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.