America
wakes me up
in the middle of the night
and wants a drink of water
in its favorite sippy cup
with the “I Voted” logo
on the side.
America
throws a tantrum
when I say it’s really dirty
and there’s fresher water
in this glass, and don’t you
want to be a big kid,
all grown up, and then
you can sleep better?
America
keeps screaming,
“I Voted! I Voted!”
so I wash the grime off the cup
and hand over the cup
and America drinks from the cup
and then I take back the cup
and sneak a sip myself from the cup
while America tucks itself back in
and falls asleep.
I stay up
a long time after
with such odd taste in my mouth,
my eyes soaked
with shame at my lack of faith
and my honest terror
of what I’ve consumed.
I go look at America sleeping,
realize again
that we can’t possibly
be family.

Hearing names,

every one of them
formerly worn by someone 
dead, someone
killed by another, or someone
who perished from
indirect action or inaction.

Hearing names

that don’t sound like yours
until one day they do and you spiral
into the center of a heap
of blood scraps. 

Forgetting you’ve heard those names

until later; sitting in front of the news
feeling nothing because
those names don’t sound like yours
until they do again

and then you turn
it off, because you don’t
want to know, because 

if you don’t know it didn’t happen.

In your sleep you are not hearing
names. In your sexing, feeding, walking,
working, voting, dancing,
you are not hearing those names.

Your life
is built on not hearing those names
even if they rhyme with yours.

Morning.

I’m terrified
of myself.

Last night
I dreamed again
of lead and steel
speaking truth to power,
speaking directly to its faces
and those visions
won’t leave my head
now that I’m awake.
I thought I’d forgotten

that language. 
It’s so ancient, so 

differently civilized.
It hurts my tongue
a little (although a little
less each
subsequent time I test
it against the edge

of the moment, even when 
I can taste blood after).
I am remembering
how to use it
to call up those
ancestors long gone,
those once

so fluent in it
that while there must have been mornings
when they must have risen
to similar terror,

they still raised their voices
of lead and steel
and spoke
deadly truth to their 
enemies

because to hold it back
was to die.

Morning.
I’m awake.
Afraid but compensating,
getting used to 

forming thoughts
from dreams,

translating.

They did it to the sky —
look up at the jail-bars
from their planes and 
factory stacks, cross bars
from bomb craters and 
piles of smoking Brown bodies.

They did it to the earth —
look out upon the jail-bars
of roads and pipelines,
cross bars of damaged towns,
ghost landfills, sick-making farms,
trails of brown Brown blood.

They did it to the sea —
look to the horizon over jail-bars
of diesel spew, acres of death and corpse-fish,
cross bar drift nets
and garbage in patches as thick
as the brown oil sucked from Brown lands.

Don’t ask me
who they are.
You know. 
You nod. You agree.
You consume
and enable. You

look 
into the sky
marveling
at the color
smoke brings out
of the sunset. You

look
across the land
and thrill to 
the ease
with which you can
cross it. You

look
at the ocean
and imagine
yourself a pirate
adrift beyond law
and rules. You

don’t understand 
how they could ruin
a world
that seems like it was made
just to be captured
on a white page.

In order to examine 
all sides of a foul debate
I turned myself inside out

When I was done
I reversed the reversal
but little went back into place

I look the same
except for some weariness
and caution in my eye

but my heart is banging
(perhaps against
some maladjusted rib)

It hurts like a bell
close to cracking
while my gut isn’t easy at all

keeps twisting and poking 
in anticipation of danger
that may be real

or may be a product of
all my contortions to try and be
civil and respectful of despicable men

their crusted ideals
their crooked deity 
their tumbling glory dreams

I bothered to listen
and try to talk
and now I’m withered

and all my innards
are slipping around
trying to keep me

alive long enough
to do something
to make me forget

that I once deluded myself
into thinking that inverting myself
for them

was a courtesy
when in fact it was
a slow suicide

begun in the name of
a civil society
that has never existed

Shut up, shut up,
shut up, shut up.

Red talk.
Oxygen theft. 
Blood mockery.
Beerhall chants. 

Shut up, we said 
to whoever that was
yelling over there.
Shut up, shut up,
we are trying to breathe.

Shut up, they said
to whoever they thought
was yelling over here. 
Shut up, shut up,
we are trying to sleep.

Shut up, shut up,
our fingers are barking.
Shut up, shut up,
they slap at their screens.

Shut up, they said, shut up, 
shut up,
and we said it right back, 
shut up, shut up, shut up, 
shut up.

Shut up, we said
when they said shut up or
I’ll give you a war 
that you won’t soon forget.

Now it’s been said
and they won’t take it back.
Now it’s put up
or shut up, shut up
and put ’em up. 

When they said what they said
they fired the first shots
and when we said what we said
we were dodging the bullets.

When they said
what they said
it was old and terrible.
We’d seen it before

so we said what we said
because we didn’t believe
they could say it again
without being made 
to shut up, shut up;

civility be damned,

we’ve seen this before
and no one seems to think
it can happen here
but it can and it has
and it is and it will
so shut up, shut up,
shut the hell up,
shut the fuck up

and aim
for the mouth.