At the Death: Goya's "The Shootings of May Third 1808"
So they'll die, in living color scythed down by the French fusillade of musketballs shot by shakoed privates far from home before a green Spanish hill
But not before a final demonstration as one man stands defiant, arms raised, his mouth stretched in final speech, a last beseech by this actor in bright white shirt momentarily caught by the painter's eye, his focal shirt blindingly white, though we the viewers know it soon will bleed carmine like the ground, dun, shit-colored, sullied when he subsides.

Bloody Street
I believe so do they
Kill me but you will not win with your guns because you are paid to be murderers by a machine of evil we believe that which is just and good
Kill me lay me in the blood already below me others are witnesses you will never win that man over there he will report in paint for as long as it remains on the canvas

may third 1880shootings i feel my arms raised why. why?
it is if i am standing just beyond my own reach it is all sound and no sound i can see my eyes reflected in the drop of sweat that runs down my killer's cheek my eyes but yet not for i am already gone just beyond my reach.

GOYA BURLESQUE
Of course it isn't funny, that's the point but nevertheless the guy being shot could be a blacked up minstrel,
Al Jolson being shot for a final rendition of "Mammy" as he waves his hands in the air tho' that was not what they shot people for in Spain in 1808
The blood gives it away, how recent it looks, so red still so gaudy you can mistake the well lighted scene for theatre lights where poor auditioners are sent away dead and the tablelaux of soldiers stop for a smoke.

Elementary Slam-amanic Journey
War: neither "art," nor "thou art,“ but yet another chance to wake up, especially me, to : to be or not to be is not the question.
How fast I feel I must go when I’m afraid.
Ghastly, to feel so near out of time.
Personally, I must spell myself out of the shoot, out of the gallery and shout,
"I’m having trouble breathing through the horrors of what we do to each other.
"Not so fun, either, what I do to myself.
Nor the sorrows I feel over us.
Makes me want to stop singing,
"Whether or not at war, whether or not in love, whether or not we’re in harmony, seems to me we stammer
round after round hoping for another round doing little except hoping for another round.
Ghastly, feeling so out of rhyme.
I must take some time to shout,
"I feel bound to you, going round and around Earth in the tail of the Milky Way, sometimes hated, sometimes loved.
Not always fun, blowing in the wind.
But here I am, beautiful and terrible.
I may seem to be or not to be.
And when I sail on my breath
I see what feels like us, waters and airs swathed in diverse skins at war, and I am unmasked.

unmoving a painting is visual and unmoving in this one is a figure dressed in the white light of innocence his pose invites bullets to pierce him as the nails pieced Christ demanding the stigmata to prove his martyrs death but here in the final captured moments of his life we are forced to stand beside the firing squad share an eternity of watching waiting for the hammers to fall as they will

Goya poster: May 3, 2008 the intensity of la coche-bomba grows,
los rebeldes grow ever bolder as if their version of freedom will prevail six years after victoria first declared no painter captures the atrocities of this never-ending war, no photographer there when insurgents lined against a ox-marked wall two-hundred years after Goya expressed his displeasure of war against the harmless and débil, the victims remain as inocente six years or two-hundred
nada changes except technology

I tried to tell you that I'd walked into someone else's dream that I'd tried to run escape from the blood shed you never listened you lifted your gun with the rest turned the streets into stenching rivers that ran red carrying the dead into another dream
I tried to tell you that my shirt was too white to be spoiled by the blood of innocence
I pleaded with you to let me continue my sleep under the stars
I didn't belong here
I tried to tell you that I was trapped in someone else's dream you never listened

The Third of May 1808
Pity the soldier in a foreign land.
Armed with anonymity, he’s become the uniform he wears, the arms he carries.
Between him and his loved ones now he’s given up his face and n ame is only atrocity. Atrocity made easy by the uniform and the comrade ship of the firing squad. When you’re no thing but your country’s political will it never does to show a human face, to love a little the folk whose kids you’re bayoneting .
Nunn

FIRING SQUAD
We must make an example of you.
Too many library books go overdue.
Face the wall and wear your glasses
We must educate the masses.
The message reads loud and clear.
We don't trust those who take the books away from here
When others are waiting to borrow.
Yours were due back yesterday. Not today or tomorrow.
We're using silencers so we don't make a din.
Please don't scream, there's people reading
About the value of not being late
So they don't meet your sorry fate.
They'll bring their books back on time,
Knowing we cannot tolerate such a crime.
You took a book upon the law
You kept that book despite what you saw
On page two-hundred and twenty two.
You knew what would happen to you.
You also took one on Harry Houdini.....
Hey, where's he gone? Did anyone see.... ?