It is as broken as Troy
or Fukushima.

As crumbled as numberless cities
still unfound and unnamed.

No beauty to it now
as if it were Atlantis

sill thriving under pressure and
without light. If it is even real,

it is no longer within
our reach if it ever was.

Do you hate this lament for it? I do.
I longed for it as we all did.

Embarrassed now to say that
I once sang of how it could be found,

entered, made into a home,
but it was bait. It was only

lure, only decoy. While I chased it
it slipped away and something different rose

on its site that stank of whitened bones
and old massacres. I looked for it

on a hill while they built it
in a charnel trench. They knew me

well enough to know how I could be
fooled, and I was so fooled. My song for

the city became a scream, a death metal
horn of rage. My angle on the angles

of the buildings and roads turned sharp
and bloody. It became impossible

to inhabit my body and say it belonged there.
It’s just a nowhere form. It’s a frame for loss.

They keep building their city, marketing Troy,
tell us to keep praying to the ghosts of Fukushima.

They insist Atlantis will reveal itself,
rise from the nuclear waves if I will just wait.

That city I see them drawing up from the waves?
Not Atlantis, but R’lyeh, and yes, they always knew.

You’re a bad boy. You stay up well after midnight
to plan society’s future.

It’s easy enough. Just decide
what will terrify them

into their next inevitable dumb move;
then go make that happen.

Will they be more motivated by the acts of
their neighbors, or by the acts

of what they call “God?”
Or a stew of both — a storm drawn forth

from capitalism, a war clause invoked
over failing, stolen aquifers? Anything might do it.

It’s that close. How to make it happen
is the question that keeps you up.

You could just go out into the dark,
lie back in a dry field and pray for rain, or fire.

You could process and process the news
seeking the keys to the machinery

that makes such things happen, find tiny clues
or fake clues to their whereabouts, decide

for or against their veracity, exhaust yourself
in conspiracy, then die convinced in thick fog.

All you have to do, you realize, is go back to sleep.
Inaction is as powerful an agenda as anything else.

It might be dawn somewhere in the world
but you’re an American and all you have to do

to make the future happen is stay the night’s course
and go back to sleep. All you have to do

to wreck shit is be American.
Go do that, you bad boy. Make that happen.

An old show about an old story.
You know who wrote it.
You say you’ve never seen it?
That’s because you’re in it.

It’s been the same basic plot
from the start: eventually everyone
becomes either silent, dead,
or Ward and June.

Beaver and Wally? As long as they sell,
sell, sell and buy, buy, buy, it’s all good.
A hard hat for Lumpy. For Eddie Haskell?
A badge and a gun.

Except for June, they don’t need
named or memorable women, and as for
everyone else unseen it’s already
been discussed –silent, or dead.

You say you want to change the channel?
June looks worried. Ward puts down his pipe
and takes off his belt. Wally makes himself
scarce, Beaver waits in his room. Eddie grins,

and nobody gives a fuck about Lumpy.

there are no small parts
only small actors

he told himself
as he slipped into
the cemetery with
a can of spray paint
after midnight

there are no small parts
only small actors

as he hung
a blasphemous flag
outside his home

no small parts
only small actors

as he chose
a sticker for
his bumper

small parts

chose a gun

small actor

chose a stage

no small actors

actors in the background
who move with purpose
advance the action

no small parts
no small actors

he told himself

Every time someone
tells the story
of a routine atrocity or
an ongoing oppression
on a big enough
and well-lit stage,

someone watching or listening
will wring their hands
and fall to their knees in anguish,
crying out, “why is no one
talking about this?”

so loudly that it drowns out
the creaking
from the death-laden branch
of the well-maintained
and perfectly manicured tree
in their backyard,

the one that came with the house,
the one that sold them on the place
back when they were looking for
their forever home.

big wind
coming through with
built in tilt

its source in impure lust for
knocking things down
it thinks are in its way

refuses
to call itself
a hard wind

instead calls itself
a nation of civility
with a civil society

its civil society is not civil
no matter what it says
it screams in the big wind’s favor

civility here means talk nice or
we will blow you over
talk nice or be unheard

either way no one
will hear you
as long as the big wind blows

civility is
no weapon
against such a storm as that

to be heard over
a tornado inside
a hurricane

you had better
be prepared
to scream

and to grab that big wind
by its throat
when it bears down

and to set your mouth
and teeth
upon its ear

You were there, seated on the low wall,
breathing hard after running. Recovering.
I was there too, though we did not speak.
Both of us had just finished running from
what had chased us. Were we done or just
taking a moment? We never spoke. Our eyes
never met. If we had taken a moment there
we might have learned something, gained
a little time, made a plan to fight back. Might
have stopped, been able to settle, been able
to put down actual roots. Instead we were
caught up in recovery, preparing for
more running and more attempts to escape
and live. This is how it works, how it was
always designed to work. This is how we’ve come
to call this living. It never lets up and
we never learn how many of us there are
running away from the same thing.

Used to be when the television got tired
it would briefly display a waving flag
while an old racist song played
(they always played an instrumental and few had heard
or even knew about the racist verse)
and then all would become a burst of static
or the soul-cry from the Emergency Broadcast System
while on screen you’d see a stereotype, what they called
an Injun
in what they called
a war bonnet
displayed in the center of a bullseye graphic.
Now they just turn their time over to sell, sell, sell.
I’ve always thought the old way was more honest
about who we are,
but was it?

revised — originally posted 2/11/2018

American Gothic is a very famous painting
Experts like to argue about which America it’s about
One thing I think we can all agree on
is that the picture is centered on a pitchfork

We like to think we’re different
We like to think we’re beyond it
We like to think we’re not the ones
who are supposed to hold the pitchfork

Our biggest problem?
Out of an excess of kindness
we have let the other side pick up
all the torches and pitchforks

No one’s scared of
any of us because
we said “this can’t be happening”
instead of “where’s my pitchfork”

It’s not the exclusive tool of the devil
It’s just another tool on the rack
We can’t make hay while our sun dims
We need to learn our way around a pitchfork

Boycotts chants and votes do matter
They matter even more when
it’s clear that behind all our moves
are the tines of a forest of pitchforks

It is good to punch the obvious ones
but eventually we will have to get around
to watching a billionaire wriggle
on the end of a pitchfork

So go and look at that painting
Put yourself in it and imagine the feel of the handle
No one in there looks happy but they surely have
a hold on that blessed pitchfork