Seaweed, I know nothing about
seaweed — the difference between
kelp and anything else is a mystery,
but anytime I’ve seen a kelp forest
on a television show I’ve thought
either that such a place might be
fascinating to explore, terrifying
to become entangled in — the long
stems and flat hands of black-green
waving, like flags of our forefathers
waving, their entanglement of fury
tinged with fear made over to represent
pride, look at the flags of the moment
claiming to protect innocent masses
stuck down there in the murk
and shadow; I think of the kelp
every time I must go into the crowded streets;
I remember my fear, looking at the others,
wondering who among them
is terrifying, is furious, is terrified,
is oblivious to fear and anger but is
nonetheless a danger even without
trying; I am among them as one of them,
a being moving slowly through
an undulating dilemma: is this
what we are, is all of this natural,
are we the fury and fear and what is
nature if we cannot separate ourselves
from it, why is it so hard for me
to remember anything but kelp
when I see the word “seaweed?”
Tag Archives: political poems
Seaweed
The White Rug
They always want you
face down on the white rug.
Want you to be afraid
to stain it.
Want you to bleed
somewhere out of sight.
Some extraordinary
wounds you’ve got there,
they say. But how old
are they? They can’t still
be bleeding? You must be
mistaken. It must have been
something else, something
you did. Don’t stain
the white rug with it.
Crawl over there if you’re
going to do that. The rug
is fragile, and expensive.
We don’t want to have to
replace it, or dye it — although
we would know
it was a white rug to begin
and still is under the cover
of color. And if we tore it out
we’d just put another white one
down. Meanwhile,
you’re still bleeding and
face down on the rug as they
begin to clean up around you then
tie a rope around your neck
and start to drag you off
to other rooms where the rugs
aren’t white but the color
of older blood and also, maybe,
the ash of many bonfires,
black paint on a graveyard marker,
dirt from their disturbed
basement floor:
from where you’re lying,
nothing looks or smells clean.
Big Stone
This is the story
of the argument everyone had
with Big Stone
Big Stone says to us all
I can displace your weight
in water from here
without immersing myself
It’s a neat trick
an impossible trick for you
but I’m projecting tonnage
you don’t have
How do you think are you
supposed to compete
We said
something
unoriginal
about Bruce Lee
water and
big stones
Big Stone laughed
so hard at us
mocking the idea of
being cut to pebbles
by water
Laughed so hard and stonily
that it split along
its own faults
so we rushed
into that void
left in the center
of Big Stone
We recognized little there
but felt at home or at least as if
we were on the way home
although the rock terrified us
as it continued to crumble
Things moved faster
that we’d ever believed possible
Big Stone’s threat
to displace
our weight in water
failed to consider that we
might ourselves be water
even if we had somehow forgotten that
through all the eons of staring
at Big Stone
An American Poem
This is an American poem;
I should insert
a nature image here.
I should purple
the mountains up,
like a god. Then I’ll chew
the scenery
until there’s nothing left
to suck from it.
This is an American poem;
it contains a rigged dance
of myth and cynicism.
In here we
we step on
each others’ toes
then apologize nonstop until
the pain becomes so strong
we cannot help but lash out.
In every true American poem
there should be exuberant
ghosts and the sound
of babies, crying, screaming,
playing. Doing all the things
American babies have always done.
If you write it, they say:
Not the babies, please. Leave
the babies out of it, they are precious
and innocent. Bah, humbug,
you say even though it’s
the Fourth of July. The Fourth
of July is built on dead children,
uses fireworks to justify
a war everlasting.
In every great American poem
should be an America over half
of its readers do not recognize.
What’s that about ghosts? Don’t you
recognize yourself in there?
Still cheering, still writing,
but reversed. A good mirror
shows you your other side.
A better one shows you more than one.
This is my American poem and if it’s any good
it’s chafing you like the dish on the table
with the turkey and all those sides
while the country, the nation,
even the purple mountains above it all
look at all of us wondering
where they went wrong
that this is how it feels now
to write an American poem.
Across The Street
Across the street
Joe has hung
an American flag
with one blue stripe
out the window.
Calls the cops
on the Black folks next door
at least once a month
for “looking in his windows”
or “parking too close to his driveway.”
It’s a narrow city street
in a low down part of town
and no one’s got room enough
to park their cars without being
on top of each other,
but Joe still blows the snow
from his driveway
against the windows of
his neighbors all winter long
in an expression of his displeasure.
Loudly calls the folks next door
“the monkeys.” The cops
always come when he calls,
never do a damn thing,
but come out every time.
Joe likes to complain out loud
to everyone about all of this.
“What? I’m not supposed to have
property rights just because
I’m a registered sex offender?”
Joe’s son has a daughter.
I see her now and then
on the porch
sitting on Joe’s lap when they
come to visit.
At least,
I assume it’s his granddaughter.
There can’t be any other
explanation. There just
can’t be.
One time, someone
put a brick through
Joe’s windshield. He
called the cops and blamed
the next door neighbor.
The cops came
and talked to everyone.
Kept them separate,
said they could
prove nothing, did nothing.
I wish there was
something just and right
to say here,
but all I’ve got is that
I’d move
but where is it going to be
any different unless
you go so far away you can’t
be found? Until then, I take comfort
knowing that I still have
more bricks in the backyard
should it come down
to that again, and
the cops have yet to cross the street
whenever they’ve come:
the same cops who told me
that I should have known better
than to live here after the break-in
a few years ago, that things like that
never get solved in this neighborhood;
the same cops who took four hours
on a Saturday night to come look at
the totaled cars when the stolen car
sideswiped half the street and was left
at the bottom of the hill in pieces;
the same cops who came through
our backyards with assault rifles
and dogs looking for a killer who
(we later learned) walked right by them
in drag down the sidewalk.
I could go on and on and on
but it’s all happening across
the street right now, and
I can’t move, so here I sit
on my bricks without a flag to fly.
What You Can Get Away With
What you can get away with
in here is
at least three murders a day
depending on your
choice of food and
drink and how much
electricity you use and
where you drive and how far
and for what purpose
What you can get away with
in here is
tossing out a storm cloud
of sharp words for fun
as we used to do
with good old
lawn darts
(c’mon, you never met
a soul damaged by lawn darts
after all
must be one of those
legends the weak tell
to shut the strong up)
and then laughing
when they penetrate
someone’s head
What you can get away with
in here is
cartoons on sports jerseys
and high school recreations of
important-to-the-infrastructure
massacres by bullet
by oil and steel and a hundred
paper cuts from lethal treaties
What you can get away with
in here is
blinkered messaging and
whistling for hunting dogs
for some moonlight or daylight scramble
after prey you don’t even know but
once you corner them you can decide
you know enough
to pour blood out on the soil
(not to spill it
it’s no accident)
What you can get away with
in here is
blindly misunderstanding
who lets you get away
with all this and why
it serves them to have you
become what you are
and remain here laughing
and tossing and shooting and
buying and selling and
what’s a little blood anyway
The Back Room
No matter what the front room thinks,
the back room knows this business stinks.
The front room puts its smile up front.
The back room’s smile is kept covert.
The front room just assumes it’s safe.
The back room knows it’s all a cage.
Whenever the front room goes to sleep
the back room fortifies its keep.
No matter what the front room thinks
what’s cooked in the back room always stinks.
Armor Song
To be openly ourselves nowadays
too often feels like resisting an assault:
routinely forced to learn
muscular new love songs, forever
bulking up for the strain
of trying to hold on to each other.
Daylight comes up
on another round of attacks, snipers
watching for us to dare
to be openly together and say,
beloved, here we can sing out loud
to each other, here we can be safe.
At night, assassins roll up on our homes
where we thought we could leave
the curtains open at least through dinner
so we could watch the city twinkle
or see fireflies grace the neighborhood
as night took hold. We dare to say
beloved, even in darkness there’s light,
however small, however fleeting;
then, too often, comes the shot
or the knife, the fire on the lawn.
Somehow, bewilderingly so,
so many still hate us here
who smile and pat our backs
in public, then slink into corners to plan
how we might be removed or
erased completely from our own lives.
If we ever escape the need to be
this perpetually strong, this might be
a good place to hold on to one another
more loosely and engage the softness
we keep behind armor now; until then
we flex, we watch, we love, we guard.
Dare
Say “that’s not music”
often enough and someone
will soon enough
sing you wrong.
You don’t have to agree,
but you’ll still be wrong.
Say “that’s unnatural”
often enough
and soon enough
someone will offer you science.
You don’t have to like it,
but you’ll still be wrong.
Say “that’s un-American.”
Go ahead. I dare you.
The Question In Your Sleep
On your walk home
after dark last night
you were daydreaming
about the future
when you were
confronted:
she stepped out
from behind a pillar
on the outside edge of
a decaying parking garage
and looked into you.
She appeared, this time,
as a little girl dressed
in distressed clothes
from a fantasy frontier era.
You saw the gingham,
the dirt, the torn hem.
You thought something
was off but you couldn’t
put a finger on it
until you saw the pillar
was a tooth and the garage
was a mouth and you
had to run from being swallowed
by whatever
had coughed her up.
At home, you sat
and slowly ate
cold canned soup
while catching up
on the news and did
a spit take
when she showed up
in the background of
a story about
something unrelated
to her — a crisis tale
wedged between
atrocities.
She cradled a puppy
in her arms, a puppy with
huge teeth, a lolling tongue.
A mouth you recognized at once.
This morning, waking up
from a question that lasted
all through your sleep:
asking yourself
how long has this been going on —
torn clothes, betrayal,
innocent fantasy masking darkness
and the devouring behind it.
The beloved dog that becomes
the vulpine Other. The pleading eyes
fixed upon your own.
On The Inability To Feel (The Dike)
In order to stop snickering
at the humor lurking
like vermin in
each of the growing cracks
in the dike of Empire
I have to think of all
the innocents and
roughly crushed folks
already barely surviving
in the flood zone below
and remember the quote
about comedy and tragedy
in order to force myself
to pull up short
of a belly laugh
while thinking
of the rumble of stones
and rubble that will come
with the cleansing
when that wall explodes at last
Workplace Advice
When they say
“you’re overqualified,”
believe them. Thank them,
then surpass them.
Do better:
become their bosses,
their competitors,
their rivals; better still,
render them
irrelevant or forgotten.
Not everything
is up to them.
When they say, “don’t
come to me with a problem
without having a solution,”
understand that in their heads
the sentence too often ends after
“ don’t come to me”
and the rest too often translates to
“la la la la la la I can’t hear you.”
Your irritation, your pain, your
confusion or frustration
are enough reason
to speak up. Not everything
is up to you.
When they say, “if you’re bored
then you’re boring,”
whisper or shout “bullshit”
depending on your level of safety.
Sometimes a meeting is boring.
Sometimes a person is boring.
Sometimes this grind grinds so hard
it’s easy to forget
that what’s out there
is soft and fascinating and
endless. We wish for an end
to all their prattle
but you are here now and
if they say to you, “Do what you love
and you’ll never work a day
in your life,” believe them
only long enough to distinguish
between temporary consent
and permanent compulsion.
Your joy awaits,
and nothing of that
is truly in their hands.
What Did You Do In The War?
I wrote poems,
a lot of poems.
At the time
it seemed to many to be
an indulgence.
But now it seems
I wasn’t writing poems
as much as I was
making bullets and
planting seeds: bullets
for the moment, seeds
for the future.
Sometimes one poem would be
both — those were the times
I think I was at my best.
I do not like war —
I am not one of those
whose blood sings with it.
But there were times,
I admit, when I’d look
at what I’d written
and say, there’s one
that will hurt, there’s one
that will sprout later,
and I would sit back
and say, there. There
it is. I mean,
why do you fight a war
except for the chance
to hear poems when it’s over?
(Which is why they killed
some of us,
you know. It wasn’t
safe — not as dangerous
as some things, but still,
they killed some of us
not because our bullets hurt them
but because our seeds
terrified them.)
When you ask me
what I did in the war,
I tell you this: it wasn’t
as much as some did,
but it was everything
I could do — an indulgence,
maybe, but I did it with
my hands and it took
all the strength I had
on some days, some nights,
when the firefights came close
and I thought I would or should die
but nonetheless I kept the lamp on
above the paper as I tried
to make a better world with my pen.
Fire In The Hole
the crater where we live shows
that an explosive heart once was set off here.
no one knows the names of all those
who were there when it blew apart.
the names of all those who became alarmed
at their disappearance are unknown.
that said, we must acknowledge
that there are oceans of blood in the soil
where we live because
it’s all we have ever experienced.
we can’t see over the walls
to the things that may be out there.
whether it was always meant to be this way
is irrelevant to the limitations we face.
if it ought to be another way,
if another way is still possible, we can’t say.
crater walls limit what words we know.
walls keep us from even asking for more.
many of us don’t even know
the crater is a crater.
if we do we think time and erosion
have leveled it to memory alone.
anyone who has been to the walls knows better.
they come back and point to them,
then lay hands upon the soil at our feet
to bring the blood up oozing
onto our shoes. they try to tell us
but we can’t seem to understand
that everything old is still new.
the ticking we hear is not an echo.
there is
fire in the hole.
Land Acknowledgement
When a civilization collapses,
it does not evaporate and vanish
but instead dissolves more or less slowly,
stains the earth and soil,
tints the waters for an age
or two after it appears to be gone.
What colors do you see
under your feet? What is the tint
of what is in your glass? More to the point:
when you make a land
acknowledgment, open your mouths
to say “Today we stand on the land
of the Nipmuk, the Mskogee,
the Lakota,” do you think of this
in terms of what you can see and taste
right now, or is it more akin
to describing long-extinct
fauna and flora? Do you even look
at where you are
before you speak?
We are dying to know.
Dark Matter 