What Keeps Mankind Alive: Issa's Sunday Service, #32

This week's Issa's Sunday Service features two repeat offenders: Tom Waits (as musician) performing the work of Bertolt Brecht (as inspiration), in this case "What Keeps Mankind Alive," a devastating little ditty if ever there was one. Monday, December 7th is the birthday of Mr. Waits, hence this week's selection. The song comes from The Threepenny Opera, with lyrics by Brecht and music by Kurt Weill. Here's the words:

What Keeps Mankind Alive

You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven deadly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins

You lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn, for once, the way the world is run
However much you twist or whatever lies that you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those who are now starving
Get proper helpings when we all start carving
What keeps mankind alive?

What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled, punished, silenced and oppressed
Mankind can keep alive thanks to its brilliance
In keeping its humanity repressed
And for once you must try not to shriek the facts
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

Happy birthday, Mr. Waits. And, as a little present, here is ol' Uncle Bill, of Naked Lunch fame, to give his rendition of same:

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This week's feature poem comes from issue #48, a broadside entitled Tibetan Gun Flower by the poet Charlie Mehrhoff. Back in August, I read one of the poems from this broadside, "springtime in a city park,"(page down a bit to see) at the Six Gallery Press reading. Recently, I posted another, entitled "fact:", at the daily Twitter feed (which cross-posts to Facebook). For those of you who don't lean in those directions, here it is:

fact:

to think that god had to become me
in order to throw his cigarette out the window,
write these words.

Charlie Mehrhoff

And here's another from that same broadside, previously unposted:

leaf, green leaf
her shadow
upon the silence of an empty road
that is poetry.

Charlie Mehrhoff

And, of course, the last word goes to the master:

a wood fire--
her shadow in the window
pulling thread

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don