1.
When they got off their boats
in those first years, they had with them
worship, fear, and want. Used guns
and disease to spread what they’d brought
and cleared the land so their speech, theirs alone,
could ring out. You use what you have when you need
to run a genocide just to get by. 

2.
They endlessly retell all their lovely myths
about how plantations ran, but in truth
fear and want and worship were made anew there
and no amount of speech can bind the wounds
from whip or rape.

3.
Freedom of speech, freedom of worship,
freedom from want, freedom from fear.

They’ve declared themselves the default
so all those terms are theirs to define.

Which of their four freedoms
do you think they love the most? 

Which of their four freedoms
is most easily weaponized?

4.
It’s not like they’ve ever stopped trying.
A prison here, a reservation there;
a blood quantum chant, a hypocrite anthem;
a redline, a voting line, a pipeline, a rope;
smug worship, suffocating want, cold-back fear;
speaking up is a gas worthy, gun worthy game to them. 

It’s not like they’ve ever stopped trying.
Mask-off sneering at the safety of others;
insistent demands for managers and cops;
churches set on fire, an ape with a Bible
offering fear to the terrified and want to the starving;
a border wall stabbed through the bones of silent ancestors.

5.
Speak of new freedoms now:

freedom from their way of worship — 
how tiring it becomes to hear them speak of God
and show us nothing but the demonic;

freedom from their notion of speech
that makes heroes of their mythic killers
and tell us we never died at their hands;

freedom to want more than what they offer,
to want the return of things that they’ve stolen
and drained of meaning, turning them into mere style;

and as for freedom to fear? We see them holding that now;
gingerly, at last seeing how it feels (a little) not to be
in full hard control of their own story.

I’m supposed to be
punching a Nazi right now
but I can’t open the door
to go out and find one.

I’m supposed to be tearing down
a statue right now
but I can’t keep my grip on anything —
rope, stone, life.

I’m ashamed of the illnesses
that keep me from standing
and walking and breathing
with the armies of the righteous.

I’m tired of starting every sentence
with “I.” I am trying
to decide how to matter
without myself mattering the most.

To slip into the river
of the moment and vanish
may be all I can muster.
To disappear. To not leave

a damned thing behind
except anything someone better
could use. I would like to be
of some use, even if it

requires my absence.
Let there be an axis without me
upon which new things may turn.
Let the turning

pass me, let the passage
be swift enough that
I vanish quickly from view,
slow enough

that by the time you come back
to where I was,
there’s nothing of note —
not a statue,

not a bloody eye,
not a handprint on a rope.
Take what you need from me
and let me go, let me go.

I will be broken
by the demise of
this country, 
of course. How could
I not be — it made me.
I can only modify what I am
just so far — cannot 
transform entirely. Not now,
not this late. 

You tell me,

of course you can change.
Of course you can shift yourself 
aside of the tumbling 
stones and statues, the smoking
crash of the ruins — you can
survive and even thrive.
You can be something else.

No. I know better, and I know
even more than better —
I know a limited amount of best.

Best for me
is to stand open handed under
the looming wall of the thing
that was built for me and those 
like me and catch the rubble
as it begins to crumble,

try to keep it from crushing
the ones without safety
or a place to hide.

It will take me eventually
but I will be damned if 
I let it take anyone I have
the ability to save.

An article 
on modern architecture
laments how ugly 
it all is, compares and contrasts
Dubai and Singapore skylines
to the streets of ancient Italian
cities, mocks physics-defying towers
of steel and glass
set into city blocks worldwide
at nearly impossible angles and 
presents the street map of Paris
and a collage of pictures
of Roman aqueducts
as the perfection of human
spirit made real, weeps at how much
grace and soul we have pissed away
on such monstrosities, blames
every disease of our society
on the retreat from such classical norms —

and here I am
thinking of broken temples
in India and blown up mosques in Iraq;
of what Timbutu must have been
in its prime and how mounds 
across North America still undulate
in harmony with the landscape
wherever they have not been bulldozed;
thinking of six grandfathers dynamited 
for four presidents; 

I want to say a lot of things
about destruction and rebirth and
the relevance of the past to the present

and they all just come out at once
in words I can never fully mean
as to say them is
to condemn myself as well
but I must, I must:

fuck you, old Europe, old head,
no more than small peninsula of vast Asia,
skull cap above the head of Africa,
made rich by the long plunder of the Americas:

yield your time.

How to be a white American
this year: shift your stance

and consider the view of the drain
from inside the drain.

Think of a sunrise viewed from here
where sunset’s in progress. Bend down

and smell the thrown rocks, the landed bricks,
tear gas floating across the soil.

Get out of the hold
your skin has on you: armor

you may have counted on,
tattooed spells of protection

you say you never knew existed — 
and if you admitted that you knew,

you denied
that you could read them.

It’s not fun here right now.
It’s not going to be fun,

not supposed to be fun.
Never fear: you will someday

dine and screw
and find joy in small things

as always. Just don’t 
try to shift back

to where you were standing
before all this:

the ground there won’t be as solid
as it used to appear.