When that situation presented itself,
there were things I wanted to say
that would have revealed me to be one 
who was being the change
he wanted to see in the world.  

There were some damn powerful syllables
and the breaths between them had good clout
as well.  There was phrasing
that would have stopped a tank; if a tank
had popped up right then, we would have been fine.

I carry these words around all the time;
in fact, I may be a walking, talking armory.
It’s an excellent game to play. I talk it
well:  passing the ammunition, firing off
a salvo, taking rhetorical aim.

Speak the change you want to see in the world.
I know the original phrasing is a little different.
I’m sure this is what was meant, though.
This version surely covers those
with voices as strong as mine.  

Of course, sometimes I do not speak.
You can’t claim every battle as your own,
of course. These battles, for instance, 
where more than breath is on the immediate line?
I save mine.  I sit, I listen, I save mine

for those moments when no one else is talking
because they’re all too busy working, or everyone 
is talking because they’re busy working together.
If talk is dear, I fight carefully and pull back 
quickly.  If talk is cheap, I spend freely.  

The important thing: you know
when I’m talking.  When I’m talking
I’m saving the world. When I’m talking
I’m sweeping the world clean.  When I’m talking,
you should stop working and hear me.

The trick
to thriving
and not simply surviving
in these gangster days

is to practice
gangster discipline
without accepting
gangster theology.

Eyes in the back
of my head, but only for
the panoramic view.  Keep
my hand empty, ready to receive.

Learn to ride
without dying,
call out 
every good day.

Let my tears fall
unrestrained when they come,
pour them out unashamed
on my sidewalk, street, and home.

If you don’t buy this?
Step back.  
I’ll step back
regardless.

If you can’t or won’t
understand this
I do not know 
what will become of us.

The difference between them

is that the United States
is a density of data
and there are many ways to parse it
into patterns.  Everyone
defends their own interpretation
to the death and beyond, while

each constellation
is a paucity of data;
we share interpretations
of them; no one ever dies about
whether we call it Orion
or not. Also, everyone

looks up to the constellations.

Grappled all night
with nostalgia
until I was too tired
to get away,
so I called out

radio, help:

play “Walk, Don’t Run.”
Play “Rebel Rouser’ ”
or “Pipeline.”  

Songs of movement,
no lyric clutter, good beat
plus a pure skin-crawling sense
that what once was
must still be out there;
that’s what I need to have.

I don’t much care
for the music of my youth.
It was mostly lies.
I don’t love it much unless
I need to grow teeth
and gnaw my leg off
to escape
from some bloody crush
of the jaws of time,
and it hurts,
it hurts
but it’s sometimes
is all that there is 
so when it happens

Telstar me,
Sleepwalk me,
Rumble me,
Wipeout me;

my longing for those songs
means I’m trapped and they
are the only way out.
 
 

Everything is labeled “Must See.”
Everything is marked “Can’t Miss.”

Sales, marketing,
the ritual dance.

This is a bombardment,
not a civilization.

This is the flocking of vulturous pigeons
to feed on the seeds of possible tomorrows.

It’s all a shame, an arresting argument.
Everything is a pea under the only mattress.

There’s only one painting for all of this
and it is named “The Fantasy Of Swimming In Shit.”

Only one song releases us
and it’s called “Sitting By The Stonehenge Fires.”

With closed eyes you might see what it might be
without this air to breathe.

You are not alone, you know.
None of us are, no matter how blindered we feel.

Did you ever stop to think,
or instead did you just keep going
while you thought?

The stones on the pathway
have it right:  stay still, they insist,
stay still!  

Zero out the movement.
Let all else hurtle along.
Turtle yourself up and think,

or feel.  Sense something
and allow it voice.
Stay still!

There is so much to learn,
so much to know — for instance,
think about the skin that rocks develop

between their innards
and those who’d break them.
Armor so thick it seems to go

all the way through, and that’s
the point.  They stay still and
integrated top to bottom, inside

to out.  Stop completely and think about it…
feel that growing hardness, that reluctance 
to get back into the rapids?  Progress.

Even if you fall back in now, all you’ll be is wet,
not bent or broken. It would take centuries at the least
to change you now.

I love
the black hat 

it feels great
to say that 

look close
white hat’s

dirty
while black hat’s

not
or not showing anyway

I love the black hat 
just for that

how in its blackness
it absorbs what it attracts

and if you call it
symbolic of evil or uniform

for outlaw games then
you miss that it integrates

messy experience more than
the white hat does

I love putting on
the black hat

watching people hear me
differently

seeing what I can
slip by with

learning so much more
than if I were villainous

in
white

What we’ve been eating is mostly
fictional — no, that’s not it.

What we’ve been eating is mostly
lazy precooked and flash frozen —

that’s more like it, that’s true enough,
but not quite what I want to say about it.

What we’ve been eating is what we are.
A tangled cliche?  They become cliche 

for a reason: they’re true. Follow it:
what we’ve been eating is colonialism’s fodder.

What we have been eating
is utterly simplified and dumbed down.

What we’ve been eating is killing us?
Of course it is.  The essence of the dying diet

is that we’re told to eat to survive and enjoy and delight
and it’s all empty and we end up hollow —

ah, almost there, on top of it, yes —
we are what we eat

and what we’ve been eating
are lies.

what they started with: willow. willow bark for smoke
and for pain. tie the young branches into circles 
and it’s for play, the children understanding the circle
and joy therein.  you could do worse than start with willow.
there is grace in willow, willow allows us our interpretation of willow —

unlike oak, stony oak, granite oak always itself.
the tree presenting as rock. smell broken oak and you know at once
it’s more mineral than tree.  make up stories about oak, pretend to know it
at your peril.  even they only came to oak
once they’d mastered willow and birch and apprenticed to maple;

you can’t come straight at oak or it will snap you up.  
you need to know these things.  pretty soon they may be
the only allies we have left, the ones who get trees the way they get
us, the ones who look like us but don’t scare as easily.  you need to know
what they know about trees and how concrete fails when challenged by roots.

not going to suggest you’ll ever be one of them but with any luck
they may deign to let you survive.  maybe get to know willow, a few words of it
at the least: joy, smoke, pain, circles. no one knows if that will be enough
but it will be a start.  and no, i’m not coming with you.  it’s a little late for me
and someone has to hang back and listen to the concrete scream.

I would love you more,
my activist, my firebrand,
if you could allow all of me in;

if I detected anything more
to your passion than a lust
for right pegs in right holes,

if I thought you truly loved people 
for the complex, contradictory,
dense ghosts they are

and not as you wish they were:
symbolic husks, bullets in your
slide deck on what’s wrong with the world.