A tattered flag dances on a rusty pole,
having forgotten what color it once bore.
It has forgotten that it is a flag,
and what flags are even for.
Was it a bed sheet caught by bad luck,
or a symbol of hubris since humbled?
None can tell, the reports say,
there are none left.

The rag flutters at full mast, saluting the death
of civil servants muttering below their breath.
Everyone's dead! scream the rotting newspapers
behind the cracked glass of their rusted dispensers.

This is a planet suffocated by an idiot race
that left a running car indoors,
stayed for tea, lazed and slept,
multiplied and made merry,
then burned the bodies to hide
their monumental stupidity.
Easier to remember faces than dig holes,
and if you can fit thirty five heads
into a two body boot,
just imagine what you can do
with a billion unused cars.

It looks like they built and they built
until there was simply no more room,
and they ate and lived and fathered
and sang and thought and wrote,
made love, war and many a treasure,
and used and churned and measured
and grew and burned and murdered
until there were no more brides or grooms,
just the long prophesied doom.
There are no more funerals,
no fun in this immortal ******
that is half clay, half undrinkable,
there are none left to sing elegies,
every ending should have eulogies
so silently final.

Under layers of dust and ash,
under this meaningless, floating rag
and beside the splintered corpses of trees leafless like discarded matchsticks,
every poem is posthumously ghost-written and never read,
the bricks have crumbled into desiccated bread,
but bone persists through the ages.

There is something about seeing a woman
in a man's clothes
that hints at recent sins,
for where are her own clothes
and why does she choose to wear
a man's shirt? A man's stink?
His salty passions, faded nights
written sartorially in drink?
The wood of his wardrobe
and his love of meatballs?

Jackets are overcoats, clothes lie,
skin peeks from behind rolled up sleeves
pants are dated, we say, **** pants.
There is a sense that what I've been wearing
has never seen better days.
I study this creature with a cat's grace
masquerading in a mongrel's wrinkled skin.

It is then I decide that these clothes
are no longer mine, that they belong
to she who they've chosen and that
I'd rather be naked than feel the shame
of being second best for my own things.
Quietly, I peel her like an orange,
tongues singing like electricity.

Old men in older times once agreed
that everyone should be able to say
whatever to whoever they **** well please.
Old men today have decreed
that everyone should be able to say
whatever old men in new times please and
you can't say what you **** well please
unless everyone is **** well pleased.
Might as well adopt a Communist manifesto
to quote to each other for conversation, and
tune every radio to the same fascist station.
Be politically correct, but otherwise wrong-
it's not free speech for the dumb when you're
humming the same old tuneless song
in the country of liberated photostat machines.

Victuals for intellectuals:
be quasi and prototypical,
not pseudo or ritual.
Feel shame and wonder.
Don’t blunder in the shallow muck,
shovel to your knees and look under.

Do not track linear paths:
Think sideways, backwards,
upside down, exist laterally.
Accept contradictory truths:
they are not just possible
they are inevitable.

If you haven’t found one
in your search, keep your
head down and eyes open.
Be new to avoid ennui, and
let no truth chip your tooth.

Be quiet, not stupid,
be rarely edible and
hoarse from spirit.
Be invisible, not loud,
be a hoax until
you are undeniable.

Poetry is sometimes easy like the wind rushing
to where there is not much wind, caressing in waves,
invisible and pliant like the air, as effortless as
breathing it. Poetry is sometimes impossible,
like turning the tumbler of a lock with your fingertip,
like climbing a mountain barefoot in a blizzard
of screaming, sliding sleet, like a tearing cry
that dies into a whimper in your throat as you
realize the futility of that which you do,
the implacability of the beast you fight.

Sometimes, there are no words that can describe
the machinations and the subtle ticking of a clock
that beats in time to the human soul. Not hearing
the rhythm, you forget the music until your heart
sings again and you dance free like a young ballerina
cutting ballet. No poem is a picture that captures
the fluttering, soaring and sinking in the heart’s chambers.
You choose a word that fits, discard ten of its brothers,
yet feel surprise when your sentences have no answers
for the questions in your chest. You mourn every phrase
you have lost as you fell asleep. Knowing not
what you forgot, you move on to new questions.

You cannot miss what you’ve never felt, but you can yearn for
something you’ve forgotten. What is the difference to you
if you cannot remember the difference? The embryos of
the heart and mind are fragile. Your heart sings of a country
it cannot see anymore now that your back is turned,
you cast fishing nets behind you into the past blindly.
You remember that you have forgotten, and you forget
what bears remembering. You remember a day long past
not as the day that passed but as the memory of its passing,
yet feel surprise when years later and many forgettings hence,
it happened to someone else altogether.