BASTARD VERSE
Bastard Cheers, Gavirela Person
B is for the Birthparents who Brought Us Forth.A is for A-Parents, who Give Their Part.
S is for our Siblinghood, our Fam-ily Torch.
T is for the Terror We Strike In Some Hearts.
A is for ADOPTEES! (pause) We Know What We’re Worth!
R is for Registration which we’ve Made An Art.
D is for Discrimination (pause, pause) — NO MORE!
Put them all togethe
They spell BASTARD!
My People! My Conscience! My Birth!
******Rah Rah! Sis Boom Bah!
Bastards We Will Change The Law!
******
Give Me My Identity!
Only Then Will I Be Free!
******
Variations on the Primal Wound
Daddy Had A Primal Woody
Mama Felt It Was Her Duty
To Take Him In,
It Was Unplanned
They Had Their Fun
Now Here I Am!
Gooooooooo Bastards!
******
It Is Apparent
I Have Four Parents
Big Brother Makes Five
But He’s So Jive
He Says Two Parents
Are Not Alive!
Where Can They Be?
Where Did They Go?
Big Brother Does Not
Want Me To Know!
Let My Bastard People Go!
Let My Bastard People Go!
Let My Bastard People Go!
******
Pricetag, Pricetag,
On My Ass,
I Live Under A
Looking Glass.
I See Mama,
I See Pop,
Two More Somewhere,
I Won’t Stop!
Bastards Gonna
Reach The Top
Paper Trail, Paper Trail,
Where Do You Lead?
Judge, Will You Do Me
One Good Deed?
Only Adoptees
Have This Need!
Overturn The Laws!
We Will Succeed!
Sylvia Head Bull_Goose Looney and Mistress of all She Surveys Buzzard Nation
Touching Adoption Related Poetry
If He and She get utterly plastered,
And “do the nasty”, they make a Bastard!
If She screws He, just for the itch
The Bastard’s mom is called a Bitch!
If Bitch and Bastard are left by He
He’s rightly called a S.O.B.!
‘Tween you and me, I would demur,
And call the creep a Whoreson Cur!
Whether Cur or Bastard, Bitch or what,
the problems caused by Prick and Twat!
Or maybe call them Cunt and Prong
(now let’s not make this overlong…)
And if you want to tie one on
Then on that Pole, a Condom, don!
Or He with He and She with She
To make sure there’d no Bastards be!
If all these words have you in a fit
It’s too damn bad one can’t say shit!
So please refrain from all that clucking
And be glad I didn’t refer to F*****g!!
Note to Bureaucrats
I see those pretty folders
stacked behind your files
Filled with all the things I’ve sought,
And rights for which I’ve vainly fought.
I see the teeth behind your smiles.
Guard your manger, Puppies!
From hungry horse’s call.
You shall not stop the granary mice!
We’ll get past you once more or twice,
And make the knowledge free for all!
You with names and histories
Of daughters sons and wives,
Stored in drawers and databases –
To you, we’re numbers… only cases,
Fight us for your jobs. We’re fighting for our LIVES!
******
“Nil Carborundum Illigit”
So goes the witty line around.
We’ve seen the phrase and heard the snickers
Aimed at passing bumperstickers.
WelL.. WE’RE the bastards who will WEAR YOU DOWN!
October 1996 Nil Carborundum Bureaucratum!
Sylvia’s Revelations on Dr. Who
Some more slices from the Dalek- atessen…
Dr Who of his scarf is quite vain.
Its use is for riding the train.
He wears it quite loose,
tied to the caboose,
And rides free by the neck! How insane!
Dr Who with his girlfriend was vexed
He found that his last name perplexed.
His girl said ‘Let’s play Doctor,’
He did and it shocked her,
She slapped him and left, oh what next?
Dr Who’s in a terrible rut!He’s found that his mom was a slut!
To relinquish, she opted
The Doc was adopted!
His BIRTH name’s not Who… it is WHAT!(his Bmom is trembling… I wonder… what is that she’s Gallifrey’d of!
Dr Who has an unheard of son.
The girl didn’t say Who was the one…
She used his Tardis key
As a makeshift IUD
And her oven gave birth to a bun!
And so Timelords are not all immune
And this poem will be ending soon.
So let’s all relax!
It will roll off our backs
And we can all go howl at the moon!
Pandora’s Box by Esmeralda Kent
Always scolded as small children,
those who ask too many questions
never learn to take direction,
“How’d that rabbit get inside that hat?”
All the anger that’s been hidden
Deep in secret hiding places,
throwing masks across our faces,
“Did curiosity really kill the cat?”
Twas a time when passion was the key
Which opened up the pain in me,
Destroying all the locks.
Unleashing demons spawned in fear,
Reflecting shadows in the mirror
of Pandora’s Box.
Open it up, all that is concealed,
Open it up, so the truth can be revealed,
You must break all your locks.
Open it up, take a look inside,
Open it up, have you anything to hide
Inside Pandora’s Box?
On Friday, May 17, 1996 on alt.adoption Mack Bray asked:
Will someone please tell me what “Bastard Nation” is?
Hey Mista Brey….
here’s my 43 cents worth on the question…the thing is you have to read this continuously for full effect…K?
Bastard Nation is the last great spiritual revolution of the second Millennium….Gulp!!! Open Wide…. it is the politics of aversion and the principles of careful codification of nuance and neglect in the ongoing die-A-Lectic of the hitherto chosen ones… a wafer thin solution to unswerving parallel plutonium “child centered” principles in the post nuclear age.
BN is your interpretation of these words.
A singular unified presence of like-minded individuals who share the common uniqueness of being something “other” by definition of legal status adoption.
Bastard Nation has no identity. Like Godhead. Like the measurements of deep space before Chronos, or Joey siph Campbell for that matter. Or Auntie MATTER. for that matter. Or no matter in some matters.
Bastard Nation is Oedipus before his retinas snapped. Or the Harley Davidson that Pamela Lee Anderson rode through some ring of fire in a Hollywood movie. Or the BARB E Q, we all thought we were going to before we discovered the mosquitoes and the bright smell Tide left in our clothes…mmm…
Bastard Nation is all and it is nothingness.
It is Sartre, Foucault, Goethe, Rilke, Barthes, Camus, Doestoevsky, Paul, Peter, John, Jesus, Lloyd Bridges before Corpus Christi, a bleeding grey blood suit bag in a Florida Everglade, Spaulding Grey Swimming to Kamchatca after his Dinner With Claude Van Damme, before the Woosters and lofty like Hamlet… it is the first definition of the first dawn of the first summer of Sumer, …it is a paper cutter in a social services office in downtown Baltimore, sometime on the Sunday visiting sunshine mid April, l996… it is the cannibalistic vigor of the ancient Mayan religion of Olmec, and the floating raft of Medusa. It is the paranoid delivery of once great major league speed ball pitcher, say a Ryan. Or a vast fleet of stars, say Orion. Or an integer of electrical impulse say an ion…or a Captain of the Quarks, or a James JO-jo’s cykick Allegiance, Joycian novella-like, running on empty, Jackson browne, songs from my past antagonizing a frenzied revelation of minor warrior like proportions… It is all of the above and none of the below, as is, as was, will be, without, inside, a blastocyst of nude fleshy ambivalence…and further poor spelling habits. Grammar. Fuck! (Another one for D.P.)
It is the first phoneme we heard.
Its the moment the curtain was pulled back and the big brown roving eyes of bliss, gratitude, and serenity bid on love. My love, our love, the nurturing older woman sleeping beside me, rollicking we were, in laughter, like some hours earlier, like a Milleresque beaten queen, laughing at our seclusion, drugged in ether, “down with me..” she says “now!”…smelling my favourite beard, loving me, why me? She could have had Moses…she picked my floppy disco jaded white ass…Bastard I say….Nation I say…marching out into the cool winter pick up hockey game, slumming the thoughts of this new found nation….in the smell of torment I smelled me a rat….and da’ rat says, poetry first, and Bastard next…be a nation when you get loved….so I did.
My love. Our love, this bastard. This torrent of geo-diversity on the playground. I asked some woman once if she was my mother for a joke. For a joke.
As I was lying beside her .
“Well…?”
No answer, is the Nationality of remorse. Cuz it’s fucked up. Cuz it’s fraid of us…of our stamped wings. Of our curly wurleys in the Saskatoon evenings.
Basterd. A little fucking, fucking Bastard!!!!
BASSTTTARRRRRDDDDD!!!!!!!
It’s a nationless Bastardy piece of prose….example…
The man behind the counter clenched his teeth as the silver gloss fraction of a nanosecond exploded what logic before he handed the killer the keys…some symbols, of value…as he squeezed out his second to last breath, his last words being….
“Son of a ….bastard!”
I’m gittin off topic, which happens from tome to tome…back to the linguistic jump rope of the definition of the words ….Bastard and Nation, together…again…ahh, Estrogon? Lucky?! is that you?
Of course I speak for myself, as though I need to remind my self that.. Just so we don’t get the wrong guy at the trial. Yup me and Joeseph K we been tried in the same court. Well different rooms same epoch. You ever read Kafka? That is pure Bastard Nation! Or Ralph Ellison, he was a bastard. One of the best!! He lived in the nation. Bertolt Brecht. BN survivor, and definer. German head smacker, chainsmoker, poverty activist, theatre guy. Terry Fox, the one legged Canadian Runner. He had Nation in his blood.
Bastard Nation does not exist.
This is a plea for non existence!?
Bastard Nation will refuse all handouts, all Alms, all orphan Annies, and Trains and Brandos whose racist, sexist bullshit won’t wipe the sweet sorry ass of an American Buffalo, no thanks to D. Mamet, and all glare from the goofy footlights of deceptive evening wear….and on and on and on and…To think Brando refused an Oscar for native american rights, who is he fooling? Mr. Dressup?
Oh, yeah, here is the statement….
What is Risk but uncalculated Fortune. I just made that up. Or how about this one. “I will swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but….”
Bastard Nation is the anatomy of all things evil, equal, excitable, exacting, and easy. It is the frost on the window on a cold Boulder Co., morning…. It is the dazzling parade of lights that cascade from a Northern sky on an open prairie, sometime ago. I recall.
Bastard Nation is a mythical place. A place of refuge, and healing, and wisdom and nurturing. A place where wolves cry Peter tend my flock I tarry…and the heroes of wicca rebel. BN is a epistemological quandary. It is blasphemous. It is feminist, and masculinist. It is a sorry violinist standing beside the I-5, playing Dvoric, while the asphalt deepens from the certain summer weight of cedar and red oak being rocketed by via some 18 wheel Weyhauser agenda. “Rollin’ rollin’ rolling’….”
It is the private corporate boardroom, where the VPs and Party executives trade parting shots long before the war on wisdoms belongs in the quantum physical space of profits, mergers, and actors for re sale game.
Bastard Nation is a concept of people, here who write statements against the immortality Act, circa, 1973 South Africa, apartheid. Bastard Nation is a hollywood with a vision, a Wall Street with shower, a papal picnic without leading edge security folding chairs, a Winston Stalk car without the filters…the sounds of the oval cacophony, a fugue of infinitely regressing temperatures…all for the love of Nationhood. Nation-hold. Ahh, yes, the poser’s and the power broiler’s. Those who disseminate, and those who incarnate.
The right folks at the Registry. The Bastard Nation key grips. Those who help delineate the corruptness to our Nation state. Those who paint the colours on the fuselage before the turbines say…”look out carrier pigeons, Gideon’s got nothing on these winged immortals…”
So it comes to pass, and piss, and the pace of sanctity just went nuclear. To trust with love.
Bastard Nation was a stale piece of bread. A broken coke bottle. A mirror. A reprehensible strategy of assimilation. It’s this. And me, and tho’….
For now….
And…
Bastard Nation is the least bit of difference associated with the free form poetics of post intellectualism with a fanatical tinge…best viewed in the Spring time. Bastardy.
There’s more on this rant, little said enough…
And so our little euphemistic eulogy to the question….”what is Bastard Nation?” comes to a screeching latent steep and subtle….sticky in places…you know…you can feel it, just can’t get to the end.
Me.
I.
A shadow of doubt…
Bombastic Nation of Beautiful Bastards
Compass by Sarah Fry
I knew years ago I was not one who believed
that life, nor any river, could doctor truth and run.
So I set a course for Charlotte! There was I conceived,
In a hotel, an apartment bed, under top-floor August sun.
This is not to say I had no love.
Still something always plants me on the guilt,
Waters nearby roots to nourish me above
Some collective past where seed on soil was spilt.
Can hurt be identified? Can it? I wonder then,
Can primal wounds and dampened cord excuse
My years of memories? My self? All that has been?
In classifying pain, I can only name a bruise.
Take my soul; though it is mine,
I hand it over freely for inspection.
Please, isolate the moments, draw the line
Where separation met with recollection.
Others, those not in this creaking boat,
Misunderstand our rough sail through the mud;
They call it interference. Those ingrates are afloat!
Still on we row in search of thicker blood.
But whether it is Carolina or some darker place,
The reasons do not cause us to set forth
In search of past or similarity of face.
A compass cannot help but point to north.
I wish that in these words, I could provide
A solace to those scrambling on both shores.
I cry out that I will not choose a side!
I can only be forever mine, not yours.
Copyright 1997 Sarah C. Fry
Sarah Fry is a SF Bay Area adoptee recently reunited with her birthmotherthrough the International Soundex Reunion Registry. Sarah volunteered at RegDay ’97 and did local press outreach for the ISRR and BN in conjunction with this event.
(Protect the heart and prepare for one more rejection)
BASTARD CHILD
Well, here I am, your biggest fear . . .
The bastard child of yesteryear.
Once set aside like olden news,
I’m back again and you must choose
To face the past or turn away
But either way-I’m here to stay.
I will not run as you once did,
You hung your head, your face you hid.
And acting like I was your shame
You gave them leave to change my name.
But change my heart you can not do,
Erase the past and start anew.
For here I am . . . your biggest fear.
The bastard child of yesteryear.
