I have lately dreamed the words
“stuck pig”
so often they’ve turned
into music
I cannot stop humming
asleep or awake

Accompanied by
triangle or tympani
and now
and then
the sound of stones
rolling down a hill
into a river from
their former spots
in a castle wall

If this is a metaphor
what does it mean 
that on a recent night
I received
the second verse
in a new dream
of fields and flowers

and the words were

“bleeding out
means
the meat will be 
sweeter”

Who are they,
the ones you call “them?”
It’s hard to explain, other than

they decide, not you — unless
you find yourself on the side
of consensus. 

Some jump back and forth,
into and out of it. Some join
and never look back,

some are born there, some
look up one day and find
somehow they have become “them.”

How immense they are
depends on how small you feel
yourself to be.

If there is a
visible horizon before you,
they are the vanishing point.

Your descriptions of them
have a plasticity of form,
though rarely of intent.

Their mouths
are bound over
to the service of ghosts.

In their hair the ashes 
of torches, pyres, stakes
in piles of pitch-soaked wood.

They may choose to soothe
if you agree, snip and snide
if you are mildly out of line,

rap knuckles and slap down
if you are more recalcitrant,
beat and slay if they see the need,

or so they want you
to believe. They are
avatars of what

you are supposed
to believe and the forms
must be preserved

or else there’s nothing
to be preserved and
things fall apart and

even if that is something
to be desired
it does not happen

without pain and
the circle remains
unbroken as long as 

they hold you close;
as long as you let them
hold you. 

When they take us
in the night, when they
slip into our beds with us
and rob us of our right
to our desires, when
they carve our beings
from us and leave us
as husks, as remains,

we will have to be our own light.

When they sniff at the sick
and smell what they call
justified pain, when they
seize our bodies to pay the debt
for their own satisfaction, 
when they buy bullets with 
what could have bought 
our own healthy returns to 
our own healthy lives,

we will have to be our own light.

When they come in killer walls
of camo and blue to take our water
and foul it for the joy of cash heaps,
when they step in grand cadence
to darken our streets with metal and fear
while we cower in homes they long to burn,
when they raze the schools overseas with bombs
and raze the schools in our towns with illogic and lies,
then drag our children from everywhere
into prison,
into servitude,
into battle,
into death,
into worldwide shadow,

we will have to be our own light.

We will have to remember
who we are,
what we can do, 
who we refuse to become,
what we refuse to do.

We will have to be
in their eyes
ungovernable,
will have to be our own light,
illuminating each other’s way, even
if need be learning to start
fires, with each torch igniting another
until their darkness either
fails before us
or is left behind
for all time.

Speaking of horror
there’s a
huge Dodge truck
parked at the donut shop
I’m about to go into
and it’s flying both
an American flag and 
a Confederate flag
each one the size of
a comforter or 
opened body bag and
it’s Spring

Speaking of 
horror that is as
a way of saying
something moving
in the dispassionate moment
of how matter of factly
those flags fly together

Speaking of horror
my body is hollering
stay out of there

Horror is how easily I lose
my usual donut appetite

In fact I don’t even
want a coffee

I know I could likely walk in 
with impunity
and buy my usual
with impunity
and recognize the person
who owns that truck 
and stare at them
with impunity in fact
they might nod to me if
we passed through the glass doors
at the same time in 
opposite directions

I don’t want to park
where horror lives
so I drive around the block to 
another donut shop

but it’s Spring and
in keeping with Spring
and speaking of horror

I really have lost all desire
for the usual