silence to you,
voice of the end.

silence, I command you to 
silence, to your ears
opening wider than your maw
of a yapping face. 

silence I tell you,
silence from your
cottonmouth brain,
your self-important
hemlock breath,
your falsely righteous
gas chamber
world view.

free speech,
you scream, give me my free
spew. as if you’ve ever
paid for any of what you’ve said.
as if there’s ever been 
much if any cost to you
for being this loud.

I hear what clatters 
out of your body
and I cannot call you
by your given name
and feel clean. 
you don’t sound 
like a real person. you sound
possessed, or gone
from your shell, supplanted by 

this stench. this is not sound
you are speaking. this is
odor. this screams in all my parts
that hold history. memory

of hangings, massacres.
of camps and reservations.
of the rule of thumb and 
the machinery of rape. the land
drained. the people drained.

if I were to give you a name 
it would be cristoforo colombo.
it would be bull connor.
it would be aristotle.

if i had magick I’d say:

silence, then.
silence, you voice of 
end all, be all, screaming for 
obedience to the dead and gone.
I bind you to silence.
I cast you into it.
silence, I say.
you are now made historical,
caught in the pages of a book
which can be closed upon you.

we will always know you’re there.
we just can’t know you now.

A day comes
when an army of wisps,
ghosts in foul clothing,
rises from graves
marked and unmarked,
floats to the White House.

Suspended there, impervious
to attempts to dispel it,

the army chants as one voice:

you killed us.

The President
behind the curtain,
trembling,
tries to deafen himself.

Close your eyes
and tell me:

who is in the army?
Who is the President?

A stage set
for a performance
of an obscure play
based on the life cycle
of a psychoactive fungus.

It is called 
“The Man
Who Could Not
Remove His Hat.”

We are still trying to decide
how to read the script
as it’s in a strange cipher,
and no one has a clue.

It looks a little like
an Egyptian code,
says someone from wardrobe —
which makes sense,
as they were obsessed with hats
in the days of the Ptolemies.
Cleopatra was known
for her lamb’s wool toques
decorated with the skins
of asps, hence the myth
of her demise by one;
in truth she died of hat poisoning,
died young but toasty warm.

No, you’re wrong,
said an understudy
with some mystery in their
face as if they had been
somewhere far away for a long
time and refused to think about it —

that code looks like something
I learned in high school
where we studied things like this
to prepare us for — well, for
life where we were. My uncle
in particular was skilled in such things
and he’d buy me beer when I was young
and help me with my homework,
letting me sip from his flask as well,
saying, I should keep all this
under my hat if I wanted to, well,
live where we lived back then. 
But it’s not one I’ve seen. Not one
I know. It just looks like one.

Several of us are beginning to rethink
our roles in the play. Most of us
have taken off our own hats now,

except for the lead who pulls his down farther,
tighter, over his forehead, down to the bridge
of his nose; a broken fedora in mottled yellow,
a damaged face under felted wool,
and when we step away to form a circle
around him, the lights come up 

and we are in a full house
with no idea how to act

but there are flags flying and 
secret knowledge wafting,
anthems and trumpet flourishes
as the Man Who Cannot Remove His Hat
rises above us, above us all;

hail, hail, cries the audience in the dark,
and for those trapped on stage
nothing stays real
for more than a second
at a time. 

So much to apologize for
and soon enough,
no one left to accept the apology. 

No one to care
about good intentions
or consciousness of impact. 

A shrinking crowd
in the graveyard waiting
for this funeral to end

so they can go home
and wait for the next one,
whispering “sorry” the whole time

until they are silenced
and buried. When the last one
is ready, they’ll say it a final time;

after, the word will no longer exist
and the long stubborn dialogue
between us and our damage

will be over at last. It will be
a relief; it may serve 
as acceptable penance.