(with a nod to Billy Tuggle)

America’s too in love
with Whitman’s barbaric yawp
ever to offer honor soft words
spoken kindly.

This is why I’ve almost
stopped offering the latter to anyone:
it left me feeling almost
un-American to do that

and what I’ve been called 
for daring to care about 
others, there is no need to repeat;
I’m sure you know the words.

The single cry over
the collective voice.
Barbaric insistent
bastardization of language

toward selfish ends.
Not communication
but announcement, 
claim-staking; 

America, barbarian
nation, founded on
conquest, enslavement,
and plunder. And yet

somewhere here
are communities where people
speak quietly under the Shadow,
in spite of it,

and only raise their voices
in amplification of what was said
while the nation wasn’t listening,
or in song. That’s part of 

America too, although I think
it needs a different word than American
to describe where it comes from:
human, perhaps.  Civilized, maybe.

I cannot trust anything,
so I set myself on fire.

I’m burning now
and a crowd gathers.

Someone calls out,
“Is there nothing we can do?”

I can’t talk with lips this crisp
so someone else says,

“he must prefer it, let us
leave him to the flames.”

Of course, I prefer this
to help from anyone saying 

such a thing. I did it because
of my lack of trust. I’m 

a whole nation of distrust
in a single body

and this fire is how I tell you
you weren’t worthy of me —

how I show you my arrogance,
my horrid willingness

to start bigger flames. 
“Is there nothing we can do?”

Maybe water, maybe
smothering, maybe just

bury me in sand or under
a dome of concrete.

You could paint a flag
over it later — it’s what

I would expect of you:
glorifying me and my 

narrowed, stunted life.
You’ll pick the flag

that works best for you,
I trust. I know you that well.

Hence the flames,
hence the greasy bitter ash

I am now. Hence the memory
of what I once thought I was,

curling away
in smoke.

after the fall

chrome face 
of a restored GTO
rumbling by
a flash of sun points
in my eye

silver pink street lights
their glow
their dulled hum

the doppler effect
of a truck approaching
then passing on the street
below my open window

a car apparently doing the same
but instead slowing
and turning in to our driveway

bass the only thing to be heard
from that new club
until the doors open
to push everyone home
at closing time
and then the laughter
and then the shouting
and then no more

until the stores begin to open
and commutes begin
and voices and 
scraps of car stereo music

bass the only thing to be heard

turning from the streets
I will surely miss

the tap working
the power on
the words on a screen
the diseases staying far away
from me and mine

I do not know
all that exists right now
that will not exist
after the fall
there will be something 
I will not miss but 
I cannot know

I watch the streets
for comings and goings

because there is so much
inside and within
I desperately want
to remain unknown

We focus too much
on opening credits.

Character development,
plotting, how the optics

are arranged and changed;
all that is set aside.

The writing of it — how
the arc is presented, where

one must suspend disbelief,
what makes no sense, what

is left unsaid and left to dangle
out there unanswered — shit,

even the who and when
of the writing are ignored — 

those who stay for the the last crawl
of all those behind the scenes

are few, those who understand
all the roles and occupations

as they are assigned on screen
are fewer still.

We’ve unapologetically loved
the movie, though:

the lights; the special effects;
the heroes and the villains —

but damn people, damn.
This is no way to run a country.

Impudently reaching
for justice, the people
dared to approach those
unused to such encroachments
upon their high places;

people who spoke
imperfectly, did not spell
as prescribed, who now and then
set things on fire below the pedestals
where the powers
were beginning to tremble
as the people surged up.

Insisting upon justice,
people moved forward:

then, the sound of stone cracking. Not 
deeply, not all the way through,

but certainly
something was starting to break,
something was starting to fall.

1.
When they got off their boats
in those first years, they had with them
worship, fear, and want. Used guns
and disease to spread what they’d brought
and cleared the land so their speech, theirs alone,
could ring out. You use what you have when you need
to run a genocide just to get by. 

2.
They endlessly retell all their lovely myths
about how plantations ran, but in truth
fear and want and worship were made anew there
and no amount of speech can bind the wounds
from whip or rape.

3.
Freedom of speech, freedom of worship,
freedom from want, freedom from fear.

They’ve declared themselves the default
so all those terms are theirs to define.

Which of their four freedoms
do you think they love the most? 

Which of their four freedoms
is most easily weaponized?

4.
It’s not like they’ve ever stopped trying.
A prison here, a reservation there;
a blood quantum chant, a hypocrite anthem;
a redline, a voting line, a pipeline, a rope;
smug worship, suffocating want, cold-back fear;
speaking up is a gas worthy, gun worthy game to them. 

It’s not like they’ve ever stopped trying.
Mask-off sneering at the safety of others;
insistent demands for managers and cops;
churches set on fire, an ape with a Bible
offering fear to the terrified and want to the starving;
a border wall stabbed through the bones of silent ancestors.

5.
Speak of new freedoms now:

freedom from their way of worship — 
how tiring it becomes to hear them speak of God
and show us nothing but the demonic;

freedom from their notion of speech
that makes heroes of their mythic killers
and tell us we never died at their hands;

freedom to want more than what they offer,
to want the return of things that they’ve stolen
and drained of meaning, turning them into mere style;

and as for freedom to fear? We see them holding that now;
gingerly, at last seeing how it feels (a little) not to be
in full hard control of their own story.

I’m supposed to be
punching a Nazi right now
but I can’t open the door
to go out and find one.

I’m supposed to be tearing down
a statue right now
but I can’t keep my grip on anything —
rope, stone, life.

I’m ashamed of the illnesses
that keep me from standing
and walking and breathing
with the armies of the righteous.

I’m tired of starting every sentence
with “I.” I am trying
to decide how to matter
without myself mattering the most.

To slip into the river
of the moment and vanish
may be all I can muster.
To disappear. To not leave

a damned thing behind
except anything someone better
could use. I would like to be
of some use, even if it

requires my absence.
Let there be an axis without me
upon which new things may turn.
Let the turning

pass me, let the passage
be swift enough that
I vanish quickly from view,
slow enough

that by the time you come back
to where I was,
there’s nothing of note —
not a statue,

not a bloody eye,
not a handprint on a rope.
Take what you need from me
and let me go, let me go.

I will be broken
by the demise of
this country, 
of course. How could
I not be — it made me.
I can only modify what I am
just so far — cannot 
transform entirely. Not now,
not this late. 

You tell me,

of course you can change.
Of course you can shift yourself 
aside of the tumbling 
stones and statues, the smoking
crash of the ruins — you can
survive and even thrive.
You can be something else.

No. I know better, and I know
even more than better —
I know a limited amount of best.

Best for me
is to stand open handed under
the looming wall of the thing
that was built for me and those 
like me and catch the rubble
as it begins to crumble,

try to keep it from crushing
the ones without safety
or a place to hide.

It will take me eventually
but I will be damned if 
I let it take anyone I have
the ability to save.