It’s been a big fat dance
around a long hot fire
but looks like the Man Stomp
is coming to a close

A bunch of Stompers
don’t want that to happen
Start it all again,
they say

(Drill baby drill
Supply the demand
A Man Stomp’s no place
to mention the sun)

Rev up the oil lamps
and the gold maps
Yank us off a haunch
from a mammal

We don’t need to burn it
to eat it
Make it a little edible,
is good enough, they say

And to finish if they hadn’t already
invented birthday cakes
they’d invent one
just to smash on a Girl Face

(Resolution, honor,
acceptance of fate
A Man Stomp is no place
to take a date)

Delicately extract ourselves from the circle
The world outside the Man Stomp is cold
for a moment — then 
farther we get from shouting and banging

boy howdy here comes the big reveal
what they called love didn’t come close to the possibility
and open space potential of what Love really is
A whole different kind of dance

(Sic semper tyrannis baby
Dulce et decorum est
Man Stomp is no place
for a humble request)

They will stomp a while yet
It’s part of the dance
to be unable
to forget

They will stomp
a hole back there
Some things will fall in
and disappear

Maybe they wil set
the world on fire when
their torches fall
as they dance

(Scorched earth to turn from
Bones to rot away
A Man Stomp is no place
for a real man to stay)

I come down the stairs
to see the faces of
my sweet revolutionary friends upturned
as they rise to the morning.

Goddamn, I love and hate them
all at once as I come down the stairs
into their cloud of hope
from my dreamless sleep.

I want to demand of the Powerful
that they see with me
their smiles pregnant with new holidays,
the street fairs waiting to break out when they sing,

how every movement
of every arm
and even every hair
becomes a banner

for a risen nation,
a revolution
for the living, the joyful,
the loyal opposition.

What kind of glory will it take 
to move the Powers to action?
I do not know, but it’s clear that patience,
once a virtue, has no place here today.

Coming down the stairs
from the closed room,
I see smiles,
I hear laughter

and their song and breath and wonder
fling me right into
the world they are making new.
Give them a short track to the Powers That Be

and together they will open up
every blessed door
that hasn’t been opened
in far too long.

We live in thrall to those who have the skill
to make anyone or anything believable —   
magicians of the moment

able to command compelling spectacle 
from the routine and long-established progress 
of second to minute to hour to day. Like heirs of the film moguls

they sit in dim rooms divining the desires of the masses,
cutting and pasting snips and trails of each into collages
that stir us all, pulling the old strings on our puppet hearts

not with fiction but with purported fact.
Get a whiff of their work on the evening news, for instance;
calm yourself to the delicate vocal rumbles

of trained explainers,
fall into drowse at smooth graphics…
then, thrill awake

at how the climax bombs you,
how the coda unnerves you;
the poetry of this created public opinion

echoes long after the channel’s changed.  Think of those
who are paid to knead and bake such things,
those who pull and punch it till it’s swollen

and turn it into something we’re told is
the staff of life, something we’ve always been told
is the staff of life — loaves of familiar bread

flung at our heads as we sit in the bleachers
of new circuses in cheap seats we chose 
without ever leaving the pleasures of home.

Don’t you shudder to wonder
what they eat and how they are entertained
when they rest, when they are safe at home?

Look at that newspaper —

ha, I meant that
newsfeed —

it does not matter.  All that’s left
is to choose the soundtrack
to the future, and it’s

“Meet the new boss…
same as the old boss…”

When I tilt a windmill
at my battered guitar,
when I make a joyful
dissonance of the noise-news,

I change nothing
but I can tolerate the horror
of knowing what is coming
a little better when
my ears join my heart
in bleeding.