In long cemetery rows
We broke our backs to sow these tilling fields—

Nourishing them with rivulets of blood,
And panicked sweat—

Gun shells sprouting nooses
Make hardened, apathetic blooms—

And we wonder why the fruit is poison—
Giving seeds room to germinate,

In the name of individualism
In the name of industry,

In the name of law,
In the name of order—

In long cemetery rows
We broke our back to sow the killing fields—

To drown out the pain
As weakness leaving having over stayed—

Asking what’s wrong with me
As the lines get deeper,

On foreheads and wrists,
In unemployment offices and churches

We still spit on charity
Ever feeding the sodden ground,

Weakness does not ask control
But only respite

Strength asks for status quo
To overcome and fight,

A test for the True American,
Whatever face becomes this myth,

To be born classless into this stratum of wealth
To indulge humanly and face the consequences

To chase desire and be punished for it
To be the casualty of ideologies

So far removed from what belly and skin want
To ignore the rumblings and twitching—

Who does till these killing fields
But those meant to die there?

While the quartermaster, on hills
Where treaties are to be drawn,

Strips away the olive branch,
Tween him and the planters,

As he waits for the whites of their eyes
To collide as the unthinkable:

An unmanageable force of nature,
The hatred sowed in those killing fields.

But, until then, we drain every last bit
From ourselves, fighting over a dying earth.

Roll out all the fuel we need let’s burn the machine
That could have brought peace.

If neoliberalism has taught me anything
It’s that Love is a close, slow, and cold war
Of poisoned wells, proxy wars, and intel—
Know thy enemy, keep them closer than allies.
So close this necessary rivalry
That no olive branch can pass between
That, even in times of peace,
The light-bearing serpents
Post guard near the vaults of one’s purity
Unsure whether grain or gold
Actually lines the walls of ones coffers,
And the thousand envious myrmidons
Kept along the edges of their body’s territory
And skirt the embassy within.
Is there room in the hearth
For pacifists like me?
Or are all the rooms quartered by troops?
It’s sad to say, only the words of the cynic
Could truck and barter
Their way through the bronze gates,
What small inlets there may be,
As master seeking the slave
And slave, the master’s whips
Is a true sign of loyalty to Monogamy’s crown.
What Love couldn’t be said to be
The sadomasochism of
The corporate merger,
Or annexation
Or competitive market of ideas?
***, in the time of Smith or Hobbes,
Is exactly what we need—
Egoism allwheres,
Like so much embroidery
The love of ones life
Veils *******, a swallowing, a utility
And undoes the altruism,
Anything but all-true-ism,
In favor of the fetishism of control,
Flashed like semaphores in storm-beaten nights
To any ship passing
Seeking port and safe passage,
Exchange fire, those shapes and pleas,
Turned warnings to threats,
Sinking, sinking deeper
Into each other’s arms.
In all their plotting, do they hear
Andres-Salome, Ree, and Nietzsche
Laughing about in unburdened skin
Laughing to let the summer in,
On cart-drawn pleasures
And rustic, old-world habits
That rub dirt in the wound
Of the flesh’s censures
By the cruel absence of the lash
And the ostracon.

The walls are pliable, permeable,
But those big bills bully
Us smaller ones into charity,
As race to the top
Of morality’s sheer bovine cliffs
Where light, so little light, beams in.
How have the seams resisted
Temptation to burst?
These walls are not strong—
No, that is a myth,
Just as these arms
Are made of paper
These fists of hempen stitch
Made fit to hold aloft
A debtor’s desires, his weight in gold
Under the largesse of
Bigger denominations,
In their shadows, where round
Light passes, galactically bent
Those heavenly bodies
Which, to comprehend,
Invites a schizophrenia—
But, how natural
If the world beyond here
Does not reach out,
If we, too, are made of the same,
It wishes to come in—
Perhaps it already has
And lets us know in its groaning.

If it’s not rich
It’s not worth the stomachache—

If you’re gonna trip
You’d better hallucinate—

If you’re lost in Elysium
Talk once to the butterflies—

If you love Fate
Become the wet dreams of Delphi.

I could save you
From staring at a nothing all day
Were my arms stronger
My will resolute,
But then, you tired, you poor,
You huddled masses
Would not stand on your own two feet.
Freedom can be sold
To the highest bidder
And rented to whatever lord
Of our choosing,
We have dominion over ourselves,
Both master and slave.
Freely we withhold
Our hands to our mouths,
Those righteous tokens
That engorge our pockets
But deprive our stomachs
The sustenance and dignity
Attested to by endless
Epics, sagas, and eddas of
Those proper kings
Filling their mouths with mantras
About heroes becoming heroes
By making others small.
Who am I
To deprive you of the chance
Of fighting or failing
At the hands of global giants?
Who am I
To stall your righteous war
Of material enrichment
By laying down arm?
There I risk being
But another neck
To be stepped upon.

A furious screaming came off the lakes
And drowned out a million curses
Hiding from the cold, as hands in their pockets:
Isolated and trembling.
Despite a proprioception lost,
One body, blue at the tips, curls closer
To the dikes of thickening blood,
That, neatly, remain outward, exposed.
Do we not huddle in coaches and spaces
When our passions’ armor cracks?
Do we not crave touch for lack of warmth
When the skies above are clear?
Do we not risk hypothermia
When we expose ourselves to another?
We are the organs of great cities,
As we are great cities of cells
Seeking outlet on natural course all rigid
Those unconscious fraternities
Ebb and grow as we, like lakes, turn to floes
By cruel chemical realities held to bodies are—
As hands of distant lovers are—
Seeking outlet, seeking tributary.
Stagnant, though, cities stand
As the thin-skinned tissues flow
Swelling at inlets, at terminus expand
To compensate, give room—
This winter of hearts only lengthens
And so bodies begin to quake
As our bedrock breaks through
Its torments cutting outward from the skin.

Act 1
Standing near glass, one is never alone,
The room is always crowded
An inanimate audience, rapt,
Starved for words as water in the desert.
They are quite fashionably dressed.
Fashionably late to the lisztomanic social hour
Entertaining Pan, Eros, and Aphrodite
So to catch the eyes of some
Rebel of the heart;
Ah, but who could take their eyes
Off the face of world-hope and earthly pain?
Deep and Endless as he rides the soft, pink waves
Of love from strangers infinite and faceless,
There we see Alpha and Omega
Cruelty in his perfect Travis Bickle impression:
“You talkin’ to me?
You talkin’...to me?”

Act 2
With dumb admiration, they all look back,
Whispering like gospel, praise and fear alike.
A show was one to give, and so it was given,
But the silence is deafening--
So, this fourth wall fails us,
The veil of envious telepathies
Cast locks of hair errant and
Eye with nocturnal shadow--
Disassembly spiders like ice from water
And all in the foreground fades
Washed out by limerant lights
Wasting outward tithes
That, within or without, we are blind  
Lest that slowly shattering negative-space
Converts, excites, and tosses us back
To the depreciating eye and its yawning folds
Outside the mirror’s window
The implicit volley from another world
Those faraway pastures of greener plane.

Act 3
There, there I know the judgements of distant onlookers
Are but the prodigal son of fear and desire
But knowledge-of and feeling-toward are two faces
Of no glass possible to modern physics,
And yet, though I’m the spectacle
They can see what little part of the world
I cannot.