Portside

You Do Not Have the Right to Remain Silent (a Rant)
By Terry Adams

You no longer have the right to remain silent. 
Your keystrokes have been sold to the Cloud
and you are already indicted.
You are accused of shredding your words on plastic bags blowing from wire fences, murdering your words in the market of deafness,
suffocating your words in the diaries you never wrote.

You are entitled to representation by a soul.
If you cannot afford a soul,
one will NOT be provided for you, nor will there be a soul present at your interrogation by the jury of verbs.

You do not have the right to remain silent. 
However, you are entitled to an opinion.  If you cannot afford an opinion
you will be assigned one in the search engine of your peers.    
You are entitled to an attitude.  If you do not have an attitude
you will be sentenced to one in a court of law.

You are entitled to a feeling.   If you do not have a feeling,
you will have one by the time you are finished and you will not enjoy this feeling.
If you cannot afford a feeling read an old one out loud in a San Francisco alley,
or look one up in the Manual of Diagnosis & therapy.
You do not have the right to remain silent.
The trapdoor to the angry city of your genes is rattling.

You are entitled to a phone call. I suggest you make it to the child hiding
in a bomb crater in the future you failed to describe.
You do not have the right to remain silent nor to believe
the bulldozer of time will run out of nerve gas.

The news is a plastic toy Easter egg with a penny rattling inside.
History is a rag doll whistling from a late train in the heart of Kansas.
You do not have the right to remain silent.

You are not a civil right.  You are neither an equal right
nor a right withdrawn – there is very little left to be right about.            
You must speak.  You must finish your thesis in the University of heat.

You have the right of the trees trying to un-saw themselves.
The rights of stars, the rights of the air, the rights of rocks, the soil.
The law-making body in your genes is due back from recess.
You DO NOT have the right to remain silent.

Terry Adams MCs the annual poetry festival at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. He has poems in Poetry Magazine, Witness, The Sun, The Sand Hill Review, etc. His current book is Adam’s Ribs, from Off The Grid Press (Weld, Maine). He restored and lives in Ken Kesey’s infamous old cabin in La Honda, California.