It’s a neighbor with a bad car
parked on the street
without plates, the cops
hovering around then having it towed.
It’s the couple screaming at
each other on the sidewalk and
one of them tears a rock out of your wall,
raising it overhead, and now
it’s your concern. Did they screw up
the succulents that grow there,
the hen and chicks? You yell down from
the bedroom window to put it back.
That breaks the anger spell.
They leave after tossing the rock
onto the top of the wall.
You will replace it later
now that all is well and after
the tow truck leaves with the bad car?
It’s almost as suburban out here as it is back home
where high school friends live who say
“the city is a cesspool” and trot around
boastfully shaking their heads at me
from their beautiful yards
where the hen and chicks grow from holes
artfully cut into the sides of barrels
transformed into planters they bought
at the hardware store down the street
from the place where that guy
stabbed another guy in the back of the head
at a lazy evening barbecue a couple of years ago,
an isolated incident among isolated people,
insulated people who choose to turn away.
To those high school friends I say:
welcome to the cesspool
where I see my shit and name it
while you hide yours.
In the longest of long runs
it all smells the same.
It all spills out eventually
just like those tough little plants do when they
bloom, long translucent stems and flowers
drooping out of barrel holes and stonewall cracks,
trying to make the best
of wherever they find themselves.
Tag Archives: political poems
Hen And Chicks
They Are Yelling At Me
I don’t know who they are
but they keep yelling at me:
Enough, enough! What’s with
the moaning, all the doom-poems?
You are sitting in a warm-enough room.
You are still warm to the touch.
Look out the window at that one cardinal.
There’s the woman across the street
starting her Jeep. There’s so much going on
that isn’t the direct result of some tragedy.
Write a damn love poem,
they say. An ice-cream poem,
cool and sweet. A feather pillow poem,
soft and easy to clutch. A poem with
a roar-shaped kiss. A metric ton
of roar-shaped kisses, in fact. Why
the constant scream of pain and
anger at how the worms of money and hate
twist through all our guts
all day and night? Write us
out of that with a love poem,
a bird poem, a stars in your eyes poem
or two or three hundred, Mr. Prolific,
Mr. I Got Words For Everyone, Buddy?
All my poems are love poems, I answer back.
I wouldn’t stand for them if they were not.
I would not be here with them clustered around me
if I did not think they held love within.
The poems with the guns will do what’s right
for love. The poems full of moans are the echo
of wishing for better. Every word
may taste like rocky road
to a parched and bitter mouth.
And why is there roaring at all in these words
if not to speak of love for the world as loudly as I can
in the face of so many teeth and such greedy claws?
They don’t answer. They never do.
I wish I could do anything else but this.
This morning I shall settle at the keyboard
to put flowers upon all the unmarked graves.
It’s not a living. It’s a life.
Shh, I tell them. Enough, enough.
As American As Petting A Bison
Some context for this:
How To Lose Your Pants By Being Dumb
If I were to become a bully
I’d do my business
righteously, historically.
I’d fill my raging belly
with ghost egret flesh,
drink nothing but spectral bison’s tears,
grow horns
the size of a railroad car
and start looking around
for a bison-petting tourist with
jeans and blood to spare.
Watch them run away after trying
to pet me. Thinking
I’m tame. Believing the
schoolbooks they’d seen.
You’d think I’d have learned
about how such behavior
tends to pan out over time.
You’d think that — and you’d
be wrong. This is mild. It isn’t about
replicating their history of violence.
There’s a whole country out there
the wants us lovable enough
to keep on a shelf in the living room.
Someone’s got to set them straight
in the name of survival. Put them
pantsless on the hook
for everything
they never learned in school
or subsequently.
It’s not their fault, you say,
that they bought the myth they were sold.
But it is. It’s not like
they haven’t been told.
Anyway, I’m starting small.
No need to panic yet.
Your jeans
don’t begin to pay off
what was stolen, but it’s a start.
The Mad King
There are very few clues to find
when exploring how
he became this narrow.
His permanent record
barely explains anything
as no one ever felt much need
to put notes in there.
His employment file
describes his mild job history,
annual satisfactory reviews,
merely adequate
bumps in pay year upon year.
Tax returns tell nothing
and there’s nothing of note
in the newspapers of record.
So how he got to
hollering about the “woke mob”
that’s killing him, is a puzzle
when there’s no sign of damage
from anyone in his history.
It all looks pretty clean.
Except for the bullshit
on his tongue, he could be anyone.
That may be the problem: perhaps
he thought he should be exalted
for being so much like
what he’d been told he should be
that when being ordinary and
bland and safe-pale was not enough
by itself to make him king,
he drew a sword on his face
and stepped up and out screaming
for his kingdom.
He makes it up
as he marches along
behind the bulls, feeding.
East Palatine Newspaper Poem
It’s not Chernobyl.
What it is
is East Palatine,
Ohio and it’s big,
it’s as big as miles around.
It’s not nuclear but
it is a big-ass gas burst
with a lot of dead chickens
underneath and maybe dogs
and maybe people but
we don’t know because
what it is,
is embarrassingly
lethal. There’s a lot of
mouths to be sewn shut,
but it is not as silent as capitalism
which right now is busy
selling gas masks and
burial plots and refusing
to look anyone in the eye —
after all it’s not Fukushima;
what it is won’t be washed away
with the next tsunami or
“natural disaster.” As it is
it’s not all that famous yet
and we really don’t know enough
to do anything but ignore it.
It’s not a spy balloon, not a UFO
falling from on high. Just a train
off the rails and a death plume.
Not anything
like a football game.
It won’t be in the headlines
tomorrow. Cross your fingers
and hope it isn’t what it is.
Bring Us The Flood
In some part of The Land
there’s been more rain
than they can handle
but not here, where we long
for rain and pray for The Land
to come back into Balance.
What if this is Balance?
Some say it is and the Land
is behaving as it should.
We are the Fulcrum
upon which the Balance
has come to rest.
Some say, it is what it is. Some say
those words are themselves
the blunt tip upon which
the Fulcrum has come to rest
and the reason the Balance
wobbles like a weak priest
in a confessional, shaking
as he listens to sins in a voice
he knows so well.Too well.
All I know is that the rain
is elsewhere, not here. We
do what we can to maintain
Balance. We shiver or we burn
and tell each other to take hold
and hang on. It is what it is:
the Balance is not in our favor
and unlikely to come to us now.
That’s the nature of Balance:
it settles, eventually, come rain
or come shine. There’s a reason
some say it that way: it is
what it is,
come rain or come shine,
easy come, easy go.
It’s been years now since
we’ve seen rain. Listen to
The Land. Bring us now the Flood.
Things You Can Do Once You Are Dead, Apparently
Appeal
to our
better natures.
Soften public
opinion toward
your parents.
Annoy and afflict others
with memories of how you lived
and died.
Suggest a better world
for those who remain,
eventually. At least
remain
a lesson
on the way there.
There’s rotting
to be done. There are
cheap shots to be taken
at your expense.
Absorb and deflect them
and in fact cease caring
for what strikes you,
as you were unable to do
in your last live minutes.
Lie there until
someone grows a conscience
and replants it elsewhere.
Feed it
on your name
and last words.
Water it
with unruly streams
of your blood and tears.
Fade from it, or do not.
Not for everyone,
not for long years.
A Little Distance Between
More than a little
distance between
me in a car
being pulled over
for speeding or bad light
or something or other
or nothing at all
and the ones
(you know the ones I mean)
who don’t drive away
from being pulled over
for speeding or bad light
or something or other
or nothing at all
I’ve got my head
in my hands
most days when
I sit on the couch
and think about
how the news plays
on and on the same
look at me there with
my head in my hands
as I sit on my butt
I’m a circle a wheel
a stone in a catapult
I just can’t
launch myself
through my TV screen
into the fire around
the scenes on screen so instead
I’ll drive fast and carelessly
into the next city town village over
See what happens — aw go on
Nothing’s gonna happen most likely
Most likely the worst
that can happen is a wreck
and I’ll just be a tragedy
of my own making
The lights will be blue and benign
The tones of the news anchors
will be mournful resigned
In the next life
I wanna be a boulder
no one can find a use for
until I’m hurled a little distance
over the walls of a fortress
I can wait till the next life
for someone else to get justice
One Over
They long to be
elsewhere
People who are not
in their places want to be
anywhere but where they sit
seeming to be
comfortable
Happiness
and ease don’t look
the same on everyone
They long to be
elsewhere and
it feels like my duty
to assist them and help
move them along
to their next place
It’s a sacred duty
We have a right
to move the uncomfortable
to where they belong
and these people
clearly don’t belong
here in my neighborhood
They are smiling but
they look so lost
whenever we make eye contact
They look like they’d be happier
one street over
One town over
One country over
Adjusting The Woke Curriculum
They live for
their children
only through their
bullets.
All they will grow to know is
how to love a bullet and
how to scorn what a bullet
can cut.
They say we’re in a shorn world now,
skinned of warmth and softness.
No learning to be found in anything now
but tales of flame and steel.
So what’s with
that sobbing kid
poking with a stick
at the just killed rabbit in the gutter
in the front of the neighbor’s house?
Must be queer. Must be damaged.
Get him out of sight, root through
his books, then shoot or set fire
to what ails him.
Poison, Venom, Infection
There’s danger
in poisonous lands and water;
simply being there
and breathing
is enough to make you
sicken and die.
There’s danger
among the venomous;
if you know
where to look
and how to armor up
you may walk there but
if you
blow your cover
and your armor fails,
a single sting
may get through
and be enough.
There’s danger
where the infectious
roam free, spewing
plagues and slipping germs
past your defenses when you thought
you’d done enough.
You can’t stay safe inside forever;
you are going to have to leave
the safe house one day.
Down the block, all over the country,
you see houses with trouble flags
and deadly yard signs.
Is the air around them infectious?
Are your neighbors in fact venomous?
Are these signs that the whole damned world
is poisonous and this is what
a mass casualty event looks like as it begins?
Are you enough for whatever comes next?
ICBM
is what
we thought
was most likely
to kill us
when I was
a grade school kid
and why
we believed
it was out of
“stranger danger”
that the End and the Evil
would come
all the news
all the way
through USSR and PRC
to PLO and ISIS
initials that stood for
the Other
till one day
it became as clear to us
as blood
on a forensic slide
that MAGA could kill
without pressing a button
that without
a single ICBM launch
it had been war
against us from back
when it was called
KKK
which I learned
as a kid
we’d crushed or
relegated to history
with a hey nonny nonny
we shall overcome
what we learn
out of school these days
is that nowadays and always
look next door instead of overseas
for the End and the Evil
as your neighbor’s face
might hold
a loaded silo
a bastard flag
an LOL and a J/K
waiting to open
and let the Great Death fly
Good As It Gets
as good as it gets
you living warm
and yeasty fresh inside
a big new loaf
of soft white bread
crust on that bread
light brown almost like
a much-laundered
faded bloodstain
on cotton
sitting in
your ancestral backyard
the sheets smelling sweet
heirloom sheets hung on
old rope lines
grandad’s sheets
you grew up with
washed as clean
as they can get
you cut a slice of that
good fresh bread
slice right through
the crust
lay
mayo
on thick
as far as you know
this is as good as it gets
At The Bar In December
One deep inhale
in the cold and I’m thinking
I need to go back inside
and punch this guy. I’ve lashed out
in rage before, but this is not that:
this is calculation, this
strategic punching I’m contemplating.
I’m following a path I endorsed
long ago and now I’m at the point
where I have to take action
if I believe I’ve done right.
One deep inhale
of the cold and I’m ready
to stop overthinking.
I need to go back inside
and punch this guy. I’d call him out
to the sidewalk but too many would see
the next thing and the next thing
and whatever came after that
and then where would I be: giving him
a chance to prepare, a chance to get armed,
a chance to win? I need to just do
for once what the body tells me:
punch him with as much cold in my hand
as I have in my lungs (after of course
one long exhale)
and then say yes.
that was right. All fear
will fall off me
like broken scales.
Punch him, punch them.
The consequences
are so much gentler
than the consequences
of self-betrayal.
Shooter
I turn to
the monstrous,
fearing monsters.
I’ve become
Animal. Humans
pledge not to,
but too often fail
in their promises.
Betrayal of trust
is endemic among us.
Memory and
documentation
be damned; reaction
is truth. Fear is
health. Who are
those in the wood
or alley that are more
terrifying than I am?
Stand ready, says
the spirit
of the ravenous; Animal,
your time has come.
Take off your watch.
There’s only now. Go.
Dark Matter 