[This_Sheen_Of_Truth]

Everyone, I know I promised you a review of the March 30th Vienna show this week, but something has come up, and I'm sorry but I can't meet that demand.

I have been given the opportunity to attend a secret underground art/performance/resistance gathering this weekend -- it will require that I leave Los Angeles for several days, where I will then meet with like-minded individuals at a secret location in the California desert, where we will then meet and congregate to embarace our common views and way of thinking, and perhaps even begin to fan the burning embers of the coming Revolution.

My only hope is that I have the pleasure of meeting Neil Czerno while there, and that I make it out alive. I've heard word of these expeditions before. It's not always pretty, and not everyone has the stamina to make it through. But goddamit, sometimes a cause is more important than an individual person, and their safety.

I kindly ask Maise or Iris to post a review of the show in my absence. I will not return until Monday, and I suspect any outside communication -- to the internet or otherwise -- will be difficult, if not downright impossible.

However, I will not leave you alone. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the first of what will be an ongoing series of Protest Poems here at Wearing These Chains. Words of power, strength, and passion, crying out for change in this dark world we live in.

You have a voice. Wake up and use it. Art is resistance. Wake up and give a shit.

this sheen of truth
a protest poem by gabriel miller

beauty reborn
die-o-mechanical
feed the machine with little boys and guns
and watch them burn

we don't need your empathy
we don't want your sympathy
we don't need your fields of green
just fill up my oil machine

the red and the white
and the youtube
videoscreen of the dying dream
you always said
so bad
too sad
but you never got mad
(i remember when we all had a choice)
you just let it go by

you want to have it all
watch the pawns fall like a shakespeare
tragedy
the shame of america
like the navajo, one with the land
we must make a stand

oil fields
gush like tears
but you're only crying
blood.