created a monster inside who ate his way out of the hive and proved he was in charge. My Dad beat his first wife. The second was my mother who suffered greatly. She kept trying to stay alive to help her children survive.  Her cancer ate her alive. Poor Dad gambled our money away and came home mean and exhausted. If got worse if she fought.

My two sisters, my brother, my Dad and my mother all crammed into a one-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t too pleasant but I have a few good memories. Uncle Leo visited Dad every Sunday and they played their violins, sang tunes and lyrics they created and accompanied each other all day, showing each other what they'd learned and created.

Then Uncle Leo’s wife went off her rocker and was never the same again. Day after day, she chanted the same words, “They go to Argentina and they think they’re great!” referring to Jews who had escaped and Nazi's escaping the holocaust. Uncle Leo died when I was ten. Poor Dad went crazy too. His sisters and mother got him out of Bellevue by paying a fine of two and a half thousand. My father chased the doctor around with a knife, the doctor who’d removed my mother’s breast – my dad chasing him wielding a big butcher knife. He claimed the doctor was having an affair with my mom. Dad flipped out and never recovered either.

Poor Dad –never easy for you- your mother kvetching in Yiddish bragging about her dancing on the Russian Stage but how she gave it all up and left it behind so you could be born in America. Lucky for you – she had the foresight to see forty years ahead.

Poor Dad, working all day when all you wanted to do was be like your Dad who had accompanied your mom with his violin – the violin became yours. No one ever taught you to play but you played like a pro. Rest in peace Day - may you finally have the security and peace you longed for in life.

times are tough for the 99 %

Help me go & speak to Obama for the 99% & you!

I'm a poor artist surviving on a pension & SS. I'm seeking donations to go Obama's dinner so I can break things down to him for how it is for the unprivileged. I would love to have an opportunity to explain how hard it is for us who will never own a home, for those of us who live right in the way of people fracking our water supply so that in several years probably half of us will be dead and those of us who survive will be diseased. I would definitely like an opportunity to voice my opinion. I want to tell Obama how it is everyone's basic right to have adequate medical care food and shelter.

I want him to know that the poor need an expansion of social welfare programs like we had in the Johnson era and that he needs to stop giving big pay outs to people on Wall Street, that he needs to follow President Roosevelt's tactics when it come to taxing the very wealthy because the poor can no longer shelter everything plus pay for everything the rich want.

No one can afford their own apartment anymore. Where are people to go?
There's no jobs and what about the man who makes 23000 and has 3 young children and a wife? He pays taxes and can barely pay the rent.
Things are rough all around for the 99 percent.

For the first times in years - spending some time with the 99% in Zocotti Park and participating in their activities and sharing their space, I feel hopeful that sometime in my lifetime there will be change and more equitable distribution of resources, jobs, money for food medical care for working poor. I haven't felt this hopeful in years.

I even got to hang out with Uncle Eddie & Robin which was great fun. Robin said they'd traveled from West Virginia to be with their brothers and sisters. Uncle Eddie even accompanied me with his banjo when I performed the following poem. Very cool people.

Billie’s Consumerism Blues

What I find crazy is that none of this is being reported in the news. I mean why should we know that a grass roots organization has moved into a park on Wall Street or that this same grass roots population has the same type demonstrations going on in at least 50 more cities.

Yesterday at occupywallstreet.com I was surprised to learn that this occupation is going on in other cities simultaneously and somehow miraculously this news is being kept from our citizenry.
I was really happy to be there today and see so much going on. They even had a performance corner which I participated in which was great fun.

A lot of solidarity permeates the air!

Check the link below at Kevin Zeese's blog to see exactly where and spread the word everywhere to everyone you know:

occupy occupy occupy 
This is a great blog for disseminating information.
http://october2011.org/blogs/kevin-zeese/99-are-standing-everywhere-occupy-together

Celebrities Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore visit Zucotti park

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2042317/Occupy-Wall-Street-Michael-Moore-joins-protesters-New-York.html

Above is a profile of Uncle Eddie and below is Robin.

And here's Robin, his cohort in crime!

occupy wall street all day all week is the chant you hear!

My first short film is now online: "Toss up and Sides again"

Ben Hopper filmed his first short film - check it out! Shot over a period of 2 days using a Canon 5D Mark II during the 18th Israeli Juggling Convention in Gan HaShlosha (Israel) back in April this year.

My first short film is now online: "Toss up and Sides again"

We Are the 99 Percent

We Are the 99 Percent

Misunderstandings

Nurtured with contempt instead of acceptance I came to understand that contempt was what I deserved. A world filled with maladjusted tendencies, constrained to a room, one of many to come. Three beds stood in our one bedroom with two side-by-side windows with deep sills that faced a wide open schoolyard that ran the entire width of our square city block.

Six of us lived in a one bedroom walk up gratefully situated on the first floor of a five story red brick building. There were two graceful entrances to the left and right of the main courtyard surrounded by well tended shrubbery. 

In our one bedroom there was a double bed plus two singles side by side against the wall, facing outwards so that all of our feet directly faced each other. The two single beds pushed together were mine and the middle sister's. The double bed on the opposite side facing ours was occupied by my eldest sister, Georgette, and my mother. 

My bed was closest the window and Harriet's bed was pushed alongside mine, the heads pushed against the wall. There was only a few feet of space left to walk between the four beds. I spent a lot of time in bed. That was where I did my homework, read for hours and dreamed away the hours.

My favorite part of weekends and mostly all I looked forward to was the ability to stay late in bed gazing at the sky. If my sisters came in or my mother I would climb on the window sill behind the curtain where they could not watch me and I could imagine I was alone with my dreams of clouds constructing lives of gods and goddesses while I instructed them on how to play nice with one another to have a good time.

I never did fit it with anybody, especially in first through third grades. Children made fun of me. A girl name Ruth told me she and her friend were going to get dressed up and have a lollipop party and everyone was invited. Did I want to go? I looked in Ruth’s face feeling suspicious of their niceness I felt trapped but didn’t know why. I nodded yes. “Sucker,” they yelled gleefully laughing hysterically, whilst staring into each others eyes, they danced away arm in arm. I stared after them.

I sing misty blue for you today

Misty blue just for you today Daddy

Sing misty for you every day

Waiting to hear you say

You’re coming on home today

My life’s on hold – my mind strays

I see you in my mind’s eye drinking that Bombay Gin

Sitting alone in a Starbuck’s café

Knowing life plays me like a Violin

But I can’t stop wondering and hoping
That there's a better way

Please tell me you’ll always love me Daddy

The way you know that I love you

The way you know that I love you

Please please come on home to stay

My soul has turned misty like the
weather before the storm

While it keeps playing the same old song

Play it in reverse today and tomorrow

Let me coerce you to come on home

Let your worries disperse

Things can’t get much worse

So come on home baby

We’re going to jam the night away
and play new music all night long
till the dawn lights up the sky Daddy

The weather of my insight has changed.

The days grow shorter sun up to sun down yet they feel longer. I toss nightly sleeplessly awakened by the pitter patter of rain on my A.C. Relentlessly the same way every day like the A.C. upstairs  at the Medina’s  drips steadily down on top of mine. The storms won’t abate. Although the wind is gone a steady rain remains like the leak in my heart. I’m bleeding out and can’t say when. Only it’s not blood, it’s the leaking of love and spinal fluids and I can’t hold them back. I know it’s going to rain again today.

I look out the window. Quiet yet in spite of the quiet the rain falls like a silent cellophane sheet blanketing my world. Consumed by tireless passion I consider my options on how to avoid contact with the world. As though hearing my thoughts a breeze awakens outside my window whispering to me about the loss of his mother, the rainbow warrior. I console us and entreat him to try again.

He foreswears off the grain alcohol and thunder and moonshine light up the sky.

The wind is my friend. He whispers words only I hear so I listen again to see if I fear the answer. 
My thoughts and the wind have moved on. I hear a car barking down the street. The sound of the city whistles and my ears ring.

The pain in the crook of my arm keeps me alive. I google ‘pain in crook of arm’ to see what I can find. It’s described as some weird tendonitis. Ice as usual oh my. Shouldn’t I know that already?

I google group venus astrology. My astrology tells me “Avoid pessimism and don’ t retreat into yourself. You must expand psychologically and seek new experiences.”

Story of my life…

Onwards to new adventures!

What am I waiting for…

The Only One

 I thought about you and watched videos of us inside of me. I sat and cried for what I thought we’d had but slowly over the next year I realized our life was recreated from a fantasy of what I desired from you. In my mind the dream I’d created of who you are became real. Slowly over time you proved to me again and again that the dream was a fantasy. Being subjected to your unrelenting anger and sarcasm was nothing new. What became new was now I saw the things you did for what they are. You proved that I never possessed the dream I desired. You proved that I only see things the way I want to see them. I went back in time in my mind rearranging the pieces of our lives. I had never wanted to see you for who you are so I created the man I hoped to find. Picking through the events in time now I see I saw you, as I wanted you to be.  You were always the way I see you now but I refused to see who you were when we were together. To survive I lived a fantasy.

Living in dreams enriches my life but there is the comedown when I realize it’s only a dream, a rich fantasy about how I want things to be but not the way they really are. Everyone I see is colored through whatever lens I am wearing that day. I live in bright-distorted colors of varying shades and intensities.  Blue is rarely true blue and it is in my nature to stay true to myself. I am fickle. I change colors.

My sad is midnight blue yet I keep trying to see stars peeking through. Green seeps through me helping me keep in touch with nature yet I’m streaked with red where I’ve been led astray by envy or anger. My lust puts a golden dust on the dawn. It’s all I see when I’m in love, like being trapped in a lovely crystal ball with gold dust all around. It ends with releasing blood ties at season’s end; the red turns shades of yellow and orange, where I struggle with my faith in mankind. I’m ready to begin again. My color is aqua. I become a shade of royal plum. Like the Aegean Sea I float in the arms of eternity searching for the right you to understand me.

After the gold dust settles pastels show me like a misty savior heading towards threatening seas to rescue them from the dark. Colors shift from dawn to dusk inside of me as I rearrange my life accordingly with a party cake pink; a perpetual continuity lives inside of me as I struggle with the colors. They consume me. I realize I’m not the only one who can’t escape so I pray for us all instead.

I recycle the stories in my head and see they are all the same. The names change but the stories remain the same. After some time telling stories, the men run into each other knocking each other down because they don’t watch where they’re running. After a few stories I realize it doesn’t matter who did what. It’s like any one of them could have been in any of my stories doing the same things the other one did. The faces and names become interchangeable. They blur together and become one. For God’s sake it’s the same old stories with new and different faces.