I started this poem while in jail for 4 days during the wto protest in seattle.

One Tuesday the World Trade Organization met in Seattle.

On Tuesday we met at a place in the rain
to walk into Leviathan’s shadow.
We shivered in park in the dark
north while drum tones tuned our bones,
then held hands and ran to morning’s
meticulously imagined rampart.

One Tuesday we went free:
tyranny choked on the pennants
of the turtle’s legion, her clowns and drums.
Our own detachment of giants floated above, solemn
and stiff, mocking the helmets’ blue bulwark.

North of the Paramount Theater on Pine street, arm-in-arm,
by twelve we saw the sun and Tuesday’s rainbow.
And although Tuesday’s children’s wept and their skin burned,
the medics gently anointed us.
That day with pepper spray we washed
the certainty of domination,
from each other’s burning eye.

On a Wednesday of interrogations, checkpoints and gas,
we went to jail and shared a name.
The city was saved for shopping
from our voices and our restless feet,
but the jail was too small for all of us.

That bus we rode, flex-cuffed and cold, on Wednesday night,
I take to work every other day.
The bus belongs to us.
If you want to ride to a more equal world,
you can’t just walk into jail.

On Thursday Pharaoh stopped.
His jail was full; when Tuesday’s
chanting children returned
to surround King County jail.

Though normal now the city was ours: that’s the difference a day makes.

But every year after Thanksgiving, as the vast banal commerce commences,
the ghost of solidarity in a lockbox will rise through vapor weeping and coughing to sing on stilts:

of the inconsolable Ministers stuck in hotel rooms;
or wandering, disoriented, down Pine street, arguing
with top-hatted, grinning doppelgangers, and red-nosed clowns–

and of the groan –
a concussion grenade from the streets of Seattle–
still coming through the bank walls.

Because as we imagined Tuesday,
Tuesday we became.

(This poem started in jail, by John WTO, 199055818 12/1/99)