shit
Listen, we have Brecht
I was going crazy
I picked up my phone
I was talking to Maged
Utopia Utopia
Utopia Utopia
Utopia Utopia
Maged is moving from Seattle
to Atlanta to be closer to his son
I dream of the New Jerusalem of love,
an Eden of sparks from the mouth of the rose cult
The rooster of Midtown cockadoodledoos,
crest shivers Floridian, last bit of cold
in these parts; I am the bold-hearted one.
Tallahassee on the “Dead Mall” Wiki page,
stock market up, earth crash, crypto-mining
the numeral seven like the delight of the godhead.
I smoke and ask my neighbor what he would do
if the government had him on a list of dissidents.
Demon of the windstorm, demon of talons and beaks,
I know you hear everything I sing, two children
huddled together, under the moon,
baby falling from a chariot of wildly shaped light.
What do we make of him? Wander the earth
in search of your brother. Brother, what would you do?
And something stupid takes over him,
“Well we are all on a list anyway,” as he backslides
into his drunkenness, restoration of the neo-Nazi’s
Twitter account and a 2:00 p.m. consciousness-raising
session, I wish I was high instead of inside
my body dragging itself to another action.
First National Women’s Liberation meeting
in Tallahassee, but now I’m drunk, high, and smoking
a ton of cigarettes with my neighbor, the one
who saved me from Hurricane Whatever’s 3:00 a.m. rainwater
pouring through the wolf-eyed tree holes of the ceiling—
then a MRSA infection on my elbow. No one knows
why a hurricane reddens the night sky, no one knows why
the ER doc says, “It’s the dirty water.
It comes from farms, factories, collects
and then dumps down, so here is an IV antibiotic.”
Sat in the ER, cried, but called no one,
emotions intensified like a Sabbath.
The handsome nurse talked
about surfing in Costa Rica while
my blood disinfected and outside
the hospital a Ouija board of plants
made a foreign language out of the night.
Man in neon coat walks uphill through the crows.
Reddish glow of the hurricane horizon
creeping toward the heart. Oldest woman
at the meeting talks about 1960 and ’61.
“We were organized, we had an action.
They told us what to do and we did it,
then we’d go to jail and it was on to the next
action.” Woke up—eyes puffy as windmills.
Thought of Rotterdam. That fucking poet
who didn’t ask if he could hold my hand,
just grabbed it on the teeth chattering bridge
and then yelled, “We are poets! We are here!”
right into the river. And we walked into the spaceship
I mean hotel and in my room, I ordered
a panini and ate it on the white sheets, crumbs
on the white sheets. Mirrors everywhere.
Rotterdam, the last place I ever felt sexy.
I rise before everyone, kids at their dad’s.
No commotion, rivers of clearing
eucalyptus mist in the aura factory
like pictures of Norway, her glaciated
remove languishes in a think tank
of food security, to want that kind of coldness,
to be surrounded by a swarm of bears
or love affair so north of here, but the winds
were shoved into the stone mouths of lions,
their rhymes tourniquets of counterfeit ideas.
And Rotterdam standing like an inquisition
of ships sloshing the metallic waters.
See, the thing is, Poet, you’re failing.
You’re failing at capitalism.
You’re failing at “self-care.”
You’re failing at feminism.
You’re
