The boundaries implore us
to keep our heads in the game
and do our jobs.

Keep the homefires burning
but stop short of lighting new ones
if they go out.

We’ll be safe inside
but we should leave a door slightly ajar
for worthy guests. 

Others are going
to try to get in. Remember
that there’s a lot of love here

for when the right ones knock
and want to shelter by the fire. 
As for the rest, that’s what a gun is for.

If you need a penny at the store, take one
from the tray at the counter — but
only one per visit, you common thief. 

Do not mistake 
convenience for generosity.
Pay up or get out or just get out. 

The boundaries come dressed
in dirty white robes that stink.
Could use a thorough airing out.

If you want to live here you have to
respect the boundaries even if they disrobe
and fully show themselves.

We wouldn’t like to see our boundaries 
naked, though. You know they
wouldn’t ease up if they were stripped.

The boundaries thus exposed
would of course look less benign: all crotch,
no knee to bend in supplication. 

Locked in, upright, decrepit, and cold.
Vision out of science fiction or perhaps
a frieze of history fully ossified. 

It’s all you need. You don’t need a future.
The boundaries tell you how it will be
from now on: keep the home fires burning,

keep firing out the windows at the shadows,
keep your resources tight, expect nothing more
than a penny for your thoughts and all the ammo

you could ever need for when the fires go out
and you have to rob your neighbor
to survive.

All you need to do
is listen to understand
that the scales are buckling
and near collapse.
When they fail at last
and nothing 
can be weighed and
the numbers trusted,
will we disagree
on what heavy
and light mean?
Maybe we’re already there.
A stone is thrown
and a child falls to the ground
to lie there unmoving.
The body fell with
a dense thud. The body fell with
no sound, as does a feather.
The stone was huge,
hurled with intention
by someone with great power.
The stone was light, simply tossed,
a great accident deeply regretted. 
Now we’ve got to move the body
and figure out what to do next.
Whoever picks it up
needs to be prepared for how hard
that will be and how far
it will have to be carried
to wherever it will rest
and that lady we used to depend on
to keep the now-useless scales 
can’t help with any of that. 

Blue
or red
but both are  
white as well
as well as  
white as hell:

each built from
shaded interpretation,
then elucidation of
rationale for first mistakes
redoubled in each
subsequent mistake.  

All I want 
is to go home
to this place
of which they both speak
where no one I
have ever known
has ever lived. 

A mystery home
of joy and backslapping,
of setting shoulders in unison
to the common wheel
to pull the bounty on board
forward to
the common feast.

That someone 
has been from the start 
under the wheel
and that the bounty on board
is far from
common to all and in fact
is crushing to many?
Details. A pittance
in the bank of memory.

All I want 
is a home where I can rest
unbroken as I
have never been. Where 
the red and the blue and 
the white over our heads
is a banner, not a shroud. 

The people
cackling madly
while they point and jeer
at what the vulgar old pig
and its brood stole
miss the sharp suited
emboldened criminals
busy stealing so much more.

The people
so insistent on 
institutional justice for what’s been done
miss the need to mete out
individualized justice now
to those doing much worse now.

The people
screaming for indictments
other people need to serve
on the past
miss what they ought to do themselves
for the future. This is why

the people
cheering so loudly
for a well done speech
miss the sound
of switchblades snapping open
behind them in the crowd,
of weapons being switched
from one-hit wonder
to rock and roll. 

behold
the mad construction of 
these politicians’ hairstyles 

sculpted to hold
a hard crest like 
a cruel dragon or cold raptor

or left loosely spectacular
as wild as some 
indecent architecture 

what you see is the result of a devil
running its hand through
early on in their lives

tousling their pelts into flags
saying “don’t ever forget
you’re my special boy”

and they don’t

You have been born
into a palace. 

Carved into
the walls of the palace

is an equation
that is itself a palace 

all its own, a palace
made of directions

to enter a farther palace
beyond all mathematics

where you can live forever
instead of staying 

and eventually dying
here in this first palace

where you are only
allowed to be either

spectator of, or specter for,
the immortals inside the

palace of math, the ones
who have figured it all out

or were born into it;
that’s all they will ever know

of you, your struggle 
with numbers,

your mad scratching
at the walls trying to 

figure out how to have
what they have.

You are to them
either specter of the disastrous

life outside, or spectator for 
the luxury of being inside, 

and while you do the math
to figure out how palaces

may be entered by command or
fortune or breach, they keep

watch.  There’s math
to be done on their side too:

the simple arithmetic 
of how to raise the walls,

no matter how close
you or anyone may get

to solving for
the key,  for zero;

for the red white and blue
on the other side of the x.

Hard, too hard:
the punch down
once again. 

If we mean 
to stop this,
we must punch up 

and not with words
alone, not with boycotts
or shame. 

Punching up
requires
punching. They know

how not to hear,
how to drown our
voices. It’s the base

under their
whole monumental
world. To break free

will demand
breakage. The less
we accept that truth

in the name of 
peace, the more they will drive us
before them with their

punching, slashing war.
To punch back is
to admit that war

is upon us. To punch up
is to admit we may have no choice
but to steal back weapons

they have stolen in
punching down always, 
snatching up our strength

and calling it their own
as they have from the beginning
of what they call history,

the time we know only 
for its endless hammering 
from above.