Exquisite Corpse at El Jardin Paraiso and Other Mayday Poems

 

May 2

Exquisite Corpse at El Jardin Paraiso and Other Mayday Poems

I ran into Virginia on the way to the poetry reading at El Jardin Paraiso on East 5th  in Alphabet City, a bright  Saturday, the day after Mayday.

Birds swirled about as Virginia and I walked up Ave C, comparing notes on the state of affairs, protests, mothers, still here, on their way elsewhere, an ice cream truck humming in syncopated  rhythm with a car alarm, across from the garden as we entered on the 4th Street.  

Piles of debris, tires and rubble filled this space five decades ago, when the city was broke.  Green Guerillas, vagabonds, and gardeners stepped, squatted it, cleaning up the syringes, mulching compost, transforming the lott. Since 1980, Paraiso has been a green, lush garden.  

A few of my buddies, Brennan and Anne, were already there, sitting in the tree. Greeting them, I looked about, strolling to the pond, saying hi to Howard and JK in a garden meeting by the casita at the 5th street entrance. The smell of honey suckle in the air. 

We sit by the big tree, sharing snippets of poems, as we’ve done for years and years now, one poem meandering into another, poem after poem, year after year. Sometimes the start off with Prufrock:

“Let us go then, you and I,” we start

“through certain half-deserted streets…”

Others share Walt of Hart, and then people get to their own stories of heartbreak, being dumped stories, lost friends, the ennui of everyday hurt and rebirth that reverberate in the garden.

Some of the trees fell after Sandy flooded the neighborhood. We marched and sung. Who will speak for the trees, wondered the Lorax. 

We’ve seen a lot here. 

Looking dapper in a green sweater, Ray recited a poem by Sharon Olds, about missing someone who’d been there, that had disappeared:  'if i pass a mirror, i turn away, crying, remembering his back… I guess that's how people go on…  Each hour is a room of shadows, like being naked.." 

Next, his spider poem, about a guest who he found himself talking with in his solitary West Village apartment, an homage to a spider who masqueraded as a fly and read Ovid, chatting with the cat who lives there about everything, the three becoming fast friends, all of us changing, ever transforming, metamorphoses constant in poems and lives. 

Brennan, our resident poet, who makes us laugh, followed with a poem by a girl he was going to go to Europe with. He worried, 'I'll say something wrong.’

Followed by an homage to our shared humanity by lyric poet Peaches:

“Sucking on my titties like you wanted me Calling me, all the time like Blondie Check out my chrissy behind It's fine all of the time Like sex on the beaches What else is in the teaches of peaches? Huh? What? Fuck the pain away.”

Don’t we all do it. 

The lady behind the tree who know one knows starts to read from her phone. A guest poet followed. I never got her name. Her poem about her cat struck a chord, strangers becoming friends. 

'Let life rise through me,' read Anne from a poem she wrote in 2000 and rewrote in 2002. 

I’m more of an oversharer than a poet, said Virginia, before she read about the strange feeling of her mother being gone. “May her memory be a blessing, " say friends. What is 'a blessing'? Is it light? Lie? Gauze? Ash? Phoenix? Is it stored in the cloud?' 

Brennan consoled, listened, mentioned his dad who departed two weeks prior. 

Virginia read the poem again, a sense of loss and unknowing about us. 

What is tomorrow really, wondering JC.  Boooom? Who really knows?

Howard and JK join us, their meeting over, Howard passing out a flyer for  a meeting at 6th Street Community Center. 

JK takes us on a tour looking for Eucalyptus, an aromatic tree native to Australia, known in the garden. But hard to find. 

JC asked about my mayday bust, which I told a story about. Mayday  is jayday; wall street is war street, the cops did not really appreciate it when we jumped the fence and ran to the door at the Stock Exchange, I explained. Bodies, we got more bodies here, said the cops moving us from the 7th precinct to the Tombs, where they started referring to us as prisoners. And we compared notes about favorite musicals, trips here in the past, the new benches, etc. 

Like Virginia, I confessed, I’m not much of a poet. But I try to write Instagram posts, reading a post about our 36 hour day in Jiufen, Taiwan, the mist from the mountains, mixing into the sea air, below, meandering into a sort of forever. I guess we’re all caught in that longing to write about it all, all we see and smell and think and see.  

“"I like to think of you naked, I put my naked body between myself alone and death..." I followed, reading from Between Myself and Death, by Kenneth Rexroth, an homage to that sexy place between being alive and dead.

We kept circling. 

Why don’t you read one, we asked Howard’s friend. 

Anything?

Sure. 

She dug around, looking for something on her phone, digging up a story about Vinny Burroughs, a neighborhood friend and performer held in high regard. She’d just passed. Everyone adored her. They used to sit at her living room table, rehearsing together, buddies for years. 

 JK recalled an old roommate and her fondness for his early morning habits. He used to make coffee early. 'When he's done with his body, he will ask for his deposit back....’

  Virginia told a story about a student who confides in Ai. as she feels she has no one else. We all feel fragile. And shares, “'meanwhile it rains for two weeks' a poem, from the New Yorker that could have been from the teenage writer.

'I lost you at prymart' read Brennan, missing a friend, estranged. 

'I had a thought,' said JC. 'Now it's gone.

 'They stole my arm, ' said Brennan, after feeling like he was losing it. 

It's a feeling we all have from time to time. 

'I thought I lost my face one time' JK confessed, sympathizing, recalling an ayahuasca trip back in the day, when she got high here. 

The exquisite corpse goes on and on, says Howard's friend. A woman in a pink wig walks by, reciting extemporaneous prose, between here and there, some English, some Spanish. 'Love your glasses,' she says to me, going on. 

Jc pulls out his script for 'super kitchen mushroom caper' for all of us to read, inviting her to join us. 'I drifted off to sleep' said Funghi. 'I'm a mushroom from far away..."

And on we read, circling between stories, through our afternoon the off to the garden between 4th and 5th Street, where we marched when Sandy raged, and Anne told us about school, and Brennan read about Peter Shep, and Catherine read Frank O'Hara, and I didn't know what to read, so I pulled out a few more poems from Kenneth Rexroth, to remind us of that sexy place between our bodies and infinity.

' I am waiting' read Sarah, paraphrasing Lawrence, longing for a new birth of wonder.

Anne   read a note from JC with regrets he could not make it, and a guitarist strummed along. I gave him a dollar. 

On the poems flew with the butterflies. a mayday hangover. An injury to one, an injury to all, Haymarket martyrs lingering. The lower east side poets still lurking in our consciousness, translating their anguished confessions on bar napkins, into stories for us all, Allen's homage to 'Mollach, whose buildings are violence,' Jim's diaries, of reds, blues, basketball and people who died, Eileen's Chelsea Girls in all their deliciousness, between Ave C and East River Park. Mayday is jayday, Wall Street is war street, PuertoRican Obituaries remarkably absent from the New York Times, the Book of Genesis, According to Miguelito, remains, the longing remains. 

Did Joe ever finish his oral history of the world, I ask Brad, just arriving from the feral pockets of the Gowanus.

You should, he tells me. 

Sometimes we end us at McSorley’s afterward. 

Too busy, Drew never made it. But Caitlin and Alyssa made it to Abby’s instead.

And I scribbled a few notes about the poetry reading, thinking about the anguish, connecting us, the poems, one after another, spilling into one another. The bond between them and us, between the garden and our stories, between the Lower East Side poets, Miguel and Allen, Pietro and Eileen, and the rest of us, still connected by Mayday and bikes and Paraiso, Infernos and Infinity, Baldwin who recognized we all are all alone, but the poems point us toward each other. “the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive…”

Virginia Colin Beennan Ray and I walked to Two Boots and said goodbye.

A hundred years ago, the Surrealists played exquisite corpse (or cadavre exquis), collaborating, collectively, adds images, sequence, word soup, folding paper, hide their contribution,  into unexpected composite images. It felt like one of those days in the garden. 

May 3

Sunday stroll with the Village legends, sitting by Ken at Judson, meeting Kate and Ray at

Mark Milano's Life Celebration,  May 3, 2026, 12:45 - 3:30 PM  

at The LGBTQ Center. Jay recalled Mark's singing, Kate, Mark's engagement with his wounds. I recalled Mark's capacity for forgiveness and friendship. A gut wrenching emotional service. My favorite song is "Make Our Garden Grow" , the final number from Leonard Bernstein's 1956 operetta Candide. The song serves as a climactic, uplifting anthem urging practical action, love, and community. Delay equals death, said Sharonann, recalling his moral clarity. Face your fears, Mark taught his brother. It's not a tragic story, it's a heroic story. 23 arrests, no convictions. Mark's record. Anne Christine, Charles King, Asia Russell, a room full of heros. Finishing the service, I strolled to meet my friend Anatole at Streetcha, a Ukrainian restaurant on E 7th. We talked about his roots in Vitebsk (Vitsyebsk), a city in northeastern Belarus. And anarchism.

He told me about Nestor Ivanovych Makhno[a] (Ukrainian: Нестор Іванович Махно, pronounced [ˈnɛstor iˈwɑnowɪtʃ mɐxˈnɔ]; 7 November 1888 – 25 July 1934), a Ukrainian anarchist revolutionary and the commander of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the Ukrainian War of Independence. He set up worker communes. Walking down 2nd, we ran into Jim Fouratt, the storied activist... A Sunday of legends in the Village.

RIP Mark Milano.

May 4th

"Anarchism for me means non-centralization, and inclusion for everybody. So I have always been horizontal. The audience is equal to me, I don't feel superior to the audience. I've always maintained an open door policy that got me into trouble with a lot of institutions because anybody who couldn't afford to pay was always welcome. For me, I’m not a Bakunian anarchist, blowing shit up. When I was a teenager I was involved with Up Against the Wall Motherfucker group, with Ben Morea and his band. And very few people know this, it was a very feminist organization. The women had equal power to the men, and they did advocate armed rebellion and armed revolution, throwing bricks off the tops of the buildings onto St. Mark's Place at the cops. I was one of the people throwing bricks at Stonewall—Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers were at Stonewall, too, for all these people who think it was only gay, lesbian, and trans people. Everybody was there, there were ecologists at Stonewall. But anyway, that's my anarchism."

https://brooklynrail.org/.../PENNY-ARCADE-with-Nick-Bennett/

rip bEN MOREA!!!

https://legmemog.site/ben-morea/

Penny Arcade posted a note:

Ben Morea has died at age 86

I probably learned most of what I know about forming coalitions with Ben Morea and the UATWMF’ers

I was at Stonewall with Ben and we were the ones throwing bricks at the cops

This is the great loss of an uncompromising man you could not put in a box I am  proudly in his lineage which includes The Living Theatre Julian Beck and Judith Makina as well the great Aldo Tambellini

I was with Ben at many actions from Stonewall to bringing garbage to Lincoln Center to Levitating The Pentagon  to The takeover of Columbia university

It was Ben Morea who cut the fences at Woodstock and made it a free concert

Free means you don’t pay!

Ben was the only one who stuck up for Valerie Solanis and when she said she was going to kill all men Ben said “What about me?”

And she said “we will kill you last”

Read

https://libcom.org/.../against-wall-motherfucker...

A full day of this and that, meetings and appointments, a stoop hang and Monday shift at Village Works. Uptown, the Met Gala, pranks and culture jamming.  Downtown, I headed to the bookstore. Arriving, I walked into a talk about Lower East Side artists, the store popping. The whole world seemed to pour through the doors, book nerds, books flying, zines, manifestos, fan fiction, true crime, meta fiction. The world  has changed, so has writing. Elders coming for tea, new arrivals, people selling their wares. After closing, Earl spun records at Parkside Lounge. Bobby, holding court late into the night. 

Poems had been everywhere for weeks and weeks, between arriving back from Taiwan, going to San Marcos, walking between Brooklyn and the East Village and back. 

April 16th

After my first class of the day, I ran into Nico in my reading spot. Or maybe it's his spot?  In between meetings, I found my way for a bike ride through the Spring sunshine. Yoga, class, bike ride, meeting, advisement, class, union meeting. Mayday preplanning. There are so many feelings flying about right now. I regularly bring poems into class, inviting conversations and dialogue. We had a sweet moment on Wednesday, talking about 'The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguel" by Miguel Pinero, a poem about anguish and exploitation. Some students loved it. Others disagreed. You never know how people react. 

"Before the beginning

God created God

In the beginning

God created the ghettos & slums

and God saw this was good.

So God said,

"Let there be more ghettos & slums"

and there were more ghettos & slums.

But God saw this was plain

so

to decorate it

God created leadbase paint and then

God commanded the rivers of garbage & filth

to flow gracefully through the ghettos.

On the third day

because on the second day God was out of town

On the third day

God's nose was running

& his jones was coming down and God

in his all knowing wisdom

knew he was sick

he needed a fix

so God

created the backyards of the ghettos

& the alleys of the slums

in heroin & cocaine

and

with his divine wisdom & grace

God created hepatitis

who begat lockjaw

who begat malaria

who begat degradation

who begat

GENOCIDE

and God knew this was good

in fact God knew things couldn't git better

but he decided to try anyway

On the fourth day

God was riding around Harlem in a gypsy cab

when he created the people

and he created these beings in ethnic proportion

but he saw the people lonely & hungry

and from his eminent rectum

he created a companion for these people

and he called this companion

capitalism

who begat racism

who begat exploitation

who begat male chauvinism

who begat machismo

who begat imperialism

who begat colonialism

who begat wall street..."

April 17

Hello Gene, hello 169 Bar, hello New York. An afternoon rain left us blues skies on the ride into the city. Everyone is out, sitting outside, enjoying the summer evening. We seemed to skip from Spring to summer, but no one's complaining. 

April 18th

45 years later, June 5, join us at the NY AIDS Memorial at dusk. Vigil and march. 

Baby C and I spent the morning reading paperbacks, chatting about the Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's work of unrequited love,  emo genius.  And  Thomas Mann's fan fiction, Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939). Took the creaky trains out to Princeton, where we enjoyed the evening with Mom and Shannon, chatting about Mama Shepard, my great grandmother, and Sherman's march on  Atlanta and March to the Sea, the US Civil War as a dress rehearsal for WWI, the mass starvation at Andersonville Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the final 14 months of the American Civil War where severe malnutrition and mass starvation were widespread. The conversations go on and on. 

April 19th

A glorious Sunday in the life, waking at 3 am, breakfast with Mom, in Princeton, talking about Mama Shepard, who shaped us all, and out to our favorite Chinese grocery store in Sunset Park Chinatown, and out to see the tribe at Village Works, the best bookstore around, chatting with Damian and Alley the cat about it all, the Hal Sarasitz memorial and Lou Reed's mentor was who understood, "In dreams begin responsibilities" referring to the title of the 1937 short story by Delmore Schwartz, ever reminding us that our internal lives and memories shape our future actions.  Ray was there to read from his wonderful memoir of poems. I was there to ask a few questions and introduce Ray, an author and friend gardener and poet, reluctant rise and register, moviegoer, actupper, crumudgeon, New Yorker, activist, person who feels, who sees a lot... mavel tov... tell us about this hybrid poetic memoir, I asked beginning a conversation about his  uncle's gladiolus and flowers. The theme of grief and memory runs through these lyric poems, stories which connect us with this feeling, this lingering sense, with movies,  John Paul Bellmondo in Breathless, the Last Metro, stories of activism, bearing witness to George Floyd, a glimpse of a man with Kaposi sarcoma (KS) lesions. Of course we've seen Ray read  these poems at Abby's bar and at Elizabeth Street Garden. We have heard his  crowd pleaser, an homage about a fly who came to stay  in his living room, a solitary poem. What about sex and memory, how does this work in your work, I asked. Ray talked about picking up a guy on his way home from the Dachau Concentration Camp. "Fuck the Nazis" he repeats in bed with him, a poem for our time. Thank you, Ray. Thank you for your questions Jackie. Thank you Alvin. Thank you Damian. Thank you Cherie. Thank you Village works. 

Jackie Rudin later wrote:

I'd never heard of a poetry memoir but after reading Raymond Diskin Black's poignant offering, "The Night of Swaying Grass", I think this might be the best way to convey one's most tender and vulnerable times in life. That plus the delicious way Ray delivered them in his reading at the Village Works Bookstore on a rainy Sunday afternoon kept us all completely under his spell for the better part of 2 hours. It was reminiscent of readings back in the day where you got completely lost and set free from the chaos around you. I can't recommend Ray's book enough and if you're lucky, you'll get to hear him share it in person. And better still if Benjamin Heim Shepard is there to co-pilot. 

April 21

Brad, Ray, Malcolm and I went out after their reading. Poetry month in full swing, the cruelest month, poetry for hard times the theme. We feel it. A tease of Spring back to cold, back to winter, then some April showers. Mayday around the corner.  Ray recited his poems from memory, recalling the phrase "Your slightest look will unclose me"  from the poem somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond by E. E. Cummings. He talked about stealing a book of Genet in the library. Brad said that's your next poem. Genet stole a lot of books. Malcolm talked about his grandmother, the family matriarch from Savannah, Ga and her soup, with corn, tomato, okra, shrimp, and crab with its shells. I will go Paris to tomorrow... it's something my grandmother will never do, said Malcolm. Grief is nothing but joy persisting, he went on. Brad reads about a Quaker meeting. We can live in two places, two minds ourselves. It's all been a lot, but still the poems remind us, they console us, they recall past lives and struggles. Malcolm recalled Haitians with HIV. Assotto Saint (1957–1994), a prominent Haitian-born poet, publisher, and performance artist who became a key HIV/AIDS activist after his own diagnosis, using art to highlight the Black gay experience, before it consumed him. He died at age 36. Ray recalled the battles over Guantanamo and the HIV concentration camp there, the demos in New York. Musicians are arriving, a tuba player joins us at Barbes. Bugsy comps me a beer. Which poems get you through hard times, asks Brad. Malcolm pointed to 

"You Are Who I Love" by Aracelis Girmay:

"You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons

You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river   You are who I love

delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train ...

April 21

For nearly two months, the Trump administration has driven an illegal, catastrophic war on Iran which has murdered thousands of Iranians, destroyed critical civilian infrastructure, and threatened total annihilation of Iran’s civilization. They have sent thousands of our brothers, sisters, and family members to fight and die for the sake of American domination of Iran and the region. It is time for congress to end this war. The cost is too high.

The billions of dollars being spent on this war could be spent on healthcare and housing. It could be used to keep veterans and civilians off the streets. It could ensure that our children have the best possible education. Instead, Trump, Hegseth, Rubio and this neocon administration use our tax dollars to destroy lives across the globe. Americans do not benefit from this war, and Americans do not support this war. If our administration won’t do anything about it, Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out  and About Face: Veterans Against the War will.

April 27th

I woke up in Brooklyn. Relieved to be back. Drank coffee, read, and looked at the papers. And made it out too late for Judson, where they were talking about the Ninth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke: "Praise but tell the angel about as world, not the indescribable. You can't impress him with your lofty feelings, in the universe where he feels far greater feelings, you're just a beginner..." Rather took it slow. Sat with Al for a bagel. Rode to meet Colin for a coffee at Tompkins, a band playing. Met Damian at Village Works. And rode back to Brooklyn, to Mattie's, whose work had been in a show the night before at Gowanus Dredgers. There, our beloved book club unpacked House of Day, House of Night (1998) by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, a "constellation novel" on the history, the dreams, and myths of a small town in Polish Silesia, a region with a shifting border...Faulkner like stories and voices, tales and legends, of Saint Wilgefortis (also known as Kümmernis, Uncumber) a 14th-century folk saint legendarily described as a bearded woman crucified for refusing an arranged marriage. Now venerated as a patron of gender non-conformity. And back out for a bite. Thinking about lost friends, fates, furies, the House of Day, House of Night, where Olga writes, "Quite out of the blue a bizarre and compelling idea came into my head today: that we have ended up as human beings through forgetfulness, through lack of attention, and that in reality we are creatures participating in a vast, cosmic battle that has probably been going on since time immemorial and which, for all we know, may never end. All we see of it are glimmers, in blood-red moons, in fires and gales, in frozen leaves that fall in October, in the jittery flight of a butterfly, in the irregular pulse of time that can lengthen a night into infinity or come to a violent stop each day at noon." 

April 28th

Monday Night at St Marks Place.  Village Works popping, people perusing, college kids, looking at poetry; one buys a copy WEB Du Dois The Souls of Black Folk that a homeless guy just brought by. Ally the cat sleeps on a bookshelf in front.  Live love hooray for love, sings ella. Kids drop by from the park. Damian shows me a few books, radio plays a few standards, the two of us, talking between songs... Nora tells us about the myth of Sisyphus, and Albert Camus who used to give Simone love advice as Cafe Flore. He knew:  "The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance." Chet Baker is singing lets Get Lost on WBGO live. "It is certain we cant escape anguish, for we are anguish," says Sartre in the epigraph of the leftover crack oral history. Cool street wear $5 books, says the chalk outside the store. Outside books away, stores closed, a few crusties ran back after a minor clash. Eric ate some pepper spray after a fight at Search and Destroy. Grabs some water. You gotta use milk, says another onlooker. Police sirens on St Marks Place. 

April 29th

We sat talking about conspiracy theories. And Emily gave me a gorgeous pot she made.  Many look at last Saturday and think it looked just too smooth. Others reject this outright. According to the Chronicle of higher education: "The sociology of conspiracy theories examines them as social, rather than just psychological, phenomena rooted in distrust, crisis, and group identity. They often thrive in times of rapid social change, providing a sense of control, belonging, and meaning for those who feel alienated or marginalized by, for example, economic, political, or social shifts."  Oh and the Knicks won. 

April 28th

The Supreme Court dropped a bombshell today, handing down a 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that effectively neuters Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the very provision that helped dismantle Jim Crow and guaranteed communities of color a fair shot at representation in Congress. Written by Justice Samuel Alito, the majority opinion rewrote the legal test for Section 2 in a way that lets partisan gerrymandering serve as a shield against racial discrimination claims. In plain terms, politicians can now draw maps that silence voters of color as long as they call it a "partisan" decision.

The real-world stakes here are enormous. The ruling could hand Republicans as many as 19 additional House seats compared to 2024 maps, and states like Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina are already watching closely to see what they can get away with now. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund did not mince words, warning that states can now "discriminate with impunity."

This is not happening in a vacuum. The ruling lands the same day Florida's legislature passed a new map explicitly designed to maximize Republican advantage, and the Trump administration is simultaneously pushing to strip temporary protections from millions of immigrants. The guardrail, as voting rights advocates have been warning, is gone. What comes next is anyone's guess, and that is exactly the problem.

April 29th

A full day of reading and teaching, thinking about Alice Walker and Howard Zinn, planning for Mayday, running to Bijans, then to meet Baby C in Brooklyn Heights, at River Deli, an Italian Restaurant, specializing in Sardinian fare, and a delicious Beehive cocktail.  Our host was excited to see his mother for the first time in two years.  Back home to  catch up with Alvin's book on growing up in New York, and  Fit Into  Me, with its meta fictional adventures, and Benjamin's journeys to Moscow and Marseilles, better than contemplating Alito's fantasies about turning the US into an apartheid state, weakening voting rights.

April 30th

An injury to one is an injury to all! Mayday us jayday!!! Meeting after meeting, class after class, I biked out at seven, past an art opening, to Judson, for another meeting, then to KGB bar on 5th for I hate my job: thots on sw, labor and capitalism... story after story about the ways sex workers look out for each other, the way outsiders are marginalized, the ways SESTA-FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act / Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), a 2018 US federal law designed to curb sex trafficking by limiting the legal immunity of websites that amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, holding online platforms liable for third-party content, seemed to foreshadow the Dobbs Decision that takes freedom of choice away. Happy Mayday y'all. See ya in the streets.