USA! USA! USA!

let's kill the bees
& trademark broccoli

let's ride our atv's
through cemeteries
of the Navajo

let's watch football,
hand in hand

throats choking
filled
with pigskin.

untitled

little space for it:
the eloquent gesture
of refusal


to do without
means death
in the land of plenty


the wheel of avarice
spins faster
than these ancient feet


i'd rather be
moonbathing
among the dolmens


sucking sap
from trees
more sensible than i

pomes & rhizomes

the poet privileges the poet self tho music
better speaks the spirit
& number measures off the arc
of flower in beholding eye

..................................

the voices of impure critique:
shadows
& the shadow people there

.................................

almost every child I have known has seemed
a genius.
every adult: broken, foolish, filled
with fear.
this process we term 'education.'

.................................

grief is not an illness to be treated.
sorrow should not be medicated.

..................................

question the voice inside your mouth.
your age speaks through you
in unoriginal words

my communist daydream #12

1.

there shall be no more debt.
the financiers of scarcity
will live on tiny plots
of dirt beneath the sun.

2.

war, the natural state of war
profiteers, shall cease.

3.

a carrot shall point rampant on our flag,
sanely grown, life-giving---this week.
next week's flag will be designed
by cybernetics programming, local 83.

4.

we shall make love in a flower
field on lunch break.  i will write
a poem on your belly with my seed.

5.

our children will sing in the amphitheater.
all the children.  manifold voices
blending into one.
they will sing beneath the sun.

eternity, fuck

heaven always scared me
more than hell.  promise
 of eternity
spent with dullard kin:
a threat propelling me
to lucifer's embracing arms.

memorial day 2014

to-do list on this day: turn
the television off.  shun
the sight of coffins prettied-
up in bunting.  write
a poem of women whose breasts
are filled with milk.  write
a poem of men who teach
the young to love & not to kill.


to reiterate: on this memorial day
2014: turn the television off.
shun the sight of coffins shamed
with colors of delusion.
ignore the notes of lying bugles:
the sound of coins
clicking, manipulated
by the ancient claws
of ancient men.

mindless subtlety

today i will be honest!
in both ellipsis & exclamation
mark...  today i will eschew
irony.  i really mean that!
i will castigate
the serpent, ground up
in your burger patty;
i will encourage you to eat
the fruit of the tree
of knowledge.
     but enough of that-----today
i will be honest!-----i will
not anthropomorphize:
i will let the sparrow be the sparrow.
i will refuse to profile the crow.
i will allow the planets, the stars,
the comets & the clouds
to careen in blissful ignorance
of the overrated mind of man-----
this man's mind, anyway, filled
as it is with vanity & folly,
fear & need.  Yours-----
eh? who's to say? 
                              But today
the mechanism of the world
revolves without me,
as it always has, actually, perfect
in its mindless subtlety.

madness america madness

madness! these steel cages
billion dollar bumper car
economy in the parking
lot xanax-addled drivers clenching
wheels of fortune careening
from one self-inflicted sorrow
to the next, madness!
a thousand dollars worth of hair
sitting on the rictus grin
of 21st century doom------
men in stupors enlivened
only by the hope of rage
the invocation of the fetish
object underneath their seat-----
women fat with corn syrup
smashing grills on car-bomb pylons
guarding warehouse bunkers filled
with goods we're dying for-----
madness! a life that won't sustain
a chain reactor cracking
underneath the hood,
your body, alien, huge, swaddled
in dollar bills, forgetful of love,
of poetry, of tenderness,
of quietude, of gentleness,
your body metastasizing
as another engine of america
explodes.

madness, america, madness

4 short poems

reading can be dangerous

america i grew up racist & then i read james baldwin at an impressionable age & he was more interesting than anybody i knew.


america i grew up a little shit of a gunslinging militarist until i read allen ginsberg at an early age & realized it's disgusting for men to kill each other, not fuck each other.


america i am upset with you now.  i expect you to play nice & share your toys.


america, reading can be dangerous.

prayer

let us pray     let us 
say     some words
breath     without meaning
a whisper     of some words
into another     heart

listen to it beat

flatland

flat farms under the sky

hope: a flatline
running to the next county

random velocities
animate this place:

a bullet     from my hand
to your heart

a motorcycle
full throttle in the night

lights out
in the sky

in my eye

my heart shrank

my heart shrank to the size of a bug.
they gave me drugs.

i lugged the spirit of my father
across a mountain.

he was so heavy.  every
body hated him.

my heart exploded with delight
at the sight of you.

you carried me for years
up the steps of a ziggurat.

i was too heavy for you;
the cruelty inside me.

your heart burst, leaving me
alone at this summit.

waiting for a sacrificial blade.

growing up racist

i an empty child filled
with hate     racist     anti-
intellectual

the only sin:
weakness

typical
american mason
dixon male

stepping
out of line
trying
to love:

hard as a bullet in the palm.

reading berardi

crime story

choose your own tragedy

quiet recollection makes me want to shout

quiet recollection makes me want to shout
the thing that happened: the orgasm
the blood that filled the tub     the gallimaufry
gallop down the aisle


poetry needs ray harryhausen mucking up its page
a pop-up skeleton with 3-D blade
that cuts the golden fleece of quietude
poetry needs the harlot & the dude


poetry needs to reach beyond its poets

quiet recollection makes me want to shout

4 short poems

angry bards, text

angry bards in battle crying
more vehemence than melody
eardrums punctured by the icepicks of our days
quotidian assaults of capital and dumbshow plays
a broken trumpet in the night
defiant globes of sound
heralding the light

angry bards

reading from "dispatches from the frontal lobe"

still life with absent portrait

3 Political Poems

atv army in utah, mother's day

o mother i sorrow at
your rape.  your violation.
a thousand bully boys
on atvs, headpiece filled
with big-gulp oxy-
addled rush incontinence

they will be the death of us
a thousand thousand
children-pigs, armed inciting
flailing fatboy tantrums
reciting constitution mis-
quotation backward crapping
anal leakage lies in giant
jingo boxer flags


they're missing you mother:
spoiling for each other's love.

or a fight.

tragedy/comedy sonnet

my introduction to your life
was tragedy.  the deaths
of all those men.
1980.  you were all so thin.

a tragedy ends in death
(or ronald reagan).  who
could have seen the comedy
coming, 30 years from then?

two men walking
down the aisle, promising
impossibilities: that life
could be happy.  a comedy ends

in marriage.  & now
everything begins.

nostalgia sunshine poem for steve sterling

Greece

greece

give us your rubble     give us
your fallen columns & your
beaches     give us your wine-dark
blood & your fated old women
tossed like doves' divining entrails
to the street.

give the haunches of your muses
to our grinning usurers.  they will
usurer them good.

you began this satyr play
3,000 years ago. now your ships
are lost & your wanderers
will never find their home.

my communist daydream

bradley manning, poet laureate

poem: the only rite

the only rite

all we worship is
slaughter: the slit throat
of the lamb & all that blood.

we could drown in the flood of it.

sometimes we build an ark and float
on a sea of sacrifice, pretend its grace
that briefly buoys us.

our lives are lived in praise
of slaughter, the joy of hot
blood spattered on our banners
or swallowed down like shame
& then, ha, the expectation
of eternal bloodless heaven?
absurdity of absurdities: we drink
it because we like it

& the sounds made
by the dying.

nostalgia sunshine

     hey steve i'm thinking about you in the sunshine acid library windowpane re-reading ginsberg
     you who read 'the green automobile' aloud while i drove us down the dark to nowhere
     this sunshine shattered day begs for your voice your yawp of yay-saying american alcoholic joy
     'hey clunie let's get drunk' & off to northwest warehouse alleyways with quarts of bohemian beer
     or up to rose garden park trails with bottle of gin & bottle of vermouth & jar of olives to mix martinis in our young bellies on the run
     this day really wants a hit of your blotter acid brain steve sterling dead 16 years your joyful visions & your chinook sorrows
     your stupid humor & the way i felt like kerouac to your cassidy

     joy is not a constant.
     you've been dead a long long time.
     i'm probably not far behind.

we have to make more terror-

we have to make more terror-
isms have to egg indigenous
brown koraners on get them goin so
we can pop them get a raise
out of somebody we have a hundred
thousand million welfare patriots
on the payroll passing time
in nsa cia fbi i know why
we have to make more terror-
isms an investment in our homeland
securities gives our flag-happy boys & gals
something to do.

it feels like science

it feels like science
fiction a story I read
last millennium:
half of us gone mad
trying to kill the other
half.  you'd think we'd have
a pill for that.

maybe the pill is why.

neoliberal globalization mandate: the poem

we will imf you into sweat
shops, we will world bank you
into the corner, pocket your
rem's, state your dreams
for you now listen up good:

we can drone on & on
forever

impossible to love in the time of drones

impossible to honor the body
the eloquence of flesh is mute
staked out as if for sky burial
picked clean of possibility
by shiny sterile children
on another planet

no room for artifice here:
the collateral murdered are not
european.  they are poor & brown

so it's all good, eh?  except that it's
impossible now to love in the time of drones.