brian-donohueWhisper

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21st Century National Anthem (a Prose Poem)I have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes back down the hill toward the water. / **** Cheney ate my flesh and shat upon my skeletal remnants. Obama came after him, unzipped his fly and emptied the pale dilution of his bladder-wine onto me (it was warm and sparkling at first, but soon became cold and fetid). / I do not want to be treated by your white-robed functionaries who take me to the precipice’s edge, deliver a pill to my mouth, a hand in my pocket, and a push on my back. I do not want to be educated by your masters of delusion, your demons of standardized measurement. I do not want to be fed by your factory corpses who sit like workers in cubicles, unmoving and covered to their hips in excrement and despair. I do not want to be employed by your treadmill machines that turn time into regret and obedience into tears. I do not want to be informed by your chyron streams that feed the wells of desolation and ignorance. I do not want to be a part of your economy that fills the fountains of palaces with the blood of innocence, where investment is a tout sheet that dissolves into electrons as the getaway limousine races toward the mansion.

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Science Did Not Fail MeScience did not fail me, nor I it. / The age of commitment, of the unconditional / Fell amid the rubble, after the Bombs

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Dark and Dangerous DoggerelAh, youth! This is from a song I wrote about 30 years ago, perhaps while under the influence of Dylan. / Man is born to tremble, I’ve seen it written in the book / And a lover’s bound to sicken from a cold impassive look;

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Queen of BeersThe desert, they say, is better crossed / If the nomad knows his way; / Your mind, I’m told, is easily lost,

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ReturnI have no energy left but for revolt — the revolt of the one / who abandons the climb, turns his back, and goes / back down the hill toward the water.

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The Opening of a Corporate IliadSing, O Muse, of greed’s Inferno, fluorescent-fringed and frigid at the core; / of white-haired chiefs with square jaws and stiff-lined lips / whose speech came clipped and hollow like the towers

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To the Goddess of TransformationPlease come in: go all the way back / to the old closet past the kitchen / where the priests left their wine-stained robes.

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I cannot remember the nameI cannot remember the name of that priest who died in agony / with his arms around the tree of ignorance. Under his body / lay the black scattered shards of his sacred vow of denial

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