Given the nature of
martyrdom and how it
leaves a piercing where
a person once was,
I shall choose instead
to sit by the river and 
be whole. 

Given the nature of
soldiering and how in
the fog of war a soldier
moves from aiming at
an enemy to simply 
trying not to be one,
I shall choose instead
to sit by the river and
be whole.

Given the nature of
being here and part of
the Machine Of The End,
no matter how much one
tries to step away from
it and make it stop,
I shall choose instead
to sit by the river and,

unable to be whole,
at least become still
and less present for
my role as a cog. 

Curtain up.
A lone figure stands 
stage left. 

At once, you
begin classifying: 
Male. White.
Fat. Old. 
Badly dressed,
uncomfortable,
and so on.

Maybe you’re wrong?
Who cares?
What you don’t know can’t
hurt you as long as you
are just watching, after all.

What you don’t know
shouldn’t trouble you.
You paid to get here.
You paid for the privilege
of deciding plot and character, 
set and theme…

The scene turns.
You see that it was all done
with complicated lighting:

he’s not white;
those clothes
are better than you thought;
you’re clearly projecting discomfort 
where there is none —
he seems completely at ease,
looking right at you without a word.

You’re pissed off — after all
you pay the players’s to play,
and if they aren’t playing 
what you paid for or thought 
you were paying for,
that has to be on them.
That has to be a mistake.

They don’t seem to be playing.

No wonder
you’re shifting in your seat.

You are completely
unsettled after you thought
your settling was over
and done with

and there’s no indication
from the action on stage
when the curtain
will be coming down.

Here they are:
the fruits of 
our long and dirty labor

falling from their trees,
hitting the ground as rotten
as the heartwood that fed them.

When they break,
they will split, expose
their mush, stink.

It’s up to us
to rake them all up,
burn them, salt the ground

where they grew,
cut down sprouts,
end this. Of course

there can be no promise
that no missed seeds
will fall to the ground

to grow again
into a poisonous
stranglehold

on what we hold dear,
but we must put hope aside
as a luxury until

we’ve fulfilled the hope
that those who came before
put into us. This 

is our job.  These 
are our fruits, reeking
of us and our inattention

and lax oversight. Until
we atone and set our garden 
right, what right do we have to hope?

A thick blanket of chaos
falls upon the holy fires
consuming our city on the hill,
seeking a way to extinguish them;

we wake to mouthfuls of
robin feathers choking us
as we struggle in a bath of scalding air,
tortured by unbearable skin; we strip ourselves

of all objects metallic right down
to ancient fillings in our teeth;
we shift our church altars to the worship
of ice; we love each other from afar

in an effort to stay unmelted; watch
our unknown neighbors swell
with superheated air and rise,
sky lanterns celebrating immolation,

falling to earth in unknown places,
setting new fires in distant towns;
we can’t bother with those screaming beyond us;
we can’t bother to pick the stems

of those feathers from our mouths so
we swallow them as we do so much
else, knowing they will pierce us
like our bigotry from inside our deepest guts,

setting us to bleed boiling 
into our farthest crevices; a thick blanket
of chaos like a wool combed with spikes and 
the nails of dying children; in all this

the only hope left is that we drown soon
or suffocate in the steam of a rising ocean
that will bring the birds back in with it;
swooping over the last scraps of the old

conflagration, their feathers
coated in both mourning
and morning, exalting
as they grieve that our flesh

is no tender feast,
that we’re roasted to leather
as they swoop, seeking places
to nest in the wreckage

of our city on the hill.

A revolution will only come

when our children can kneel
among trees and remain still
as they are pelted from above
with falling acorns, nuts, fruits,
and cones, chanting the beat
of the earth upon them.

It will come when
they can kneel on shore,
shivering, soaking
in the rush of surf, shouting
the ecstasy of the sea upon them.

It will come when they can kneel
before each other,
look into broken eyes
both like and unlike their own,
saying nothing, rising
to embrace their opposites
and weep in their arms.

It will come
when they can
disown us utterly. 

It will come
when we are unable to stop them
from stepping away from us
toward the greater good.

It will come
when they fail us more joyfully
than we have failed them.

Aren’t you tired
of living on crumbs?
Aren’t you tired
of fighting for crumbs?

Of waking up 
after three hours’ sleep
and lying awake 
until morning?
Of rising and aiming
your heart at a job
that takes all you’ve got
then returns a few scraps from
some folks at a table 
you won’t ever see
that hangs above you
like a solid cloud —

aren’t you tired
of waiting for crumbs?
Aren’t you tired of 
living on crumbs?

Of hearing three words of praise
for your being and doing
for every four hundred 
you hear in rebuke?
Of seeing the horizon
as some kind of carrot
to keep you running 
with the stick right behind?
Of becoming the person 
you dreaded you’d be
when you thought the horizon
was a sweet dance away?

Aren’t you tired 
of scratching for crumbs?
Aren’t you tired
of living on crumbs?

Here comes day
and then night
and then day
and then night
and every hour
falls into gray
till you can’t tell the difference
anymore

Here comes something
falling from the table
One atom of sleep or
one atom of comfort or
one atom of peace or
one atom of how to get by

And just as you catch it
It melts into memory
Then it grows in your memory
That’s how you survive
By turning those bits
into magnified moments
Turning those moments
into amplified stories
Fantasies of joy
you claim to believe
and try to believe
and want to believe — 

A whole culture feeds that
even while it bleeds you
Makes it hard to get past it
and realize that
it’s the dark of the day
and the dark of the night
at the same exact moment
and it is every moment…

you know you are starving
though you can’t admit it — 

and aren’t you tired
of living on crumbs?

Aren’t you tired?

In most overheard remarks
on this first frost
is a sense
of saudade — a sweet sorrow —
for an ending

when one could instead look forward
to the dying off of weeds that have been
strangling the yard and air
with gnarled vines and snarling
pollen,

or to the cooler, cleaner
air and light pouring through
branches now clear
of leaf clutter so one can see
what can no longer hide
as easily. It’s true that soon

shrouds of snow will follow, but for
a few weeks this naked clarity will 
offer more opportunity
than was available in the dank 
and overgrown summer;
do not forget that this year
there is war
and this is the season

when enemy and ally alike 
come into open view,
when battle lines
are drawn,
when the fight
truly begins.