New Poem.  (With a nod to Federico Garcia Lorca.)

My friend, I confess
I have grown to love reds
more than your preferred green.

I adore a sky of red mist,
a voice of red words,
a hard red answer to power;

I can understand a red blossom
on the chest 
of an unjust man;

can overstand a sacred and scarlet tide
surging upstream into a corrupt city
from the harbor.

It is a fine sad romance to be
in love with and to court
what can be found in blood,

to dance a deep song with blood,
to examine one’s own hands
for blood without ceasing,

for to be comfortable with red
one must see the ghost of red
everywhere it once was.

My friend, I want to trade
your spent bullets for my poppies,
my poppies for true bills, 

true bills for no more need
of any bills. My friend, I offer you
the red stag handle

of my knife, the wet ruby line
on the edge of my scalp —
what peace will you trade me

for these?
These reds
have led me to you

and your stance
above the bodies of those felled
by your green. Red, it’s my own red

I offer to spill as I seek
an end to this trade; this is why
I call you my friend, my friend;

I call past red and green
to you — to you I offer my hand,
my red for your green.

New Poem.

A roll is being called
in the streets and the 
halls of power.

The politician sniffs at it
and proclaims
that “some people cannot cope
with the enforcement of the law.”

She sees coping mechanisms
in her untroubled sleep:

there is unquestioning obedience;
there’s bow and scrape;
there is a knowledge of one’s place;

and of course when all fails
there are bullets — smaller
than close attention,
less complicated
than listening, more direct
than ideas, smoother 
in the moment
than her words.

She steps away from the podium
into blood seeping up
through the excellent carpet
that was selected because of how well
it once hid all those stains
she seems to believe
dried up long ago.
Tries not to slip in it.
Fails.  Blames this
on the distracting sounds
of the roll being called.
Fails again. Nearly falls.
Keeps trying, trying,
trying

to cope.

New Poem.

“We have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ Police Department…We will act accordingly.”
– from an NYPD internal email, Dec. 2014.

It is wartime now,
exclaims the badged blue army.
We stand up. We hear:

it is wartime now,
wartime — as if before this,
they were not at war.

It is wartime now,
as it has been for more years
than there’s been a flag.

It is wartime now.
They want to call us killers.
We will not be moved.

It is wartime now —
our weapons are the strong tongue
and the sharpened eye.

It is wartime now —
smokescreens, deceit, far flung lies;
what we say cuts through:

wartime now?  Let us
see how that differs from how
we’ve lived until now.

New Poem.

May it be said of us
when the time comes to write history
that we crossed the bridge
we were faced with.  We crossed it

though it was not the bridge
we’d hoped for — not the genteel arch
over a clean and narrow stream
with little but discomfort to face if we fell from it,

and not the steel artifact of a golden past
teeming with millions crossing it with us;
for us instead that archetype of peril,
swaying and crumbling one slat at a time,

with so many working to kill us as we crossed,
bullets pealing like bells as they struck
the stone all around us. May it be said of us 
that we never turned our gaze

from the other side to the drop below;
that we held onto each other all the way over
and clung as long as we could to those who fell
along the way, and that when we were across we turned

to the task of putting a better bridge
where the rotten one once had hung.
May it be said of us when we are gone
that we did it the way it should always be done.

New poem.

The most elegant part 
of being in a privileged body
is the ease and grace permitted to one
when avoiding difficulty.  This is not to say

one never feels pain or trauma; such a body
does not entirely prevent harsh moments
of injustice or regrettable instances
of sanction and unlawful control.  What it means

is that one can, with less fuss, slip on white gloves
and reveal to those who can offer redress
for such inconveniences the small dirt and flecks of blood
which have adhered to one as a result

of the aforementioned distresses, and 
(one would surmise) thus compel those redresses
along with appropriate apologies
from the offenders. One must see this privilege

as a deserved elegance, as fine as china
on the long table, as clean
as the drawn out whistling
of those bombs and bullets used to secure it,

or one risks it being taken away.
The price of having such elegance
in the air you breathe, in the water you drink,
in the ground below your well-shod feet

is to accept it even if you recognize
how others must bleed and die and fight and sob
for their losses in order for you 
to gain.  If you cannot or will not accept that, 

if you find yourself gnawed open
by this wisdom, know that the air
will still be there for you, perhaps colder
and more bracing; the water will still be there for you,

sweeter if scarcer; once you’ve given
the right to such privilege away, the ground below your feet
will still hold you no matter how clumsy you may become,
no matter if you fall while walking the new path.

New poem.

there are people in the streets.
some are dead. some are deadly.
some are on their feet for the first time,
awakening in a time of mirror shards
to revolution in a time of plastic, 
a war in the time of ukulele music — 

this is what democracy looks like.

there are people lighting candles.
there are people lighting candles the size of buildings
and cars. there are people holding circles
and vigils and ciphers, people running
from murk toward dawn then turning back
to face the murk and stand and never crack —

this is what democracy looks like.

there are people rising and people falling
and some of the people rising don’t yet know
they rise, just as some of those falling
won’t know it till they hit the killing floor.
some who rise will rise from sight. some who fall
will shatter to dust and sift away on the wind — 

this is what democracy looks like.

there are people voicing what was once voiceless,
building safety for those once unsafe, draping justice
like a bulletproof cloak on the shoulders of those
who have been judged unjustly
and serving justice to those unjust who have never tasted it,
making it new and now and near — 

this is what democracy looks like.

there are people who say it is best to make it plain:
hands up, don’t shoot. black lives matter.
someone stands with a megaphone in a circle of fire,
asks: what do we do now? and the circle says,
we march. we go. we do what needs doing
and when that’s done, we do more — 

this is what democracy looks like.