Funny
They can tell
When my
liver's working too hard
But they can't tell
When I'm on
Drugs

Funny
They accuse
me
of mischief
and mayhem
but they don't know I'm high
till I tell them

trauma drifts down through the branches of my family tree
like summer pollen

I had went to visit some friends
some acquaintances
these people i used to know
I was a ghost in my hometown,
where no one used my given name.
they brought me in through a screen door and
sat me down in the kitchen.
their voices were like underwater sounds
they told me to be still while he said hello.
I looked down a flight of basement stairs
where bathed in a blue light like Chopin’s  no. 19 in E minor
sat a tiger burning bright.
up the stairs it bounded forth in muted strides
to the floor it pinned me under protest
in cemetery stillness it said hello.
the kitchen was an autoclave
I never asked for help.

my hometown calls to me in my sleep
like an indian death wail on a buffalo robe
so my eyes sink back into the firmament.
bathing in the predawn light
my bones are an old horse I ride,
I score one for the body then I get onto a plane
then I score one for the body and I get onto a plane
then i score one for the body as it lays dying without complaint.
kneeling before the Holy Cross by the roadside
I take note of really just how much room there is on the bed beside me
strange bedfellows are I and the space I’ve been given.
there is a queen sized outer darkness within my twin sized
gestures of self control.
the dusk is day now and the moon is the sun
and my hometown calls to me like Jericho’s Trumpet
sounding from inside the Pale.

in my hometown I am a pilgrim
I saunter towards the seaboard
where the docks hold greek columns that soar into the air
like the elephant’s legs in Salvador Dali’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony”.
nostalgia burns my throat like acids and bases
and the columns lead up to nowhere and this place isn’t
how i remember it beyond the Pale.
limping with thin soles
dragging a dull hypothalamus like a dead mule chained to my ankle
we would sit and watch our forefathers stare at the static on the TV
from their arm chairs in the dark.
we would offer them coffee and ask how their day was and they
would tell us that sometimes they feel like a lone alley cat.
It’s like my buddy's roommate when I would go to visit; always alone inside his room.
sometimes I would see him around town and say hello and notice his face and
see that he was still alone inside his room.

well, I have skin in the game and I have a reputation
and i’m attached to my non-attachment.
sometimes a subtle brand of disgust creeps in to replace my avarice
and sometimes I starve to death holding a long handled spoon
seated at Caligula’s table.
sometimes i can’t tell their maidenhood from their madness
so i hoard one for the body.
sometimes i remember the way bees will talk to each other by dancing
and how old men will tell you they’re afraid to die.
Sometimes I hand a *** a 20 and weep as I watch him fold it
into an origami crane.

while I was in town I looked up my former landlord
I held a fondness for the times when they didn’t use my given name.
I wanted to see my old room and I had kept a raven back then and
he assured me it was still around.
the room was now and attic and was much bigger than I had held it
in my memory, vast almost.
I ask the dust as it was thick upon the floor boards and something
felt abandoned in the air.
the roof was in disrepair and one whole side was nearly completely gone.
tranquil ribbons of cirrus clouds stood in the sky through the roof like
a child’s drawing.
“Is it like you remember?”, he asked.
“Way over in the corner there was a couch my brother would sometimes sit in” I replied.
I asked after my raven and he pointed to the part of the roof that still was.
from the shadows came a bird song like an irish low whistle from above the Pale.
“That doesn’t sound like him”, I said (more to myself than to my host),
“that’s an owl or something.”

Coconut, coconut, coconut,
Crack!
Stained white on the inside,
Brown on the out.

Hit it on its head,
Slash it apart.
Nourish it with spices,
Of a Southern past.

Fuzzy to touch,
Lined in coir.
The remaining path
In defining who we are.

Droplets of the Ganges,
Drowned in the Thames.
A conflicted soul,
In search of a cleanse.

Coconut, coconut, coconut,
Crack!
That one's spoiled!
So send him back.

Rapid City wears its patriotism like a shroud.
Corner streets are populated with less than
life-size statues of past presidents
squinting at the distant Black Hills
where the grandeur of Mt. Rushmore
casually crumbles their bronze dreams.

Wax settlers, loggers and gold miners
stake claims with souvenir hunters
touring a mine, panning for fool’s gold.

In nearby Custer, 75 breaths  from Wounded Knee,
shops hawk Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo t-shirts
proclaiming them “ The Original Founding Fathers.”
Mixed in are those in star-spangled letters and fireworks
proudly streaming “Welcome to America. Now Speak English.”

Rushmore was dynamited from a cliff
by a creator who spent the rest of his life
erecting grand Confederate gestures
out of ****** Georgia quartz monzonite—
finished and opened 100 years to the day
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.  

Thirty minutes from Rushmore, existing in its shadow
on private land filled with dusty trails,
unfinished after seventy years,
probably still unfinished after twenty  more,
facing away from these great stone faces,
emerging from the side of great Thunderhead Mountain,

on an ivory stead with a mane of flowing river and wind,
exists the Oglala Lakota warrior Tasunke Witko
the worm of Crazy Horse the Old and Rattling Blanket Woman,
sibling of Little Hawk and Laughing One, memory of the spirit of
Black Buffalo and White Cow who walked with an Iron Cane,
all enclosed with him in this massive breath of white stone.

The history of this great Indian space stretches the land,
four times higher than the Statue of Liberty,
extending beyond the warrior frown, the pointing left arm.
The horse’s ear alone is the size of a rusty  reservation bus.
When finished it will be the largest sculpture in history,
bigger than the land, breath and all of Indian memory.

It was the Vision Quest of Chief Henry Standing Bear to show the whites that the red man had great heroes, too.
In a man named Korczak he found a kindred spirit,
a storyteller in stone, a survivor of Omaha Beach,
who when the first wife faltered, found a second
who gave him enough children to carry, sculpt the Bear Dream.  

The big chief’s face is still the only finished part.
Korczak’s wife and children toil with the rest,
struggling to capture the essence of a warrior
who never allowed his shadow to be snared
in the false glow of the white man’s light,
trusting only the rain beams that fall

onto his people, mountains, plains and buffaloes,
onto Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is,”
where the Lakota huddled while the world was created,
now a land of broken treaties and dying dreams,
drenched in the dust of tears underneath,
while this white face torn from red gazes East.

Displeased with exhausted mind
Though ugliness embodies perfection
Of the creation majesty empower
The whites aren't right
And black ain't beautiful
Questioning the creativity
And erroneous concept of beauty
We somewhere fades our own reality
Indulge with your voice inside
Whose raising the vocals of equality
Whose antonishing signs
Are reflection of humanity
Now the quest of questions
Is out of answers inherently
Yet hopes are serene enough
To resist a human world
And here the wrong things
Are done with good intentions.

why do men die for other men ?
what compels them to give up their lives for the lives of their fellow men ?

is it love ? is it duty ? or is it just plain madness ? is it that bond of blood ? or a promise to be better ? or is it simply what being a human is ?


the same men capable of destroying a million lives in pursuit of their own ideology ? the same men who for the purpose of their own greed and need can ignore the very definitions of civility and liberty and justice.


can we still call them men ?


what is happening at this hour in this nation, a nation which is thousands of years old and in making; isn't different from what has happened in the past and unfortunately that is going to happen in the unsuspecting future.

people are turning to an ideology that not only imprisons the free bird in the sky, but also retaliates if it so chooses to lay on a different branch.

diversity isn't celebrated anymore, but rather is frowned upon by the masses, who believe that past holds no relevance over the future.

acceptance, and the very creed upon which the great men who came before us, and made us who we are today - their legacy and wisdom is being demolished, like cards in the winds; and just like the structures of the ancient, for they no longer are painted with the colours we are familiar with today.


sheep and wolves alike, are being chased by the blood hounds, cornering every whisper with words of the system, a system that has been diseased from the inside, infecting the very veins of this great nation that has stood the test of age and it's many a poisons for millennia and more.


bit by bit the great walls of knowledge and of the enlightened spirits are being razed down by a mere fool in different costumes, performing in a circus build upon the ashes of the innocent and the innocence of the communities that now long for blood.


the very nature of this great and grave divide, is unnatural, passed down by the same set of hands that once pulled the chains and carried with them - forcefully, a plight of millions, suppressed and then set aside fanatically, all in the name of a devotional creed.

lizards in boxes pretending to be voices of the free and humane, casting their spells on the fragile and a blind audience, numb by all the back and forth between the gods, and as always, only the peasant suffers.


how many more homes must vanish before we realise there's no magic in the disappearing of colours, and the despairing remains of the one's gone, painted across the streets in black and white, begging for somebody to give them their proper funeral.

it is men who take life, animals don't **** for their sins, they never have, for they don't know what it's like to be tamed by fire.

they'd rather burn, than become more like us.

maybe that tells it all, and maybe that is why, the devil may have horns and hoofs, but it never haunts and hunts the wild.


we are what we love, but we become who we hate, always - in the end, until something worse comes around to make things better.