The 2008 Bent Mentor Showcase-Michael Sigfried aka kimpunkrock

Clip of my performance at the Bent Mentor Showcase in Seattle WA. Unfortunately the person I gave my camera too didn't turn on the camera in time....so the first 30 seconds of my poem called "Something Inherited" is not there. ARGGHHH! Anyway soon I will have a disc of the whole showcase and I can put the whole piece up.

Here is what I read:

Something Inherited


The awful tides of war
That swept over my fathers family,
Was a nightmare of epic proportions
Growing up a middle class white
Family that had to survive through
World War Two Germany was not easy.
This generation of Americans does not know
What it is like to go through war
Everyday in the homeland.
War is tough on everyone, on every side.
The German people had it bad.
Not only were they faced with a madman
That took the same powers away from them
That our govt is now starting to take from us,
Powerful and Rich families in America
Had been secretly funding the Nazis war machine,
In order to create a war with them.
For my family it was only survival that they faced
My Grandfather was given a high post in the army
Commanding a POW camp for Russian soldiers
On farmland in what is now Poland.
But my grandfather was a good man
And was punished for treating the prisoners too good.
He was sent to the Russian front,
And was not seen by the family again until the 1950s.
Their life was so painful that even now
69 years later it is not talked about
and all of the facts are still unclear to me.

After my grandfather was sent to the Russian Front,
My family was then sent to a farm to live with cousins.
It was on this farm that my Aunts and Uncles buried the dead
As the war slowly moved south back into Germany.
The land became one giant meat grinder
Filled with tank tracks and bodies without heads.
My fathers first five years were spent in horrific fear.
It took them 3 times to escape the iron curtain after the war.
It was only through the kindness of a Russian Soldier
That he finally made it to America.
My Post traumatic stress disorder has been handed down
Through generations of war.
I could never blame my father for the shell shock
He was born into.
His father did not start the war,
Nor did his father.
But someday those criminal families that created these conflicts for profit
Will suffer for what they have done to our souls.
Declassified documents and extensive research has shown that
Prescott Bush, the grandfather of our current president,
George W. Bush, supplied Hitler with a lot of money
To help create the Nazi war machine.
In 1942 the FBI froze the assets of the Bush family.
Why were they forgiven?
When will that family be held accountable for their crimes against humanity?
I want justice.
I want answers.
I want peace.