as well as supplied the necessary
ingredients for Saddam’s weapons
of mass destruction including the gas he used
against the Kurds and the helicopters to transport it
and that Bush and his cohorts including his wife
never mentioned the ways the Taliban oppressed women
or Saddam killed his own people until it was convenient politically
and still don’t talk about how daddy’s cohorts and business
partners in Saudi Arabia have links to Osama and his movement
and oppress women and all the other atrocities
dictatorships and oligarchies have been committing
with our government’s blessings
throughout our history?
You call this poetry?
[ . . . ]
Aren’t we all gonna die?
Are we obsessed with the denial of that reality?
As a kid did you, like I, feel
you owned death, like a furry little pet
sitting on your shoulder, and any time you wanted
you could turn your head and see it, or kiss it,
or pet it, or remind yourself how close it was,
but in truth, you thought of it rarely,
more frequently of everyone else’s,
because theirs seemed more imminent
even though back then you felt it
breathing on your neck in reassurance?
Or is that just me because I’ve seen
a lot of people pass, or die, as you might say,
from one thing or another, including my mother
in a way that seemed unfair and certainly
unnecessary and arbitrary and cruel?
But what death isn’t?
Those I remember that were no surprise,
though devastating anyway in their
now-you-see-me
now-you-never-will-again
finality?
Is that why now it’s life I’m obsessed with?
Or is that because when I watched
the second plane crash into the second tower on TV
a thin blue tube hung from my urethra,
attached to a clear plastic bag, the remnant of a
cancer operation the week before,
unaware an old friend was on that flight,
at that moment incinerated,
a woman who was kind to me when
she didn’t need to be?
How many people have died
before you got the chance to tell them what you meant to?
Does it seem there’s
not enough
sometimes because it is
too much?
Haven’t I said and written more than once
that poetry saved my life?
Did it for you?
[ . . . ]
Isn’t it true the world hasn’t been easy for a long time?
Wasn’t it once?
Weren’t there kids—little
girls in dresses with
skinny legs and bare arms—
and boys too shy to make
as much noise as the others—
under street lamps—out
late, because it’s too warm
to go to bed yet—and
nothing good for kids on
the radio anyway—
and nobody really afraid of
anything too strange and
disturbing to threaten their
hopes for more evenings like
this?
Wasn’t
the world easy
once?
Wasn’t that because we didn’t know
and maybe didn’t want to
like my nephews and nieces don’t
today, as they sail away to foreign ports
called up in the reserves or on the active duty
they see as a way out of the confusion
of a working class that thinks it isn’t,
or that class doesn’t matter, at least not on
the talk radio they listen to?
Is there no other way for them to go?
Isn’t that all they know
despite my talks and books and e-mails?
Don’t they say it worked for me,
it’s how I first got out into the world?
When I try to tell them why they’re wrong
to believe their leaders and the right-wing
corporate radio pimps, isn’t it difficult for them to
see, as it was for me, when I used the GI Bill
to attend a university that filled my head with information
that made me dizzy, made me feel crazy,
made me feel alienated from all I’d known
and grown to love the further away
I got from it?
[ . . . ]
Am I saying
the gang who tried to permanently eliminate Jews
and Gypsies and queers and the retarded and
deformed and more is what our troops and
their commanders replicate in our name?
Or am I saying war brings out the best and
worst of—but haven’t you heard all that before?
Aren’t your souls and hearts as sore as mine
from all the confusion and obfuscation and distortion
and repulsion of what others do to others
in the name of having been done to us?
Didn’t our government use the same tactics it
deplores Saddam for?
Didn’t we try to be honest?
But didn’t the truth keep changing on us?
When I was a kid, didn’t they teach us that
“Uncle Joe Stalin” helped us win the war?
When I was a man, didn’t
Ronald Reagan remember scenes from
war movies as if they really happened
and he was there though he was in Hollywood
the entire time making movies he remembered
as reality?
In the light of his later disease
don’t we understand that?
Don’t we understand everything, sometimes—
or once?
Is this the way we count the time to go
to get to where we know it will be all right for us again?
Or have we walked through the door to the future
and found ourselves on fire before we can see
the flames and what remains and what must go
is all these fools are fighting over when they pose
as people-in-the-know on where we all have been
and might be going?
Does it matter where we are or the color
of our skin or religion of our ancestors or is that
incidental because what’s fundamental about these times
is the way the long hot Summer starts in Winter
one unexpected day and then, say, turns up in Spring
for more than a week, or peaks in Fall
when all we want is a breath of fresh crisp air,
the kind we find some mornings in the mountains
or the North but not as many as before,
before the earth became a living/dying litmus test
of our deceit in dealing with these tired times
when even trees are gasping to survive
and they’re the ones who keep us alive?
How much do the changing weather patterns
over Afghanistan that caused the years of drought
that impoverished the country that embraced a Taliban
solution to their problems have to do with lives lost
and the other costs of 9/11?
What legacy do we end with?
Too many CDs and DVDs and not enough
of what it takes to keep us all from baking in the long
hot Summer of a race’s demise despite the seemingly
old fashioned winter we�
�ve just survived?
Is it a surprise, that the fate we share is in the air
not in the eyes of some tenacious politician
who pretends he’s one of us?
Was Duchamp correct when he said, only in French,
“Tools that are no good require more skill”?
Isn’t it too noisy these days?
Can you hear yourself think
with all these hard surfaces
reflecting the clatter
of all the shit that doesn’t
even matter anymore?
Can’t we just close the door?
Does it help?
To lock it, bolt it,
reinforce it with armed
guards and VCRs and lipo-
suction and cost reduction
and all the seduction your
memory can muster?
Is it
still too noisy in here?
Out there, is that the smell
of blood and fire in the air?
Has the star that
led us here disappeared
over the horizon, while we’re
still waiting for some-
thing else to happen, as if
we hadn’t had enough already?
Haven’t I too felt like beating or bombing someone
who frightened me or pissed me off because of the way
they looked or acted or seem to be?
Can’t we all just get along?
Don’t you want to believe we can?
But when your friends are turning up with lies
and alibis for all their sadness and depression
and the recession is supposed to be ending
just when your money’s running out,
and they keep smoking and slamming
and jabbing themselves with ways to deform
what they can’t even accept yet,
what are we doing here anyway?
Am I wrong?
Was I always?
Is it not about healing, but about tearing
each other’s eyes out because we don’t
see things the same way?
Is it all about blame?
We’re all alive and depend on the ocean and trees,
and the air they give us to breathe—so what are we doing?
Going to any lengths to rip each other off
and tear each other down?
Has the smoke gone away, or not,
because it isn’t from the flames
but from the fire that only burns
our lungs like marshmallows at the camps
we never went to, too busy getting here,
where there is no air we can’t see,
and the fee for being cynical, like I’m feeling tonight,
is to get up tomorrow and fight my way into a breath
I can remember before this war on all our simple
dreams of harmony got started?
Aren’t you feeling brokenhearted too these days?
But not like you lost a lover,
like you’re losing the sustainers of your soul and very breath?
Can’t we do something about it?
Can’t we all just get along—
as in people and trees and animals and seas
and the breeze that will someday stop if we
don’t start letting it all go—or never stop—
the hurt and the hate and the need to forget it
with stuff that just adds to the noise and pollution?
Isn’t there only one life and one problem and one solution
from the streets to the elite?
Don’t we all have a seat
in this universe we share?
Is ours now at the feet
of the oil oligarchy running
what once was our home?
You call this a poem?
Didn’t they
used to say
“the best things in life are free”
when they meant
the air and the trees and the sea?
But we know
better now, don’t we?
When death is no longer imaginary,
doesn’t it all seem like poetry?
Or—is that just me?
SWING THEORY
(Hanging Loose Press 2015)
BEFORE YOU WERE BORN
I could memorize my poems
and declaim them from stages
in avant-garde spaces and
coffee house traces of
somebody else’s ideas
and call it performance art,
but I already did that
before you were born.
I could put them on stages as a one-man show
or in the mouths of pros and blow you away
with the passion story of my life
and call it avant-garde post-modern
deconstructivist language theater,
but I did that too, when you
were still in grade school.
I could live on the streets
sleep in abandoned buildings
drink cheap rotgut
take whatever drugs are offered
and tell you to go fuck yourself
when you tell me to give up
the life of a poet and get a job,
but I already did that
before you were a gob of spit
hanging from the lip of
Charles Bukowski who had a
nice secure job at the post office back then.
I paid so many dues for the life of
the poet I lived, I once nailed all my shoes
to a board and called it art and then
tore it apart so I could wear them again.
I suffered, I starved, and so did my kids,
I did what I did for poetry I thought
and I never sold out, and even when I did
nobody bought.
I could memorize my poems
and declaim them from stages in
avant-garde spaces and coffee house
traces of somebody else’s ideas
and call it performance art,
but I already did that
before you were born.
c. 1980
BIRTH/REBIRTH
Here he is,
emerging
from
his mother,
head first,
face down,
neck
strangled by
umbilical cord,
her holding him
there, his body still
part of hers,
in her,
head and neck free
of natal confinement,
out now,
in the world,
as the midwife
struggles to remove the cord:
“Just hold him there, don’t push,
hold him hold him”
and damn
his eyes open,
wide.
He lifts his
head, takes
a look around,
cranes his enwrapped
neck to see
fur ther to the sides,
lifts it
to see
more of the ceiling and lights
and then
directly
into your own eyes
with
a profound
and deep
meaning
you understand instantly
and completely
but could never
articulate.
And then
the cord is free and
“Okay, push”
and she emits a mashup of
grunt
and growl
and yowl—
and whoosh
he’s one of us,
his eyes still open,
just looking,
seeing what there is
to see,
&n
bsp; a miracle embodied.
Our seats in the universe
shift,
to make room
for him
at its
center,
rather than us,
or you,
or anyone other than
him,
for now,
and possibly
always,
or
the always we’re allowed.
Look at that river,
those trees,
this way of
moving information
and ideas
around,
between,
among—
How will it effect him?
How does it?
Can he drink that water,
swim in that
stream,
climb that tree
or cut it down?
Where is it all going?
Or are we?
He’s with us now,
and so is she,
and them and
all of us and
how
can we include that in
our choices,
our ways of
moving forward,
or not,
staying put,
going back
to where it all begins,
or doesn’t.
How big a spirit
does the universe
embody?
Embrace?
Project?
Be?
And we?
What are the
connections?
Interpretations?
Resolutions?
Mysteries?
Our eyes open,
or not,
hearts
and minds
more importantly,
as we
stand up
for what is possible,
the infinite,
the finite,
the real
and surreal,
the answers posing
as questions,
as they always do.
More births,
more universes,
more shifting
perspectives,
more undenying,
more unlying,
more retrospective
understanding.
Oh,
this is tomorrow,
now,
and
he is among us
until he isn’t,
as are we,
and she
and all who
accept
the eternal delight
of
inevitable change,
inevitable
containment of every
opposite,
of compliance with
the universal
laws of creation
and destruction,
up and down,
good and bad,
old and new,
the future and
the past,
all stranded,
with us,
and him,
and her
and them,
here,
in the eternally
unfolding
now.
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