My hands flew open and I found myself
mistakenly trusting someone once again.
It felt like hell afterwards, worse than normal;

I’m certain that this blood
all over my hands
is my own.

Once again I’ve received what I deserve
for my perpetual, hopeful foolishness.
I reset my center, swear, “never again.”

I will no doubt do it again,
accepting what appears to be
kindness. It may even be

intended as kindness. No matter:
I will trust someone and afterward
I will bleed and swear not to bleed

ever again. Every two years,
every four years, I will remind myself
of this as I bleed and bleed.

Advice so frequently given
it’s almost an instinct:
Don’t go to bed angry.

But what if we’ve been hearing it wrong,
forgetting a comma and a capital letter:
Don’t go to bed, Angry? What if

Angry is a being? A trollish
essential worker. Angry’s job is
a work-through-the-night position.

Angry doesn’t and shouldn’t sleep, runs
on maintenance shop coffee and off-brand corn chips.
Chows down on liverwurst on white with mustard

at 2:37 AM. Fuels up to poke your fires
all damn night. Burns off the reluctance
and the civilization you cherish

to keep you warm and alive. Angry
gets a bad reputation only because
they’re working class efficient, proletarian

strong in the face of the Big Bad.
Get up and see Angry at the foot
of your bed holding your armor.

Go to bed, Angry. Thank you for keeping watch.
We should count on you more than we do.
We ought to take a note, stay up, see

what the Big Bad’s been up to
while we sleep. You can whet a blade better
in the dark, at any rate — see the sparks,

smell the burned metal. Angry
keeps us honest, ready. Don’t go to bed,
Angry, as long as there are billionaires to scare.

If “the Other” continues
to bother you into madness
simply by existing,

by being elusive,
by being
your fixation,

I shall warn you
of the consequences
by reminding you of Captain Ahab,

of how he hunted, how he died,
of how his violence and obsession
changed the whale not at all;

of how the Great American Story
isn’t named for the captain,
but for the focus of his hatred.

Call them whatever
you want, but remember:
in this story Moby Dick

shall also be Ishmael,
at once wounded and triumphant,
the one left to tell the tale.

You built a fire
by which to keep warm
and which you hoped
would keep demons away,

a fire you tended badly
and let burn mile after mile
of the earth, let the ash
poison the sea,

not to mention your role
in what it did to the air
and all the flesh and hair
that burned as well.

Now you have the nerve
to fall in love with a song
that insists you never built it,
and all I can think of

is how much you must love
the tale of Peter denying Jesus
and somehow being
forgiven for it.

Think about how many
of your youthful TV loves
opened with the sound
of a gun.

Think about how many
movies you used as a mold
opened and closed with
the sound of a weapon at play.

Think about how much
of how you used to play
needed the sound of a weapon
for the games to work right.

Think about how easily
random items could become
guns and swords in your
magically fatal hands.

Think about how happy
it made you to gun down
a playmate, relegating them
to play dead on the battlefield lawn.

Think about how they used to get up
after being dead and take their turn
to kill you back and how you went on
taking turns till the streetlights

came on and you were called away
from all the killing by higher powers
to eat something and watch a little more
killing before bedtime.

Think about how surprised you still are
that killing them now leaves
the dead on the ground.
Think about how real blood smells.

Shudder to think of them rising.
Thrill to the thought of how you grew up
into who you are: barely chagrinned, relieved
that none of them will get their turn.

What happens
in the backwash
of history
is still history.
Each massacre
is ongoing;
theft and conquest
rumble on until
it’s all been taken.

After that it’s just canon
and it reads cleaner,
like an old film
people call out as
the way they used
to make them, not like
today. They say,

stars were bigger then
and the movies today
are too small, too focused
on bullets, blood, and
who dies and who lives
without considering
all the glory the big films
made so clear and so
lovely to think about.
They really love their movies,
their tales of glory. History
be damned unless
it can be shined like silver.

Lucky there is always
more history to polish,
shape, and put to work.
That lucky old sunset
is always there for them
to ride into at the close
of their film.

so.
again.

perfect angel
or mistake. big dumb
or slight intellectual.
war cry or
blue honorific,
again.

so.

you find this
hard to follow? consider
how a bullet feels
upon learning its trajectory
has made it infamous

again.
so.

if you are
not yet numb from talking about it,
if you are not yet dumb about
only talking about it

again,

tell us:

what should we say this time?
how do we wrap this one in words

beyond so
and again

so tightly
it shall be bound away
as the last?

We give you now
a self professed
freedom fighter
safe at rest
Who fell asleep
on a bed of stars
Awoke cocooned
in hardened scars
Then wore them like
a pale thick stole
Proclaimed them each
as more than royal
Presented them
as proof of purity
A broken frame
An insecurity
which led them to grow
a heart of bombs
to excavate
graves and tombs
in which to bury
the unfortunate collateral
casualties of ideologues
just as they are
a self-confessed
vigilante blessed
with peace
in knowing
they are already gone

In a government built 
for and by men and only men
the most honor will be given
to those whose eyes mist over 
with bland depravity, the ones
who will square their shoulders
and sigh, "Well, nothing else
to be done here," then send 
soldiers and bombers
off to do bloody dirt 
they would not do
with their own hands. 

With their own hands 
they will sign orders 
for murder squads, then
go home to families, trot babies
on their knees till bedtime when they will
hand them back to women and go sit 
in their dark studies wondering 
what will emerge tomorrow morning
from the beige fog 
of incremental catastrophe in which 
they live and breathe.

They live and breathe 
for this distance from their kills
as if they've developed a taste for the news
of how children's bodies were churned
by explosives, how the targets ran screaming,
how the pushpins then were moved 
around their maps as a result, their eyes 
misting over with bland depravity, 
their lust for other lives twisting within them
as they vote, as they argue and deal,
as they campaign, as they square their shoulders 
and say, "So much more to be done, 
may we have your vote?"