I wake up singing
a song about a cowboy
then it changes to a song
about a fireman and then
a song about a gunslinger
and one about a robber
and all the time the real heroes
are fighting the real villains
elsewhere and they don’t care
what songs there are except
“We Shall Overcome” and
something wordless and keening
over the bodies of the dead —

it doesn’t matter whose bodies
they are, or were, just nameless
hunks of dead angels for God
to shake his head at and say
“Go on,” that is, until no one
is left to cheer or sing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Care to dance? I
can’t dance. Feet flop,
clumsy arms, spasm along
to any music, quick or
leaden on or off the beat.

Feel like singing? I
fail at that. Broken notes
delivered in highborn tones
or whispered mistakes
of melody on the line.

Can’t play guitar, piano;
can’t use a drum or horn
to save a life or even sound
an alarm. If you expect it,
you expect wrongness.

It’s a puzzlement == I
am your mistake, aren’t I?
I should have your mark,
your lies, your false steps
toward your own Utopia

embedded within me. I
should be like biting
on tinfoil, just before
the excruciating pain;
I should be waiting to die,

same as you. I
am not, though. Instead
I bang a drum, honk on
a harp, clumsy play a failed
guitar; I crack forth a failing song

and I dance like a bear. I
dance like an army, like a
forest burning in the darkness
outside the towns, the cities
where you sleep.

You awaken to the sound. I
keep going, louder and louder;
the staggering roar of the bear
or the lion, the hiss of the snake
twined within; behind it all

a more enduring song. I
feel, as if it could be a mere suggestion,
the tender whistle of green filtered
up through ashes
into sunlight.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Food, music,
the taste of fresh water
on a long-parched tongue;
these are what I desire
for this is what I deserve.

I deserve to be quenched
as if I am thirst, fed
as if I were born to be hunger
and sung as if I were anthem
and hymn at once.

Ridiculous, you say, 
that I’d long to give up
humanity for such simple
satisfactions as these. But
hear what I’m telling you;

this is how revolutions begin.

Alternative output
is when bombs hit earth
and open up and flowers
cover all.

Or, alternatively,
when olive trees come
to full ripeness in the time
it would have taken to butcher
children’s bodies
and fling the parts widely across hills
where ancient groves once grew.

Alternative output
of this stale algorithm
might resemble a culture
that has forgotten how to fear
any other and has resisted
turning into fodder by bending
from the waist
to see common ground beneath them
and then rising to look into
the other’s eyes
with a steady gaze.

Alternative output
is not falling over for death
but remaining standing
long enough for
the killers and their children to notice
they aren’t extinct and have not toppled
into their history books. 
Staying alive, tossing bombs
onto their streets that will bloom
like prairie, spread like salmon,
turn rubble and the still-standing dead
into sacred space filled with acolytes
of whatever will come
after you have gone.

A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

Handwriting practice.
All the letters you need 
in one easy to remember phrase.

A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

Picture the sentence hurtling
through a field. (Maybe
it’s escaping rocket fire.
Do they have foxes in Gaza?)

It comes across the sleeping dog
and lets it lie there wrapped
in its tight little cliche.  Flies over it
the way your pen never did.

Your pen
had to be precise. No slop,
no blots, no hesitation.

You had to be so careful
when you wrote
back then — every letter needed to be 
a shelter.

If you wrote badly
on the blackboard you’d be
mocked at the very least.
They’d blow you up,
they would. 

A quick brown fox 
jumps over the lazy dog

on its way south. You are
traveling as fast as you can
among the familiar ravening
of the wakened dogs of war. 
Are there foxes in Gaza? Well,
there are now. There are
again. No need
for cursive script to write 
curses. You needn’t
stop to write. In fact,
you can’t. 

A quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog.

I’m up too late.
What good does writing do
in such a lovely hand as mine?
What good am I to the struggle
when it’s so far away?

And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and coupled them tail to tail, and fastened torches between the tails.

A quick brown fox, or rather
a pair of them, screaming,
jumps over the lazy dog. The lazy dog
burns and itself is screaming
like a rocket, like a fighter jet.

Everything is screaming and no one
can write their way out of this,
standing in memory
at old-school blackboards
trying to write a new phrase
but we can’t keep our hands from shaking.

No one is anything other
than a dog waking in terror
or a fox someone else set on fire.