Splintery enough 
for ya? Tension —
can’t live with it, can’t
drink enough to kill it.
It’s like walking through
blood soup lately. I’ve got
wet legs and famished
eyes. Did you hear the 
forecast? They say it’s 
all over the whole damn
country and getting worse,
every city’s a flood plain,
every town a fire zone,
every road a rain of bullets,
every kid’s a potential orphan
and every parent’s got a wound 
open for grieving. There’s bound
to come a moment soon
where we stop calling it
bad weather and call it climate change,
stop calling it protesting and call it
uprising, stop calling it a great country
and just call it a country bearing up
against splintering, stop pretending
it wasn’t built on cracks to begin with,
stop pretending it’s not inevitable.

Spell it with two guns
and a coat of whitewash.

Spell it with three picket fences
and a wolverine trapped
under a left thumbnail.
Spell it with seven dirty words
and rigor mortis laid thick
between bricks.

Spell it with fifty-seven apologies
flavored with forgetting,
sixty-three apologies
blind to remorse,
one hundred and eleven apologies
offered on a dagger’s tip.  

Spell it original thirteen,
broken five hundred.  Spell it
three-fifths, spell it six-nineteen.  
Spell it nine-eleven; spell it with
a cloud over it, a strained 
flag, a lowered boom.

Spell it with two more guns
and a Nagasaki blister.  Spell it
with moon rocks and cratered
cities, dead kids, dead eyes
dotted with good flowers. 

Spell it with a burr. Spell it
with flanks quivering.  Spell it 
with pink dawn over gray streets
and a boat swift-rocking 
down a snow fed river. 

How to spell American:

with a cauldron. A melting pot
if you prefer. A bullet mold,
a fireproof suffrage, a vote
for steam over simmer, 
a last summer of drowsing bees.

Spell it,
respell it,
spell it,
respell it;

it’s not like anyone knows
the correct way to pronounce it.

They did not imagine
back when they began
that we would still be here
this deep into the future.

It was a failure of imagination by those
who have always exaggerated 
how much imagination
they actually have.

They always believed
that the future was theirs
to corral and segregate,
that they would own the walls

and floors and doors
and locks and bars
forever. They built that way,
they taught that way,

they thought that way
was the only way. Their way
was the highway.  They thought
we would always be

like pavement: underfoot,
smooth, forgettable
as any other necessity
someone stole long ago.

Now that their pavement is
breaking, now that
the roots they thought
they had killed

are pushing hard new life
through it toward the light,
they dare to ask:
who are you to break

so much, block the journey,
question the wholeness
of us?  We respond:
use your imagination,

what did you think would happen?
And when they say nothing to that
and bring out the stale old weapons
and the antique crushing weights

and we rise in spite
of all that and they
are astonished, saddened, cooing
and cajoling and saying there, there,

calm down,
don’t be like that, we say:
use your imagination.
What do you think is going to happen

now? And when they stand there
on their broken ground amid 
their shattered walls and locks
and doors burst open and held open

by the swift and violent greening
of our resurgence, when they say
what now, we will not speak. We will shrug
and turn our imaginations elsewhere.

“To begin with, not all
homicides are crimes.” That’s 
the first sentence I find
when I look up the word
in a legal reference source. “Not all
homicides are crimes.”  Legally

if a person dies at the hand
of another, that’s a homicide and
then a decision must be made
by some lawyer somewhere
about what to do next —

they look
at the body and begin:
this one’s a victim,
this one’s not a victim,
this one deserved it,
this one did not,
this one’s a murder, 
this one’s a manslaughter,
this one, this one, this one…

plucking petals
from bouquets of daisies
laid upon a coffin.

Even if they land 
on there having been a crime,

hoops must then be jumped through
to get to what is called justice:
the hoops are sometimes huge
and hung low
and easy to step through
and the lawyers practically skip on through
and the killer or killers are dragged on through
and there’s a trial
and some one pays, or doesn’t.  

Sometimes, though,

the hoops are small, 
are hung high in the air,
are greasy with lighter fluid  — and swiftly
the flames rise from them
and no one dares to jump through
the hoops or the flames;

the killer or killers
turn from victimizer to victim
and the victim turns
from victim to slug or thug 
and everyone involved bemoans
unfortunate presence in wrong place at wrong time
and sometimes they even call the killer
dutiful servant
or hero.

“Not all homicides are crimes.”
It all depends 
on who hangs the hoops 
and who has to jump through them.

Meanwhile, the petals
that were counted to decide
whether and how the hoops
would be hung 
remain where they fall
on the graves until the wind

pickes them up. They collect
in odd corners in towns named
Ferguson and Baltimore and Baton Rouge
and Winslow and Worcester and 
New York and Oakland
and oh, pretty much

everywhere.  They collect
and decay.  They’ve become sticky
and we are slipping upon them. There are so
many underfoot we can’t help but fall soon,

and if we crack open upon landing,
if we die, will that be
homicide
or accident
or perhaps act of God —

who will count
the petals from our
funeral bouquet, who will decide
where the hoops for that death
will be hung?

They are clearly at the point
of casual denigration, of shameless
spitting upon us as they cannibalize our children,

apparently near the point 
of openly tossing all their copies 
of their own law books into their cross fires;

they are closing the distance to the point 
of admitting they simply adore
the warm ruddy rush from our open wounds,

and are long past the point
of shrugging off every last breath
drawn from among us by their guns.

At what point do we accept
that no vote will stop them
because they have made sure

that they are the ground
upon which the vote rests,
and up or down and yes or no 

are now pointless?

Sign a check
you never expect
to be cashed;
take a stand
somewhere your face
can’t be seen, someplace
safe, warm,
and dark; after all,
you’re nothing like the ones
on the front line.
They’d rather be safe too,
and feeling the same,
but safety’s not for everyone,
even if it should be.

If you
are one of those
inclined to hide, 
you should hide,
even if it’s 
behind them; go ahead,
hide
behind them, but
not so close
to their backs
that they
have to worry
about you; 
they wouldn’t want
to mistake you
for what’s in front of them,
and you wouldn’t want that either.

They got this
without you,

without
you back there
safe and sound
and
breathing down
their necks.

It’s still early.

Still only beginning to be
unpleasantly hot here.

Still looks to be a bad one for the garden
and the people. 

I have a hose with a problem
called a drought.
I have a political lawn sign
with a problem called
a small matter of 
a war in the streets.

I had a little love for many.
I have turned that into
a lot of love for a few
and the rest can shrivel
or burn or both. I don’t have
time for them — there’s
a small matter of a war and
also a drought.  

I had a bet down on getting out of here
before it got too hot
but I’m a loser and a sore one
at that

so now I have a problem
with a drought and a 
problem with a war
and a political sign and a hose
won’t do me much good — can’t
fly out of here on a sign,
can’t keep a battle off my lawn
with a hose, not anymore.

And it’s still early,
or at least it’s still early in this dry heat
of a summer, early in the skirmishes,
early in this last late show about 
problems with drought 
and war and lost wagers
that it wouldn’t come to this,

and not a drop of cooling in sight.

Doomsday tongues 
in broken faces
sing their longing for rain
in this rainless season.

No words or songs alone
can cool this heat, but 
songs come anyway.

In the near distance,
darkness and silence.

Beyond that?