Deprivation. One of the main ingredients. Frustration. Another important ingredient. Intelligence. Ahh, yes. Not all the ingredients needed for creating a terrorist have negative connotations.

Once upon a time I was a little boy growing up amongst the savages in the city of North Arlington, New Jersey. I wore glasses in the first grade. I was the only child in my class who wore glasses. I was also Jewish, which made me more of a minority. I was chubby and short and not a good fighter, which meant that I was afraid of those who bullied me.

There were those who bullied me for various reasons, some of which I stated above. It angered me to be beaten up by anyone. The boys who picked on me were bigger and stronger and fear got the best of me. I thought of myself as a coward, which did not do anything for my self-esteem, which was minus 67 degrees Centigrade due to parental dysfunction) and by the time I was 12 years old, suicide was an option.

I sought the company of other children, some like myself, and we began to run in a small pack. There were the bigger boys, the super-school patriots who excelled in sports, there were the good kids with the proper nurturing that thrived, then there was us.

I had a rough summer between seventh and eighth grade at a camp which I despised, but I learned a trick that season which, although it was an anti-social coping skill (in some instances), served me well when I went back to school.

I learned that the bigger stronger guy doesn’t always have to be the winner of a fight. Technique was everything.

I entered eighth grade and one of my old tormentors let me know that he was going to “kick my little four-eyed ass” after school. I was afraid but I had built so much resentment and had so much simmering anger within me that I decided, out of sheer terror and desperation, to try one of the techniques I learned from two city kids who had befriended me at camp.

It was lunchtime and the school cafeteria was hustling with activity. My nemesis was chowing down, unconcerned, because he thought he knew the outcome of the battle.

I cam quietly up behind him, lifted a cafeteria chair over my head and smashed it down on him. I hit him with the chair again and again, the years of resentment and anger flowing through me into the chair, before the teachers dragged me off of him. And when they were taking me to the principal’s office I snarled at him, “If you come after me I’ll get you one way or another. You don’t have eyes in the back of your head.”

I had learned a tactic of terror. It isn’t always the man with the biggest fist who wins. Sometimes technique is everything.

Likewise, it isn’t always the country with the most modern weapon system, the most aircraft, and the largest armies which wins. I have to say, right now, no one is winning except the terrorists. Innocent people died here. Innocent people are dying over in Afghanistan.

Every time the bombs drop, the recipe is completed for more terrorists to be created. They will become the enemy of whoever they perceive to be the most arrogant power that bullies their torn land into submission.

A terrorist is born every minute. He lives in poverty, his skin is the wrong colour and his life is nothing like ours here in the United States. Because the survival rate is so poor there for children, only the strongest live.

He grows muscular, his eyes are keen, his hand are familiar with tools that kill. He is taught notions that our fat, stuffed lazy minds don’t even need to consider, notions our sensibilities can never agree with. He sees his land ripped apart by our bombs, his sisters die in his arms because of hunger or lack of antibiotics due to embargoes, his mother prostitutes herself for a mean so not all of her children die. He sees who she sleeps with.

When someone places the rifle of death in his hands, he will know who to place in the crosshairs of the gun, then there will be no doubt in his mind.

In his world there are no innocents. All of the innocents are dead. Only he is left, guilty of one thing: remaining alive while those he loved died. Guilty of remaining alive. And soon, soon, he will remedy that.

Here he comes, riding over our sad city streets, driving taxi cabs, flying our planes, using our mail systems, using even our own media against us.

He has technique. He also has company, many brothers from his village, the village of death. They have studied the art of war well, for it is all they ever had.

And they know us. They have come to walk among us, single minded, relentless in their purpose, ready to die. The finished product of a recipe of deprivation, frustration, fear, starvation, hopelessness, intelligence and a believ system which, for them, really works.

Reprinted from Spare Change News, Cambridge, MA

Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left.
After you die or go mad.
But the calmness of poetry.

— from A Poem Without A Single Bird In It by Jack Spicer

My wife, Mary Esther, is a devout Catholic who goes to Mass regularly even though she hates the patriarchy of the church. When she could walk without a cane, she would go to Mass at Arch Street in Boston, the noon Mass, and she would often see Jack Powers there, on his knees, his lips moving.

She really didn’t know Jack Powers. She did know that he was a spiritual man. But the demons. She couldn’t see the demons. I knew Jack Powers from TT the Bears, a bar in Cambridge MA where he hosted Stone Soup Poetry regularly. I started attending there in 1994 every Monday night. I didn’t know he went to church regularly.

I didn’t know that Jack Powers, in the late ’60′s and early ’70′s founded a free school on Beacon Hill, Boston and started free suppers for the elderly in the same neighborhood. I didn’t know that he taught Columbia Point Project kids remedial reading and started a food co-op there too.

In 1987 Jack Powers told The Boston Globe, and I quote, “I’m very solid on volunteerism because the extraordinary weight of problems that visits the modern industrial society can’t be met with dollars alone.”

I didn’t know that Jack Powers, on a cold winter night, if he saw a homeless person who wasn’t dressed for the cold, would take off his coat and gloves and give them to the person on the street.

I didn’t know that he often volunteered at the North End Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, Boston, in earlier years. I know that he died there, a resident, of complications of dementia. I know that he ran poetry groups at McLeans Hospital, Belmont, where he sometimes was a patient.

I do know that he started Stone Soup Poetry Readings over 40 years ago and made everyone that I knew feel welcome there. I know that he was held in such high regard in the poetry community that poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Robert Bly, among others, came to read for him and the poets who read regularly at Stone Soup.

I know Jack Powers drank quite a bit. It can be said that he drank alcoholically. When I met him in ’94, he was already putting the drinks down his gullet like they were water.

People knew I was in recovery from heroin, which is just alcohol in powder form, and some of them asked me to talk to Jack about his drinking. I talked to Jack a number of times about the damage he was doing to himself and those who loved him.

The trouble with the disease of addiction/alcoholism is that denial is a big part of it. Jack couldn’t help it. He didn’t know how to get out. He tried. He went to AA He went to the hospital for treatment. He went to church regularly.

I knew Jack through the poetry readings but I didn’t know the demons that walked through his mind and spirit. He prayed. This I know because my wife saw him, as I said, at Arch Street Church on a regular basis. When he was on his knees, lips moving, what prayers were uttered from his desperate talented mouth? Is there a God that hears all our prayers and sometimes says, NO”? I don’t know.

I’m a drug counselor now and, even with all the knowledge of the illness at my disposal, I still relapsed a little over 5 years ago. I was lucky. I was able to get back into recovery.

Certainly Jack Powers was as good a man as I, maybe better. He’s accomplished more in the poetry world than I ever have. Jack really tried to stay sober. I know he did.

There are very few of us that don’t have one type of addiction or another. Some drugs, some money, some sex, some pornography, some comic books, some power, some food, etc. etc. etc.

Jack was a good talented man who dealt with inner demons and none of us will ever know their nature. When one is haunted by his/her own mind and spirit anything can happen. Jack was a blessing that touched so many lives, so many lives that are too numerous to count.

It didn’t matter what level your poetry was at–Jack would sign you up to read–and help you if you asked. He was there for so many. He was as non-judgmental as a man, as a poet can be. There are many poets who are quick to judge others. This is no secret in the poetry world. I wish I could say that I was as non-judgmental as Jack. I don’t know.

As Doug Holder of the Ibbetson Street Press said, quoting from the Boston Globe, “Boston is full of elite universities and institutions, often very exclusive, where if you don’t have an academic pedigree you’re out of the scene. What Jack did was bring poetry to the people. He published books and had a venue where all kinds of people came through. He opened it up in Boston, which was old and stodgy until Jack brought a populist flavor, a new flowering of poetry.”

Poet Gail Mazur, from the academic scene, said of Jack, “He wanted to gather everyone int the performance of poetry. In that way, he was a little ahead of his time.”

Jack Powers was so much more than a poet. He was a man who gave so much to the world, a good man who reached out to those who didn’t have. Jack wasn’t money rich, not by any means. But he was possessed by a wealth that more of us should strive for, more of us should emulate.

But Jack was possessed by demons too. In the end, the demons took away all the gifts he had. It wasn’t that Jack Powers didn’t ask for help. He asked for help in more ways than many of us will ever know.

Jack Powers is goine now but his legacy will live on. There is much that many of us knew about Jack, but when it came down to it, no one knew the nature of the ticking clock within him that took him down. Jack Powers died at the age of 73. It was a sudden, slow death. Like Neil Cassady, Jack couldn’t get off of the railroad tracks.