really
if one is to be 
a truly
United States of American poet
one ought to speak
Spanish and English
in equal measure
with equal love for each

and in the interest
of historical accuracy
should have learned
Spanish first

one should also recognize
and pronounce correctly
hundreds of words
in other languages
from all over the world
(and not just the ones from menus)
as well as
understand anger and sorrow songs
in languages of West Africa 

and at least be able to nod 
at the ghosts
who murmur in 1500 languages
spoken here
long before any others
in fact

please
US of American poets
write in Spanish AND English
informed and changed by all these others
these are the tongues of the nation now
speak them with pride and humility

recalling always
that they were originally
the tongues
of oppressors

In the lost year of seventeen
I had blood on my hands
and a heaving song of drugs inside
but I was able to do anything
as I planned to die that soon.

In the lost year of twenty-one
I had more blood on my hands
and dead sex more than live love
so anything was possible because
this was how I was going away.

In the lost years between twenty-four
and forty-four I picked off all the blood
and washed it into the river. I had no itemized
list of seductions.  I lived as if I was
a matter of fact and did not dream on weekdays.

In this lost year, now, at fifty-two
I sing with longing to feel the blood on my hands again,
the rage in sex and passion and God yes the drugged life.
Give me back the sense that I can either create my world
or destroy it.  Help me not care about which I choose as long as I do choose.

An acoustic guitar
you can’t modify much

without destroying it.
Electric guitar though:

man, you can tear that puppy
to pieces and build it up again so new

that leaving that original name on the headstock
seems foolish, but we leave it there and we say

that’s my Fender, my Gibson.  
That’s why

the electric guitar is so damn
American —

no matter how it’s been messed with
somehow it still sounds like bombs and pie,

while an acoustic guitar always sounds like itself,
like it has no country but the one whose hands are on it

right now.  Even if it’s a country of one,
an island nation unto itself,

though of course this is only my opinion,
though of course you have a right to your own,

though of course you can choose your instrument
and play it any way you want to make your point

and we wish you would, go ahead,
the whole world, the entire family of nations, is waiting.

I watched an intellectual
state an opinion with undue confidence
and heard the snikclick of a switchblade
as he waited for response

and heard it again as he responded
to a critique of said fact — snikclick — 
and I thought of tweed and thought of
black leather and thought of textbooks

bound in tweed and black leather — of
entire libraries of tweed and black leather
and switchblades being grafted onto tongues
and how gangs of philosophers might look on Harleys

and thought of smart, picked on kids
getting their gang on with words and ideas
that have no value for them
except when they sound like “snikclick”

All priests
will tell you one thing
and forget to tell you another,
but did you expect them
to do otherwise?  
They are politicians
as much as they are
holy men and women
so trust them as far as you trust
any other human and know 
they will do what’s right for them
and say it’s right from God
because all of us do that.

If you want knowledge
you can trust
don’t listen to a human:  
get thee to an ocean or desert
or the mountains, in fact go
where high desert and mountains
drop into the ocean,
go anywhere like that
and sit near the shore for a week
or a few years.  You’ll get it,
everything you need.  

I would tell you 
to keep it to yourself and not risk
the priesthood that tends to follow,
but it tends to follow.  You will end up
lying about it to others,
telling yourself it’s for their own good.

Where my garden was a week ago
is a box of dirt.  My plants
with their unripe veggies
are piled rotting beside it, victims
of something swift and mysterious.
All that’s left are two watermelon vines
too far behind to bear fruit
before the first frost, and a lone
strawberry which is suddenly
thriving. 

I hate strawberries.

There’s a box of dirt
and a couple of useless-to-me
survivors, and I’m hungry
for the squash and cukes 
I won’t get.  I feel like I’ve presided
over a genocide
and am ready to kill what’s left
out of sheer rage.

A box of dirt, six by three by two.
I could almost lie down in it
if it were empty.  Lie down in a box of dirt
and stare up at the sky, wondering
what happened, how I got here.
Ask myself
who will water me as I once watered
what grew here,  what food
I will need. Ask if I can bear fruit
I would want to live on,
and if I will live long enough
to do that.

Under a casket in the spare room I find
a book I’d forgotten buying, a book titled
Art And Fear.

I think being under a casket
for a few years
has made it a better book
than if it hadn’t been there.
It smells like it soaked up
a little something under there
which I think makes it
far more credible.

This is the part where you ask
about the casket.

This is the part where you ask
why I moved the casket.

This is the part
where you can hear an owl
in the distance and cannot tell
if it’s in the poem, the yard,
or the next room,
the part where you stay awake
long after you should be asleep.

right now no proof
of poetry at all in you

an uncut gem
in your mouth

when you clamp down upon it
it will fire up in there 
will shatter into light

but what light

Too true — it feels good
to swing a hand
and connect with a
hard yet crackable jaw.

Hard for some people
to get this:  most
criminals I’ve known
had mountain-high self esteem.

That war thing, the one
where we rush into it singing?
We’ve tried for years to stop it,
and it keeps coming up.

Anger, said the Dalai Lama,
is unnatural,
yet every baby I’ve ever seen
knew from birth how to make a fist.

We cannot be
the enlightened ones
when we can’t even speak truth
about who we are.

Ignore the gurus
and prophets.  We’re killers
to the core and deep down,
we know it.

What we do to survive
is form societies,
then learn to kill
inside their lines.

When I move, you move…

Truckstop, train station, bus station,
airport, port;  remember when those
were the easy way out,
and no one watched you leave?
Remember sticking a thumb out on the highway?
The all-American way
to travel, depend on the “we’ve all been there”
thing…except we haven’t
and “we” means nothing anymore,
if it ever did, if it was ever anything more
than an illusion.  
Good old flag-wrapped dreamtime,
the American walkabout,
legend woven into collective self.  

When I move, you move…

Try to recall what it was like.
Tell yourself
we used to trust one another.  
Tell yourself
travel was a communal experience
and no one except small town cops
ever patted you down,
and they always let you go on your way
after taking the weed you’d hid in your sock.  
Remember
you didn’t care much
because weed was cheap
and no matter where you ended up
you knew you could find more
one handshake away.

When I move, you move…

We used to travel without a lot of thought.
We used to travel without a lot of anything.
That was how you became American:
you just got on the road.  
Had philosophical encounters and wild,
anonymous sex.  Discussed the meaning of life
in the back seat of a big boatcar
with someone who picked you up
on the way to a Dead concert, a festival, your brother’s house
in Middleburg Heights.  
Found a crash pad in a city
you reached before reaching
the city you wanted to end up in,
and decided to stay there for a while…

When I move, you move… 

Everyone’s so damn stationary now.
No matter the size of the beat surging out of the car
the car sits still and only moves in place,
and no one picks up hitchers, ever.
No one buys a ticket last minute
and gets on a plane without running a gauntlet.  
No one rides a train at all
and we fear the buses will smother us
in other people’s germs…
we don’t move at all
without knowing exactly where we’re going,
without a screen to tell us exactly where we’re going,
without a plan as to where we’re going,
only going where everyone else is going.

When I move, you move…
just like that.