To the people who stopped dancing
after the Twist, after the Frug, after
the Robot, after the Dougie: pick up
what’s left of yourself from the doorman
and leave the club. Why are you here

when there are so many people waiting
to dance? You’ve crowded the floor, 
taken up a lot of space.
No one can move unless they do
a shuffle like yours. So many have

so much wildness to unleash
that this is killing them.
You might have known that feeling once
and you might want to know it again, but
what you’re doing right now doesn’t come close

to the free shake they long to do. Maybe
that’s why you want this. Maybe them dying 
without a leg to dance on is part of some plan
you’ve hatched to get your own rhythm back
but it’s nothing that will stand. So: get off the floor

if that’s all you’ve got. Get out, get
out the door without looking back.
There’s a new crowd waiting.  Stay
if you are ready to move again. If not,
there’s a wind outside. Go be in it.

Whenever they buy a country
they have their names tattooed
all over every open patch.

We lived here before they got here
or got here after the inking up but
our names don’t look like theirs, so 

we have to hide in the spaces 
in the letters, the gap of the upper
“A”, the narrow rooms afforded

inside “D” and “O.” It helps your chances
if you are comfortable
living under a thin sheen of blood.

Hearing of your latest
spurt of hell, I wonder
who will ask the question
that will close your throat
at last.

I wonder if you
will be at a podium 
in the middle of some
hateful, stupid sentence
full of self-referential, self-
serving pablum for you that
will deal terror to so many others
when someone blurts out
the right spell, the right curse
in the form of an inquiry
you can’t deflect, or

will it come from a half-trusted aide
on a golf course
somewhere, mid-swing,
while you’re trying to forget
everyone else and focus on
your own perfection that’s always
just beyond your grasp, or

will it come from one of your children,
checking in on you  
long after midnight as you stare daggers
into the screen light between 
your soft little hands, or

will it come, most improbably,
from yourself as perhaps
a chunk of clot hits your brain
in the right spot to release you
from this unrelenting lust for 
the reverence and squat obedience
of all others. What question will it be

that takes you down, pours you
into a puddle of gray flesh on 
a public floor, terrified as always
but with a fading awareness
that this is what you always wished
for so many others, what you dealt
with so many of your labored breaths,
and now you may meet them face to face?

No one’s certain,
but rest assured,
we’ll keep asking
until we see you fall.

In a New Hampshire
tourist trap cave, confused
in mid-step
about which way to turn
by the dim light,
my hammering chest,
and the sudden rubber
in my knees.

I’m not getting
any younger, of course. No
one is, even the kid behind me
who settles against the wall
with obvious impatience, 
waiting for me
to move again.

I take another second
and grunt myself through
the crevice someone long ago
joyfully named “Orange Crush.”
I think of soft drinks and R.E.M.
and the Denver Broncos and

what if I have a heart attack here?
Don’t know what that kid would do
if I did. I doubt “Orange Crush” 
means the same to him
as it does to me but I’m sure
its meaning would change
forever for him then, becoming
“fat old man expiring before my eyes.”

Fat old man expiring before my eyes,
none of us getting younger, militia flags
on the trucks in the parking lot,
“Blue Lives Matter” T-shirt on the kid,
the Orange Crush in constant redefinition. 

Someone once said, “the personal
is political.” Someone once said to me,
“Not everything is political, y’know.” Someone
once said “isn’t it nicer not to talk politics
and just be happy?” 

I make it out of the cave into 
the light, the view across the valley
into the White Mountains. Someone
named them that, someone who came here
and called them White.

That Someone has sure said a lot of things.

Me? I’m just saying,
I’m suddenly sorry
that was the last cave on the trail.

It was cool in there, and dark, it smelled
as it’s likely smelled since the last Ice Age,
and I didn’t feel like I had
anything to worry about
except dying.

There has been
a bit of a break in the wall.

More like a fissure,
a thin crack.

Something’s
leaking out of it.

It isn’t blood. Not water
or oil or sewage,

those classic fluids
usually found at disaster sites.

It may not even be a 
liquid in spite of

those spreading stains
around the crack

which now seems to be
opening wider and perhaps

that’s a sound coming from it,
a sustained howling or maybe

someone’s idea of a song. Nothing
I recognize from my long memory

of this holiday or all the years
around it.

Something is getting out
that’s been walled up for years.

Maybe something we knew was there,
but which used to operate

from the relative cover of the wall
that’s now cracking.  Something

we knew was there but tried
to forget and now there’s a crack

and it’s getting out and we
preferred it when we could pretend

it wasn’t back there at all. Maybe
the fireworks finally 

shook it loose. Maybe we shouldn’t
have been so quick and lax about

setting so many small fires and laughing
at the explosions which followed.  Maybe

we leaned on the wall for support
too hard and too long.

No,
I don’t have a word
to say
about the latest and 
gratingest
thing said or done
by the latest and 
baddest of the big
bad monsters
we currently live with.

Instead, I want to speak
about mountains,
about the core of the earth.

All my people on both sides
came from the mountains.
In the mountains, you learn
to be silent and watch things
from a distance.

You learn to watch
mountains rising slowly, pushed up
by waves from the core
through the mantle;
you learn to watch mountains
wearing away
under the wind and rain;
you learn how to be silent and wait
for changes that will happen
with or without
your regard;

you learn that even
a cataclysm closes
gently, eventually,
and it all slips back to slow. 

Red core
stirring, mountain
twisting up toward sky,
earth shivering.

Someone, maybe a lot
of people, are going
to die, I know, and

no,
I don’t have a word
to say today about
any of it —

I’m mountain stock.
I stay
quiet,
watch the world seethe, 
wonder 
how many more words
people really need.

I can’t see everything
from here, it’s true,

but I see enough.
What else is there to say
that has not yet been said?
The mountains
are still echoing. 

There are places on Earth
so soaked in hate that

the only moral
thing to do

after finding new places
for people to live

may be to burn every scrap of wood
from furniture

to framing, fill in every
foundation, break up

all the roads that lead 
into and out of town, then

salt the ground into 
permanent sterility. Every day

you hear of places
so poisoned

that they have forfeited
the right to those locations

and instead should live on only
in the nation of infamy,

country of horror
stories and nightmares.

I do not say this lightly,
for I know every town

is someone’s home and
has at least a modicum

of love clinging to it. I do not
know how to make hate

disappear, and perhaps
I have become hate

when I think these things —
perhaps I should burn myself

then have a friend roll
my smoking corpse in salt

and bury me
in barren ground. But

something must happen
and it is hard to believe

that it will not somehow involve
fire and salt.