YES to
a right war
a good burning
a sweet crush of smoke
a cracking big crackle
a lovescream or two
a flower on a coffin
a thousand thousand bloom decked coffins
a thousand million wails of wailing august healthy grief
YES to
a stress fracture long as san andreas
a wound open as a candidate’s wide white mouth
a sky full of drone opinions making for a target
a blue hole in deep sea damage waters holding dead secrets
YES to
a why that makes a what better
a how that makes a why clean
a who that makes a how sweeter
a what that makes a when dance
YES to
a big love that manifests in a dark slap of reason
a slaughter that makes a forest rise from bones and regret
a dirt pile over ruins heaped on top of high stacks of stolen histories
YES to
the end of this
the end of this
the end of this
NO
this negation
this denial
this not now
this not yet
this not that
this not this so
YES
to YES
to YES
to going through NO with YES
like a bulldozer to grand wizardry
like a blowdown missile to bad bunkers
like a softbomb to dim corners of hiding
like a mistake multiplied enough times to come correct
when called
to YES through NO
take YES
BE
YES
be YES
YES
YES
Monthly Archives: November 2015
YES
Plague Doctors
A nation of plague doctors
in plague doctor masks,
walking untroubled
by the smell of bodies.
What long beaks full of flowers.
What dark cloaks they don
to walk among the sick insisting
they have the cure: social unity, false kindness,
willed blindness to what ails
those who stand before them.
A reliance on unseen Someones
in the sky.
A certain ruthless innocence
upon hearing corrupted narratives.
What short memories.
What a short time since
they were themselves
the sick, the subjects of pain and lies.
What pity they would feel for themselves
if they were to be unmasked.
What panic would ensue, what
screaming, what fever would spread
if they realized how little
lavender and rue can do.
The God Moment
If you believe in a God
which intervenes
in individual lives
and you do
what’s asked of you
knowing a God’s
behind it then
Evil you do is still
God’s will, rest easy and
be at peace as
you just may be
The God’s parry, forcing
another into Good
for A God’s Plan; there’s
a Pattern for this,
you may seek
Judas out and ask when
you see him for
more details.
If you believe in a God
still present but
less interventionist in Small-
Scale, do what
presents itself for doing
as you see fit and Right
as the sweep of Universe
serenely and sincerely moves
according to the tides of A God’s
design without a tug on it from
you and your small actions; if
a butterfly, blah, blah, etc.,
then you are the
unknowing butterfly of
such a Design and you’ll
get the wings you deserve,
or none at all, but A God
will be served and thanks for
your service.
If you believe in A God
which Set It All to Move
and stepped away to watch
and never nudge, do
what presents itself
to be right and good, counter Evil
as you see fit
while considering always that
you, cog of the Work,
might be broken,
hold a secret flaw
someday to break by Plan
or Accident
or Planned Accident and
thus become
God’s Popcorn Fodder.
If you believe in That God
whose Scarred Face
is currently buried in
Torn Hands,
A God who won’t raise
The Head to peek right Now,
do what you find
good and right
and counter Evil
as you see fit,
understanding that on
a scale we can’t imagine
we may be
That God’s karma.
If you believe in All God
at once, do what is presented
for doing and
speak to each item
in the List of Potential Prophets
for its own Counsel, counter Evil
as the Splinter
or Stone commands or
suggests, don’t be afraid to step
where a step is indicated as
that spot compressed below the Foot
and your sense of the Ground
is as much Church or Altar as
a Church or Altar built for
attention — do not segregate,
aggregate; onward into All God.
If you believe you are The God,
why are you reading this?
You got This.
You do what is presented to you,
prop up Good or counter Evil as
each is offered.
That’s a good God,
doing whatever a God
Moves A God To Do.
If you believe in No God,
you are likely to do
what is presented
as a Thing To Do,
not because
of debt or threat,
and to suggest
Another God
might cover this eventuality
would be worrisome as
it necessarily excludes
your No God,
so No God for you,
so shall it be.
Now, here at the close
of All the God-Talk:
are you expecting The Bow
On the Package, ready for
unwrapping?
Are you excited for a
Conclusion?
Fine.
Roll dice.
See what comes up
and see how you feel
about the particular arrangement
of little spots on bone-hued
cubes for Gaming.
It’s as much certainty
as you are ever going to get.
Roll, and roll again,
as God is said not to do —
it’s the Power we alone hold —
to do what’s presented for us to do
each time the bones roll.
Call that moment
before they come to rest
a God Moment if it helps you
choose your turn. Call on
The God as needed.
Here.
It’s always
your turn.
The Racket
If a gun woke up
aimed at something it liked
or had no business killing
would it bow
to the desire of the shooter
or misfire
If a club woke up
mid-fall upon a skull
would it twist in the hand
to miss or glance off or
would it follow through
if all nooses woke up
and unraveled at once
in executioners’ hands
would the executioners
attempt to retie them
or simply turn
to old school manual methods
and do their jobs that way
having become certain
(as the nooses were not)
of the inevitability
if not the rightness
of their duties
what would the nooses do then
considering the racket
we are living
it is hard to understand
why everything
is not
wide awake
insomniac
desperate for rest
Upright In Bed After Getting Something Right
Originally posted 1/26/2013.
You sit up in bed,
startled by the sound
of furniture breathing.
Cowering under
a bunched up comforter,
your pink nose sticking out
into danger from safety
while you try to decide
what’s suddenly up
in this big bad world
or worrying that
like so much else, this
may always be happening
but is rarely noticed
until all other distractions
are put aside.
What if
it’s all alive, even
the brick wall
in the kitchen?
The moonlight might be feeling
some kinda way
about you; the floor might be fed up
with being untidy.
Should you be worried
about the potential for revolution
by the dust bunnies?
Where exactly
does one hide
when the world is all lung and
sentience?
Go back to sleep,
little mouse; take comfort
in knowing
you are dreaming
the right questions
at last.
Forest For The Trees
Say, for the sake of argument,
that one day it all slips into place
and works the way it used to work
or works the way the mythology
insists it works:
say that you and your longtime love
fall into joyful fucking like first time teenagers
but with the benefit of experience
and deep knowledge of each other
and every day after, you remain that way;
say you save money and retire well
and travel and become in late years
learned and wise about human kindness
and as you travel you become beloved
and every day after, you remain beloved;
say that you live suddenly in the place
of refined definitions where freedom
is a free thing and all have it and live it
and honor it and dance on it and in it
and every day after is a dance within a dance;
say it and say it and say it, someday
a myth and a story and a tale will unfold
exactly as they are supposed to
and the morals they bear will all be the same:
every day, there’s a chance for it all to go well
and what we say of why it doesn’t
is as much a myth giving shape to atoms
and energy as any story of happily ever after
or triumph over pain and wrong; and every day
we choose the path from our words
to the next day’s words, and so
the grove of happening is sown and grown,
the forest we will walk through without noting
any of the trees we planted ourselves
if we don’t agree to speak of them every damn day.
In The Bull
Originally posted 8/13/2011.
Once inside,
I become
the bully bull,
somehow having grown
horns for eyes —
I gore what I observe —
my friends
turn aside.
Alone now,
I watch my own
steaming breath.
I did not want
to be inside
the animal’s hide
completely — only
to wear a bit for show.
Now I’m stuck and
all the world’s
an apocryphal red flag,
a cape in a killing hand —
when I see it
I am compelled;
I charge.
Disreputable
I hope
to carry always
an air of
disrepute —
not to sport the stale
bad boy label,
not to dress myself
in an outfit stitched
from assumptions
and bad cultural
hangovers;
not to paint my face
in dark primaries
then go out at night
in good black
and sad spots of silver
shiny enough
that even when I creep
the shadows, I’m sure
to be noticed and noted;
no, what I seek is
just enough
gnarl and twist
in my carriage and form
that from one glance
a stranger might say,
“Well…from the look of him
it’s hard to tell what’s what.
It might be
danger, it might be wisdom,
it might be hard roads or
soft boundaries.
Whatever it is,
I wouldn’t have voluntarily gone
where I suspect he’s gone, but
I’m glad someone did.”
The Unimagined Country
Originally posted 4/29/2013.
Yet-to-be-fully-imagined country
we all want to live in,
miles of plains, mountains,
peace groves full of lemon trees, country
where we let
our own blood
into the garden soil
to feed it,
where we all sing
in our own tongues in front yards,
kneel silently in back yards
under the open sky seeking guidance
or a little rain; country yet-to-be founded,
someday-to-be rich and storied;
abandoned, rediscovered,
abandoned again;
country, not nation, not state;
homeland, not seat of empire;
country yet-to-be ours, country
we’ll have to define, we’ll want to defend
against the poisons of borders,
flags, anthems, suspicions;
on the day we come into that country
we’ll look into each other’s eyes
and know what to name it
without hearing a single campaign speech,
know how to run it
without a single task force,
know how to love it
without a single weapon;
we’ll know we’ve truly settled there
when we can look into each other’s eyes
and see a neighbor, a cousin,
or a self, no matter what else we see.
What Should Not Be So
Sad on behalf of that which is blue
and is not supposed to blue ever;
sad today for blue lips cooling, blue skin
under reddened eyes, weightless blue words
doing little to heal or correct a broken moment.
Angry on behalf of that which is red
which should only be red now and then; angry today
for blood on faces, blood rising in faces, faces soaked
from inside in blood until the dragon stain
of red carries through to words and breath itself.
Scared on behalf of that which is white,
even that which has become so under pain of death;
scared today of ghosts, surrenders, pale knights on pale horses —
all the panoply of what terrifies; most of all, afraid
of white faces; it shouldn’t be so, but it is so.
A Kind Of Poverty
what you love
you claim
what you despise
claims you
what you know
and remain indifferent to
explains you
what you do not know
and others do
reframes you
thus I
learn like mad
have opinions
avoid hating many
and love few
all in an effort to
surrender little
of myself
stories you tell
of what you see
become what people see
of you
stories you tell
of how you see what
you see become
your angle on what
you are
when pushed to speak
I over-explain
and therefore negate
how little I surrender
of myself so
I am learning
silence and
how to tolerate
the growing lack
of self-delusion
that naturally follows
people who are
indifferent to me
are killing me
by millimeters
I am learning
indifference to them
each lesson a bullet
fired in self-defense
this resultant loneliness
is an expression of
a kind of poverty
much like how after a war
a country
is often in ruins
its people walking dazed
by what was once familiar
having become indifferent
to its former self
they starve eventually
or leave
Ism Schism Game
With acknowledgments and respect to Bob Marley, whose words inspired this piece…
Dictionaries
tell you what authority demands
of words
defined
to do work
on behalf of Authority
Never do they mention
when primary meaning is
in dispute
or when primary meaning
is a cornerstone
of prison or when
that cornerstone
rests firmly on negated
backs and necks
If they do tell you a meaning
came from a definition
written repeatedly in blood
with pens
made from bones
plucked from slain infants
they wink it off with
a bandage label such as
“colloquial” or “obsolete” —
trying to chase
unquiet ghosts of struggle into
forgotten fields of rubble
left over from
construction of
their order
While they own these dictionaries right now
their dictionaries have no words
to sing of those who
having come up from under boulders
having come up free of rejections and crush
having come up from understanding
to overstanding
this ism schism game
sing new words
of how stones refused
by builders become soon enough
cornerstones and
keystones of
aqueducts to carry fresh water
to those who still thirst
and of how they do so
by any definition
necessary
Godwin Speaks
Hard not to hear
that red muttering
underneath too many
breaths:
ancient, violent criminals
breaking out
from inside so many
hard-sealed heads,
first in dribbles
and then in packs,
comfortable again as they
mutter and wreck
as if it is finally the season
for such muttering to grow
in volume, grow
toward becoming the cry
of a banshee army turning out
to storm across all and sweep
all ahead of it.
Make no mistake:
not one word of
that murmur
should be mistaken
for old German,
and thus dismissed.
Admit it, at least
to yourself: you
can understand
every word.
Take It And Run
How hard is it to be
this, to be me?
Very easy on days
when there’s enough
lemon sunlight
or clean-scented rain
to keep things fresh
and moving; other days,
it’s a chore moving one lung,
let alone two,
let alone keeping up
with my cardiac rhythm,
and when it is like that
weather has no bearing
on how long I lie in bed
after waking up
only to have my head
convince the rest of me
I have not slept at all.
Take this morning,
for example — I haven’t looked
out the window to see
what is going on and
I likely won’t — so take this morning
and run. Take the whole day —
I won’t miss it.
The Imaginary Fable Of The One-Legged Flamingo
Originally posted 12/30/2014.
Pretend there’s a fable
about a flamingo born
with one and only one leg.
Pretend this bird somehow survives
the vagaries of indifferent
and unrelenting nature
and becomes an adult.
Pretend few ever get close enough
to offer solace or support —
after all, from a distance
no one would be able to tell
the bird was born missing a leg.
Pretend a one-legged flamingo,
unable by definition to switch
to its other leg when
it grows tired of standing still,
must fly more often
than its counterparts.
Pretend it’s not at all farfetched
that such a bird could truly survive.
Pretend the fable has a moral:
to those from whom much is taken
much is also given,
or
unending fatigue in living may draw out
an urge and capacity to soar,
or
perspective and vision may come to one
as compensation for grievous wounds.
Pretend that it matters which words are used.
Pretend like mad
that the chosen moral
is strong enough to keep
the flamingo from drowning
when one night it finally
is so exhausted from the cycle
of unsteady standing
and desperate flight
that it descends
though there are no
shallows in which to land.
Dark Matter 