everyone knows
about area 51
and that stuff happened there,
all kinds of stuff.

they say it’s shut down now.
they say they’ve moved it.
no one’s sure where it went
but stuff must be happening
somewhere

that we aren’t supposed to know about.

point at any map
and pick a town.  stuff is probably
happening there
we aren’t supposed to know about,
but we’ll never hear about it.
then someone will move
to another town
and stuff will continue there,

but no one writes books
about that stuff. no one wonders
about that stuff,

about small towns rife with
secret wars
and monsters living side by side
with normal folk.

at least when we still had area 51
we knew where to look for them,
and now they could be
everywhere.

When it comes to raising the dead
and giving them a chance to speak,

when it comes to invoking them,
we learn early and often how it is done
and what to say:

“Mannlicher-Carcano,”
for instance,
I learned to pronounce
when I was three years old;

Audubon Ballroon, Commander Hotel, Lorraine Motel;
Presidential Palace, Santiago, Chile;  Jonestown;
easy enough to say.

Say “Flight 11,
Darfur, rape, terror,
Bosnia, Holocaust –”
watch the blood
welling up in their eyes —

O the turns
language makes
through our times!
It’s a grand time
to be a poet
because normalcy
is so full of
shadows
that you barely have
to know the tongue
to play at necromancy.

Indigo messages
under the headlines
on the front page
suggest that these people
are doing all this
to get you.  You look for
their reptile signatures
in the shadows behind
public figures and
the subtext of their
platitudes, refusing to believe
they are human at heart
and incapable of long term
concerted action in the face of
their own greed and clumsy grasp
of the twists of fate.  In their hands
fate never twists at all
and they keep a sure grip on its path.
They must be in cahoots
with one another and their
mutual interests must coincide
with their desire to see us caged
or rotten.  You track them
from electronic safe houses,
small coffee shops, the corner of
your bedroom. It’s comforting
to have a place to focus
your concern when the world
is collapsing, when you are removed
from agency.  Having an agent to fear
makes the fear manageable, and as you post
your own indigo messages to others
who know the partial score you know,
you become one with the reptile overlords:
you’re the disloyal opposition,
the necessary distraction from chaos
and entropy,
as complicit in your own death and decay
as those you claim to despise.

A country fair in rural Connecticut
two weeks ago
Saturday night

There’s a kid
as crew cut and blonde as a farmer stereotype
wearing a side tipped black on black Yankees cap
and this T-shirt that says in white on black

TODAY I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO USE MY AK
I GOT TO SAY IT WAS A GOOD DAY

I know where that came from

I pride myself on trying to know
things my friends don’t know
It’s a hipster thing and knowing that line
qualifies me as a hipster
among my graying pals
and like a good hipster I snicker to myself

What could this hick
still wet behind his exposed ears
know about something like that
out here in the fresh air
next to the cider donut stand
under the fireworks in the woods?

I don’t know where that’s coming from

Then tonight
on a late night drive home
from Providence
I hit the preset on the car radio
and pick up a new station
“BSR in the 401 — 88.1
Hitz From Da Left”

Now I know what I know
but I don’t know anything I’m hearing

Here’s a shoutout to “my boys
on lockdown tonight in the ACI”
and “Jacqui sending this out to Rab-dog
wherever he is tonight”

I think I know this piano sample
Think it’s from Curtis Mayfield
but it’s not long enough for me to be certain
And the beats that travel with it
make it hard to hear the past for the present
so I don’t know if I know

Then the announcer cuts in with
“Who’s making rhymes like this these days?

a few seconds go by before he says

“…that’s right — no one’s
making rhymes like this, son
This is twenty years old”

and the words are similar
to something I know
but far enough away to be strange
to ears that think they’ve heard everything
there is to know

(By the way, if you’re sitting there waiting for me
to bust out in some lame replica
of the rhymes I heard
waiting with incipient glee for my failure
may I suggest
you kiss my middle aged
fat round ass

because I know what I know
and I know when I’m licked
and I’m licked so hard here
I’m still wet behind the ears)

I’ve never heard this stuff before

and the tracks roll on
like breathing that won’t stop
and I’m trying to breathe like this
but I can’t

I’ve got the window down
with this unknown old school turned up loud
listening
to the wind rush by
until the signal breaks down to static
two miles out of Providence
still thirty miles from Connecticut

I hit another button
and find a few more rhymes
a little farther on
I recognize this stuff
and can almost follow the words
but this time when Ice Cube drops
I shut the hell up

because I know what I don’t know
and what I know now is that I know shit
except it seems that hip hop’s not something
to be found in the blood
but in the air

and maybe that kid back home
with the buzz cut and the shirt down to his knees
knows something I don’t
or maybe he doesn’t
but I know I don’t know

I know now
what I know
isn’t enough

and because of that
I got to say

today was a good day

How do we know
we are modern?  Because
the song of the machine gun
so often answers our morning sun.

It’s not a hymn, we tell ourselves,
but some god must adore it,

its rattlejack melody
and simple chatter so commonplace
we don’t look up when we hear it
on a television show, in a movie,

but let the chorus start before us,
in person,
let our days threaten to end with this
before we have begun them

and we understand so much,
feel a kinship with millions
who’ve heard it through the years,
begin to imagine ourselves
at Wounded Knee, in the Ardennes,
San Juan Hill, countless villages.

Maybe it is a hymn we’re hearing.
Maybe this is our true religion:

a faith born of duck and cover,
cower and hide.  This god
brings us together with shared whispers
and screams, making us
equals
under the clouds of lead.

The leftist
was all about summer,
enjoyed the humidity
and the heat.  It made the people
dissatisfied, reminded them of the cost
of air conditioning, unsafe city pools
made less safe by the absence of lifeguards
due to budget cuts, and the way the police
stared suspiciously at small knots
of young brown men on corners. 

The conservative looked forward
to winter.  The cold kept the people
close to home, the snow
piled up in dirty ridges
like border walls, the rough and narrow streets
made rougher and narrower, and everyone
eyeing their parking spaces in paranoia,
guarding their spots with rickety chairs,
boxes, and entitlement for having gone out
and dug them themselves.

A few always said:
Give me fall.  Give me
the riot in the trees, the flames
along the branches.  Give me the dying
and the sidewalks full of debris,
the sense of things failing before they can be
reborn. 

And the whole while the rest of us,
the unlabeled people,
thought all year round about spring
and its fertile mud, how early snaps
of warmth would bring hope of temperance,
how the green would hover unseen in the buds
and bulbs not yet awake, then
would in one day transform
the world when we weren’t looking
to something perfectly suited to our needs.

Somewhere, of course,
was an old woman who chattered incessantly
to herself about cycles
while sitting at her window as she had
for years

but no one wants to hear that,
whatever the weather…

Let us now praise
the Cherokee grandmothers
who apparently worked overtime breeding
so that white people I meet
can claim just enough kinship with me
to feel less guilty.

(Or not. Maybe they don’t
feel guilty. Maybe it just makes it
easier to say something to an Indian.)

I am certain
that most of them
believe it’s true; the fact that it’s always
a grandmother and always Cherokee
makes me certain that it almost
never is.

Somewhere out there
in the red backlog of time
somebody started telling their children
and their neighbors and the townsfolk
that the Cherokee princess fell in love
with a stalwart pioneer and crossed
their tribes’ taboos to marry and bear
them, the true fruit of the new continent,
the darlings who capture the Natives’ plight
and hold it up for everyone to see, that touch of dusk
in the skin, that not-so-white
cast in the eyes.

I will not disabuse them of the notion,
they seem to need it.

But over their shoulders
I can see a black woman hiding
from a shadow in the doorway,
and I wonder what these eager people
would have to say to her
if they ever came face to face.

And while we’re on the subject:

When we take a drink, it’s just like you
taking a drink.  Most of our tobacco use
is like your own,

but the sweat lodge? That’s still ours.
You enter as naked tourists,
and leave the same way.

And when you
place a bet…
you know, we really wanna thank you for that…

Long hair and leather look lovely
on some people,
childish on others.

Everyone comes to their own place
eventually, it’s true;
but owning a dreamcatcher

doesn’t mean
you’re entitled
to our dreams.

~~~ Repost of an old piece, in response to Jessica Simpson revealing that she is 1/16 Indian after being called out on using the phrase “Indian Giver”