Some context for this:
How To Lose Your Pants By Being Dumb
If I were to become a bully
I’d do my business
righteously, historically.
I’d fill my raging belly
with ghost egret flesh,
drink nothing but spectral bison’s tears,
grow horns
the size of a railroad car
and start looking around
for a bison-petting tourist with
jeans and blood to spare.
Watch them run away after trying
to pet me. Thinking
I’m tame. Believing the
schoolbooks they’d seen.
You’d think I’d have learned
about how such behavior
tends to pan out over time.
You’d think that — and you’d
be wrong. This is mild. It isn’t about
replicating their history of violence.
There’s a whole country out there
the wants us lovable enough
to keep on a shelf in the living room.
Someone’s got to set them straight
in the name of survival. Put them
pantsless on the hook
for everything
they never learned in school
or subsequently.
It’s not their fault, you say,
that they bought the myth they were sold.
But it is. It’s not like
they haven’t been told.
Anyway, I’m starting small.
No need to panic yet.
Your jeans
don’t begin to pay off
what was stolen, but it’s a start.