Mission Statement

Our mission is
to act up at public gatherings
to toss stones at the comfortable
to sneer at the television
and afflict the generic
to dance naked in the clean laundry in the great steam room of the world
to get LAID/ to get LOVE /to get NOTICED
to waltz against the knives of war and greed
as they try to cut us loose from the church of our freedom
to look each other in the eyes at 2 AM
to speak like flowers and act like idiots
to write rants missives novels novellas epistles
and advertisements for our huge and tender
egos

to find a child crying alone
and offer a hand
to get an old woman up from her electric rocker
and hear stories of the holocaust
in her lonely patriarchal days
to stop bullets with a single line
and make them over into pencil leads

Our mission (should we choose to accept it)
involves us – all of us – even Bill Gates
(in theory)
in a mass chain improvisation
leading a dance of tongue and cheek
bump and grind
Amos Andy
Sacco Vanzetti
skatepunks riot grrls and anyone else
hurling epics and haiku into the face of bland conformity
it’s rap snapped like a chalkline
to mark the way to the street
a whisper of erotica sliding home
end rhyme as tightly matched as lips
the right words cut and shaped to fit
into white hot bursts
of short sharp verse
and the longline wasted pseudo Beat nonetheless pure at heart stories of pain and gargantuan gothic gallows laughter

Our mission friends is
poetry
and we are on a mission only we can define

so, dig
daddy-o

Listen:
poets in other places and times
have died doing what we do here tonight so casually
They stand at our elbows every time we pick up that pen
step to the mike or
(God Forbid!) listen to one another
so do not let anyone define your voice
Do not wait for a leader
If you want a leader then lead
And many voices will come together in one mission
The way stormclouds come together to make lightning
And when lightning passes it leaves thunder
And one day
they will say the same about us

Punk

someone stripped the emperor
and the sneer became an honest form of speech
and someone who had never twisted a knob before twisted a knob
and someone who’d never bent a string before bent a string
and someone sent a cowboy’s chords to do a bulldozer’s job
and someone let joy out on a rampage
and the devil became a hero
and we forgot the time
but we remembered how to bang things
we recalled the joy of bomp bam boom
whether it was drums or bodies we were slamming
and the radio quaked daily
and the songs got shorter
and the music industry couldn’t get its pants up in time
to get out the door and milk the noise until it died
and someone stuck metal under their skin
and made a memento of the blood
and someone pointed out that there is NO FUTURE
and if there is NO FUTURE there is only NOW
and if there is only NOW there is also NO PAST to hold us back
and everything began to bounce very hard
and everything began to whip around itself
and someone made a magazine and sold it without benefit of bookstore
and someone wrote a poem with reverb
and it shook the colleges down
and someone made an evening gown of sackcloth
and started a religion which began with Jesus dying
for someone else’s sins
and what it was was freedom in the form of a rejection letter
and what it was is what it still is
because someone somewhere
is still trying to find out how far the human soul can go
on three chords tuned to exhaustion
wet sex in a van
the roar of the crowd
and most of all on the joy that comes
when you spit all the outrage and triumph in you into the face of death
as you realize that it’s you – you – YOU
YOU did it
YOU stripped the emperor
and crumpled his vanity
and you did it all by yourself
and when you were done
the gods of the big beat looked down on you
and said in one dirtysweet voice
“hey you kids that shit’s too loud”
and you screamed right back
“there’s no
such
thing”

Conspiracy

The agent who really killed JFK was last seen
at the Dallas Airport buying two tickets to New Orleans
using cash covered with Illuminati flyspecks.
Why two? I can’t tell you.

Surviving Branch Davidians (23 of them)
have been spotted in the upstate New York compound
of the Rockefellers, all of them having been surgically
to resemble either David Duke, Doris Day, or Doris Duke — whichever comes first.

STOP LAUGHING AT ME! It’s not like I’m the Antichrist. No —
the Antichrist this week is a small time hood who runs a combination gas station
and orgone generator on the outskirts of Las Vegas,
where he takes his orders from the disembodied brain of Howard Hughes,

who is in fact Hitler, and always was.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the proof:
photos J. Edgar used to keep in his garter belt —
I downloaded them off the Web.

STOP LAUGHING AT ME! There is an order out there, and I need to see it —
just like Elvis did. Now there was a man who knew the truth —
and that’s why the mothership had to come down and scoop him up for home.
You didn’t believe that toilet story, did you?

Once upon a time, there were gods and goddesses,
and if we wanted to know who was pulling the strings
all we had to do was look at the nearest mountain top, or sacred grove.
Nowadays we can’t even see the strings.

But I know there are strings,
and I know someone’s hiding them —
there have to be strings
leading back to the reasons —

because there must be a reason
my brother got sick in the Gulf,
and there must be a reason
why no one will tell the truth about that —

and there has to be a reason
why good men who served their country
have to live in cardboard boxes
and scrape their survival out of this country’s skin as if they were dirt —

yeah, there’s a order out there,
and that is why I sit on my front porch, cradling my son and my gun,
watching for the black helicopters. And don’t call this paranoia.
I know about paranoia. This is not paranoia —

this was born on the Trinity Site, this was raised in Roswell, and this learned to walk
by forcing its legs against the flood of blood
that has poured from the secret motives
behind this century’s wars.

So –
do you still
feel like
laughing?

The Radioactive Artist

The radio today
brings me the story
of an artist who builds sculptures
from radioactive waste.

I sit back amazed
and listen to a doomed voice
in full cry
on behalf of his art.

He has
his Nuclear Materials Handler license number
tattooed on the back of his neck.
He has the stuff of his every sculpture in his blood.

He builds his work
from the scraps and tools left behind
in the wake of nuclear weapons manufacturing
and keeps them in a gallery

that will be off limits to critics
for 10,000 years.
Someone has to do this, he says.
Someone has to make these things beautiful.

He says this
and the energy of the earth rises from below his feet
and the energy of the sun closes around him like a sphere
and he stands at the center of our modern storm.

And he will die, sooner rather than later,
having made art that no one will ever see
and considering it a privilege
to have done so.

And his art —
the sculptures
I will never see?

They made me quit my day job.
They make me want to fly low
over volcanoes

to feel that heat
and bring it back with me
on a legal pad.

It makes me weep
to think that I’ve wasted so much time –
to think that we’ve all wasted so much time.

DIY

She burns sage at the root of her favorite tree
and calls herself priest while in town they call her slut and worse
because she dares to love who and what and when she wants.

On the nights of the full moon the men and the women of this town
come out and circle her stucco walls.
There is something in there they need.

And out there, in front of the white church, on the green lawn, right under the nose
of the fat pastor, she dances without bending a blade of grass.
God finds her agreeable.

Over there, in front of the frat house, two men kiss —
and the dangerous drunken boys inside see it
and decide to do nothing — this time.

That’s a start. Two have begun
to be comfortable making public
their own sacrament of the infinite.

And my grandmother sniffs,
” ‘ Elderly’ is such a spindly word.
The legs of that word do not begin to support me.”

She traded her electric typewriter for a laptop
two years ago and writes the definitive poetry of our age
between the innings of Cubs’ games.

She will not stop smoking. Ever.
Swears that if she gets to heaven to find the clouds are posted,
she’ll find another place to light up.

Friends, the arms of God are nearly endless —
but there you hang out at the end of one of them,
like a finger on a vast hand.

All that’s asked of you is that you touch the earth
and transmit what you feel
back to the Heart.

So — make a living.
Make a life. Make love. Make art.
Adorn this world with the work of your soul. But —

Do it yourself. No one
can do it
for you.