sicken me like plague
The books I have written for so little money like a ghost tripping on the pavement to get to you
I will be forced out of my enemy’s hands like sweaty nickels in the wavy grasses
America, I am the moors you lack
My voice crosses you like some bleak financial awareness
I crash like a bombed-out calamity
I am no good for anyone
The vines of my thoughts are the cries of all the people and animals you kill
I am the home of the birds and that’s all I will ever be
Inside my heart is a boat of Noahs
The animals are cacophonous
I am the town washed away
I starve myself every day
I am the downed power lines of your literature
I spark up from the pavement like the jolting of a corpse
I am that corpse who jolts up and goes on a long walk
America, I am a long walk in your dying wilderness
I cross the bridge hopeless.
Give me back my dream of the swarm of bears
I cry to the pollution brigade.
“What did the bears do to you?”
“Nothing, my love, they were indifferent.”
I am a black diamond from the asteroid of visions.
Furious, I have splattered my loot into the earth.
The thing is that I look gray
and gray things look half-dead.
The moon is the half-dead body of noon dredged
from those furiously remote acres of myth.
I wanted resplendent queer sex.
I pulled the hair from my head
like a Greek lament.
My head was a giddy gyre.
No one could do anything about it.
Out of the depths
of the stanza tragedy,
I cried for my body.
Wanderers, servants, maids, slaves, baristas, singing
with the dust cough, singing into the signing of books,
caught in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
Ivanka Trump’s blonde hair swishes in this gyre.
We were banned through small administrative steps—
Cookie woke up from her AIDS death, my colleague laughed,
“the scene where Cookie is at the Catholic Church and pulls a rosary
out of Divine’s ass,” things would need to get so bad
before the uprising, I have to write poems for people
so I can remember what this human thing is, but even
then, the protests might not amount to anything.
Louis, I drove around aimlessly to find you, the four
days without my children crushed the sun and I meditated
on one card (the Fool), read the warning from the university
that said I couldn’t teach the books I was teaching,
“The clitoris is too sexual,” and “Why did you bring your kids
to the protest?” The police at the back
of the gathering. “Move faster! The problems we’ve had with the police
happen when people are outside the group.” Lacey says, “Move forward!”
Regina in her orange vest, twenty-three years old, children
chanting, one little girl on the shoulders of her dad,
my kids’ small legs moving faster than the adults,
everyone knows they kick the poets out first,
climate change deniers, and Chris’s love in the pew,
I remember you, what you said spoke to me, the idea
of sanctuary, I am not religious, but I have been
broken, Lord, I have been broken
and, thus, am allowed to speak for the dead.
Feel the pain that grows
out like a nettle
from injustice,
and take that thorn
out of your paw, little one,
and keep walking north
through the snow.
Look at the people we have on our side:
Walter Benjamin is on our side
Hannah Arendt is on our side
James Baldwin is on our side
Sandra, they are all dead
But they are on our side
The other people,
the capitalists, who do they have?
They don’t have anyone
All
