A well-schooled 
experience of poisonous
double talk would suggest that
if one controls 
the language, one then
controls the thought.
Science-based, evidence-
based conclusion: if not true
then why do we believe in the 
rarity of diamonds? why 
advertising, sloganeering, 
marketing, speechwriting?
We are as vulnerable as
our ancestors, curled
into word-coated wombs of
belief as tightly as any fetus,
stuffing our entitlement
into spaces too small
for us to feel comfortable
holding our tongues for long.
Let them try to chain down
this diversity of song. Let them 
forbid “transgender” or any other:
we will spring out in a birth
of allowance, saying all the 
words at once: revolt, ignore,
engage, detach, disrupt,
resist.

It doesn’t feel as good as it used to
to breathe in this country.  

I used to fill myself with good air
in the mountains now and then

and head for the ocean on other days
to draw in as much as I could.

I’m so busy running now from morning
to morning, through mourning and grief

and rage, that my memory of the air
comes only when I stop, briefly, short

of breath.  I chop out little gusts of the past
and take in sick gulps of the moment.

I’ve got friends who will say: the mountains
are still there, and they will cure this, and others

who say there’s an ocean and a sky above it
not far away and you can suckle all you want

of the atmosphere there and you will be healed;
but when I go to the mountains or the ocean

it’s one long drag, one long inflation
before I fall back wailing.  This is

no clean world anymore.
I cannot escape into 

amnesia, somehow. I feel every razor,
every bullet.  Every burning tree, every

cloud of coal smoke or flame from 
a funeral pyre. I choke on how close

and how far it’s all come to settle in me.
The world in my lungs like glass

shards in the agonized air;
joy, shredded, bubbling

as it strangles
on blood.

Looking into 
deep white cold
as a man in shorts
walks, bent forward
at the waist, uphill
into wind’s mouth.

I’m staying in.

I’m not
that man, apparently
comfortable with
how the wind
is blowing. With
lack of heat, 
with danger of
hypothermia. 

Staring into 
deep white cold,
knowing 
I will have to
go out into it
sometime
just as everyone
does.

Knowing
I’m in it even when
I’m snuggled down,
even when I sit back
and worry,
even when I pull
the blankets tighter.

Even this act — this
scribble of fear —

laying these threads of dark
in the middle of 
deep white. Trying
to convince myself I am
dark and hot, not
white and cold,

and deeper
than these lines
on the screen.

Dear Baby Baby,
I’m going to shut up now
after saying I’m sorry;

you must know I lament how
this world is all so very
violent. The sky is violent,
the sea is violent, I am
violent, ashamed of this,
don’t care who
knows it, but I am sorry
and that is peace, isn’t it?
I dare anyone to say it isn’t,

dear Honey Honey, dearest
Sugar Sugar. I am sorry
that when I close my empty hands
they become fists — what is man
except a tree of fists, swinging
like figs on his arms? I dare anyone
to say these fruit aren’t natural and
I’m sorry, sorry I grew this way, but

dear Sweetcheeks, Sweetcheeks,
dearly beloved Ladyfriend, most treasured
Helpmeet, I’m sorry, sorry
you’ve taken all I am the way you have.
Dear Bloom In My Garden, Loveflower
Of My Eye, I’m as natural
as you are, limited, constrained, 
a square of edge and mass in a round world
that contrasts and conflicts and isn’t that
what the good God intended, what
Nature and Nurture intended for us both?

Dearest, you flee me and I’m sorry 
but I’m angry and some words come hard
to the angry and when I call you “Dearest”
I’m sorry it comes out like a war cry but
I am forced to become the Violence I claim to see
in the world and when I call you “Beloved”
you are meant to come as you are and I’m sorry
if it’s not as you’d most desire but I am
sorry, Love, sorry you see me as such a 
disaster but I am at least a natural disaster —

when you say I can learn, Sweetness,
when you say I can change, Dearest,
I’m sorry but I don’t see how
or why.

1.
I came to the Palace.

One of the force
who run the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
to halt.

One of the lackeys 
who haunt the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
to dance.

One of the underlings
who manage the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
to cuddle.

One of the bureaucrats
who finance the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
to pay.

One of the royals
who decorate the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
my name.

The monarch
for whom they built the Palace
stepped to me, asked me
for a light,

then tossed the match into
the debris on the floor of the Palace,
stepped away from the instant blaze, asked me
to cheer as it burned.

2.
I am in flames, as is the Palace, each of us
burning unremarked like a stick
being held in a campfire
by a child who doesn’t know 
the potential disasters hidden
under the red cherry of its flaming tip.

I am here, I cry out, I am here
and burning and the Palace 
roars in time with me as it burns;
no one’s coming, we look up
to the sky-God we’ve both believed in
to drown the heat and are left wanting.

3.
In the flames I think I see the Palace
struggle to rise to its full height
from its knees.

4.
Does this Palace truly labor to breathe,
as my hope and eyes labor to convince me,
or is that slothful thinking?
Is the Palace human at heart or 
merely a structure of human heart
that keeps moving 
merely to battle inertia
or in fact does it not move at all
and all the hope I have
for it rising from its ashes
is misplaced?

5.
Someone who helped to build the Palace
steps to me and asks me
to stand aside
as it burns.

Someone whose land was taken for the Palace
steps to me and asks me 
to stand aside
as it burns.

Someone who was never allowed into the Palace
steps to me and asks me
to stand outside

and let it burn.

6.
In the distance,
the Palace is burning.
Those of us
who burned with it once
but escaped
sit in the dark
and watch it go.

It was just a thing we built once
upon a time.
Let it burn.
Let us burn as well if we must.
We can always build another thing,

or our children can
if we find we can never stop
smoldering.

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.