A slight simplification of the GOP platform

If you give to mice a cookie,
They will
probably
show their ravenous hunger
by asking for another.

And if you give them one more
They may not even give their thanks.
In mice there is a genetic
tendency
to crave things
beyond
what they came
into the world
with.

Well,
some say our laws are damn unfair
in the way
they favor some
over those that
are far more deserving of largess,
so solutions must be found.

Well,
They wish to live
a lazy life
where they
can steal
from the wives
of reputable men.

These animals terrify
the decent souls
of hardworking industrialists
and undermine the foundation
of homes
where teenage girls are kissed
in ways that would
terrify
their fathers.

Perhaps their mothers
do not shriek
because
in time
one grows to love
the beasts
beneath their feet.

So when those bastards
act like They deserve
a moment’s grace
in front of
impartial courts
that serve
to protect
the people
from manufactured traps,
remember they were vermin
who had eaten through your floorboards
and driven men into the Nile
and carried fleas to half the world.

You should not have to worry
if
our justice
will be swift.
Everyone
is
dangerous
and
deserves
a
thunderclap.

They cannot be satiated,
because their hands are
plastic wrap
that melts
on everything they touch
(like a
cheap-ass
version
of Midas).

Fuck Them.
They wouldn’t vote
for us
anyway.

Variations on a friend's poem No. 2

This place is locked inside of land
and no stagnant lake will do.
The maddened women living there
mix rue with honeydew.

Since I cannot have the sea
a cathedral will suffice;
a place where they don’t slam their doors
even if your soul is ice.

There are smells you can’t define
moving with a dusty draft
and you catch the hint of breadcrumbs
and a little vicious ash

and I’m scowling at the faces
that are stained into the wall;
they tell us ancient stories
of the men after the fall

who eradicated traces
of that atavistic glee
that turns righteous men to evil
and burns life up like knotted weeds.

I wonder if the water
will be deep enough for me.
They have told me that it’s holy
but it’s enough that it is free.

Oh, Polonius, don’t tell me
of your daughter murdered there.
The Styx writhes at its boundaries
and it wets your virgin’s hair.

But tell us how you really feel

If there is a savage impulse,
say your orders came from God.
You shall surely be forgiven
for beating children with steel rods

or for lauding superstition
and ruining a baby’s mind.
If you pray enough it’s hard
to find you guilty of a crime.

It makes one wish for a hell
with its torture and its fire
where evil men are banished
to atone for their desires.

They all had a love of power
and of money and of fame
and they tend to murder women
if they see them using brains

for anything but regulation
of a body’s ticking clock
or to loyally add children
to the good Lord’s fenced-in flock.

All their slogans have been stolen
by men terrible and vile.
You can find that cross on war flags
and on money at turnstiles.

We crush paper in a ball
and worship books we have not read.
We can trust our paraphrasing
to judge the living and the dead.

So we find Abraham at Nuremberg
on a mountain tall and young.
He is making invitations
for the funeral of his son.

Absolutely Nothing

So we are gonna have a war
and it will be a tiny word,
far too short to tell of legends
or the terror and the grief.
We will wage it for the benefit
of the fat wallets of thieves,
and to make our money faster
we’ll turn men into machines.

We can never get enough
though you can be damn sure we’ll try.
We will cure a child’s blindness
then charge two million for the eyes.

So put your hands above your head
and put your hope under the ground.
There are crazy motherfuckers
who are living in your town
and we will surely find them all.

Who are those suspicious people
who are hiding in the hall?
I was sure that we had been as clear
as a gypsy’s crystal ball.

Don’t you tell me wretched lies
about some children in their beds
or the thoughts that they conceal
as they wish for buttered bread.

We will butcher them with knives.
We know what shadows have done.

We will give our blood god names
and build Her palace in the sun.
We will treat apologies
like the leprosy they are
and we’ll transmute the homes of hundreds
into a spacious airport bar.

The mothers’ stories linger
after gunpowder is gone
telling you of rooms where in past years
they had once housed a son.

The young of wealthy nations
will write for you plaintive poems
in languages you do not speak,
conveying thoughts like cobblestones.

And in a decade we will find a grave
that we dare not look inside,
whisper “they will get dignity
denied when yet alive,”
but we’ll build another monument
for a war we’ve claimed we lost.

We killed Their sixty for Our one
and spent a hundred trillion cents
and wrecked another land to rubble
in search of an endless foe.
We dug deep furrows in a field
and we fill them up with salt
if it seems a little harsh
I can swear it’s not my fault.

It should come as no surprise,
and it never should have been,
that we took our mirrors down
when they showed monsters and not men.

Then we lay our heads on pillows
and we whisper to the wind
that they couldn’t have been humans
or we couldn’t have killed them.

Not just for sugarcane anymore

The top third of the edge is marred with rust.
The smallest notch interrupted the sheen
of light being rejected and sent back
stories of metal slabs turning life to dust.

It enables a great deal of action.
Preening imperialists have before
momentously followed
through hacked up vines
and bodies
(looking for all the world like a print from Inferno)
and filled in the holes they made
with blood and whiskey.

Weapons are interesting
because they all appear
to be
exactly what they are.
This is not a condemnation
of those with a flair
towards
a dissembling life,
but
weapons have
after all
maintained
a strong projection of integrity
in the face of certain
discredited
“women’s” thinkers
who have many times
noted
the passing resemblance
of knife and blade
and slashing sword
to one of the portions
of male anatomy
that seems to offend
well-meaning souls
the most.

It is
perhaps
not intended to be taken
as an actual argument.
After all,
if we thought that
arms of war
fashioned in the manner
of steeled tulip bulbs
would efficiently kill others,
it produces no doubt
that these new terrors
would fast be as
ego stroking
as skyscrapers
have been said to be.

To be Fair, I wasn't trying very hard

I had been growing
a beard for
somewhat
more than a month.

I was eating
cheap noodles
and found
that my whiskers
were getting in the way
of the broth.

I used the same
electric razor
as I use to shave my head
to shear dead cells
into a sink.

I kept the moustache
for around twelve hours
to see just how it felt.
It was not precisely
as impressive
as I had hoped
and so again my face
appears to be my own.

One of the places
that sends me
rejection letters
has a standing policy
against poems
about shaving.
I think it will be hard
to find fault with them.

A Genie at the Bottom

The other night I found myself
trying
to fill a cup without
too much foam.
Great and terrible
are those which
find in foam
a mother’s arms.

I had noticed her when I walked in,
no great distinction
as she was not of the quality
accustomed to being ignored.

I am sure that I was staring.

My excuse would have been the
alpine heights
of my mind,
but even with this deep root in fact
my lie would have been
dead and crystalline
like a lake at a recently disused quarry.

She had on a shirt
but I do not remember the color.
She wore jeans
but I cannot describe style or type.
Shoes too,
presumably,
though this list,
admittedly plagued with redundancies,
too closely
begins to resemble
a sermon.

I remember
the delicate curve of her brow,
the way her hair fell like a fountain
beneath a hat perched tenuously
and threatening at any moment to
swim away,
the dimples in her cheeks
and the small imperfections of her smile,
and perhaps most of all
the way she laughed
when I countered someone’s
anti-Semitic remark with,
“Hey, Einstein was a Jew,
which is to say nothing of
Franz Kafka.”

She kept refilling a black
Dixie Cup
with orange soda, room temperature,
and waiting with her weight
slung onto her right hip
as in frantic desperation
I tried to banish foam
from that which I had claimed.

We were standing, accidentally,
on either side of a friend
who seemed determined to loosen
the chains
held tight
by un-played piano keys,
singing along to Modest Mouse
and wondering how we ended up here.
I am sure
that I was staring.

She disappeared among the stars
but came back after a time.

I said
that stars had told me of the death in the water.
Yes, they told me that hollow was the sound of the sea.
They wondered if ever I’d known one so free.
I told them that questions without simple answers
don’t get answered for the dead, no matter how holy,
that I didn’t care much for their fire in the sky,
said we’ve got our own suns with Plutonium cores
to wink at the expanse with a rogue’s lightning grin.

She said
that the stars make you sound like a cynical bastard.
Yes, they asked of you questions as if they were masters.
But I’ve got to tell you that nothing is freedom,
that our minds are as dead as the whales in the ocean.
But I wonder if somewhere there is a brown river
that floods onto deltas and drowns them in murder
and I wonder when the rain will fall.

And I thought
of the women with baking soda and salt on their hands
baking cookies with dirt in the streets of their city,
and I thought of their babies with their hair all tinged red.

So I drank so much
I was sure I’d forget her,
but in the morning I even
remembered her name.
I laughed when I woke up
at the tone
of my visions,
of the doom I’d imagined for the mouth of the world.
I thought of a beer-keg
being bathed in ice-water,
of birthdays of friends
and parties for pilgrims
who were going new places
in search of new air,
of gulls with choked feathers
and fish never born.
I wonder when the rain will fall.

Something in the Way I Move

Most often it seems that it is

only when no one else is around

that our most lovely ideas

present themselves.

As an example,

prior to this

I was in the throes of the human

anti diuretic hormone

expressing itself in my bathroom

when I had a fantastic idea

which of course

now

has perished with the rain.

In twenty hours I will have no home

but still my shelves are riddled with

statistical formulae scribbled on lined paper,

a shockingly cheap complete works of Shakespeare,

and a black heart carved of wood

that tells my name (first and second but not last)

the date of my first presence

and my weight upon birth.

(it was ten pounds and seven ounces, for the curious)

Since I loathe, utterly, preparations for the future,

it is not surprising that in place of many boxes

I had only one (James B. Beam Distilling Co.)

Instead I use small bags that slowly kill our world,

if well meaning persons

or scientists

are to be believed.

I never mind drinking here

because it is my home.

I cannot embarrass myself

or give scandal

within walls for which I’ve paid.

I do not remember, of course, the snippets

of my life

that should most color me with shame.

I am told that I have spit on floors

and sent vomit to trashcans

and swung fists

at the parents of dear friends.

I never decorated the walls

and so they remain the bright

demonic white

of one year ago

when many were my tears

at the thought of losing my home.

My friend told me

that it moved him

that I wept for Haiti.

I did not want to say

that I will weep for anything.

It is not hard.

I am practiced.

I had loved my room

because of blankets

placed with deep strategy

to confound the penetrating nature

of light,

and, too, for the malefaction and decay

that carved itself into flame and smoke

and ecstasy.

I had loved my door for the crack

where the light peeked in,

for the bolt that I alone could spin,

but mostly for the way that,

often,

no one knocked upon the steel.

This offering,

like my life,

was likely only

planned

nominally.

Accordingly all insults

will be accepted.

I am in a horrifying mood

and thus not at all amenable

to creating things that anyone

likes.

She came from the land of Ice and Snow

At first she spoke without ceasing

about her origins. It was not her fault,

as our town often had this searing

effect on the words of the stranger.

One of the things most maligned

is the impulse to beautifully

find oneself aligned

with others.

With one thing and another,

years passed while sand turned to glass.

She dyed her hair and looked into mirrors

and pronounced herself fit for this morass.

We have for many years been distant

and for most of what was together

I was cruel. She decorates her walls with feathers

as I sit spinning thread onto a spool.

Now she wears long necklaces,

reminiscent of Sixties stars,

eats legal pills and lays her head

in a city with nine million cars.

Men fall in love with her and she tosses her hair

and goes again to climb the stair

and close the door. None again shall pass that way

and split ends glisten like new hay.

Her strength was from some other thing

I must suppose. One lover does insist

on comparing her to a rose,

and though the other may not speak

upon the hallowed bright concrete

that lays beneath the bright-lit streets,

he still can whisper in her ear

of reaping done and what is to be sown.

She chose East and I’ll choose West,

and we’ll fall into the magpie’s chest.

Under her sleeves she declares

her incompleteness and contests

attempts to raise her in the air.

There too, she says, we raze things

that on other days received warm kisses,

and though the ocean dies the easiest

as it is there that all must fall,

our venom can rise to icons placed

in the kindest skies.

It pleases me that I am so fond of her

without the disastrous accompaniment

of comparing her to flowering lilies.

If I had learned to do this

earlier

I would perhaps have

avoided

many troubles.

Untitled #4

Years later I found a long strand of hair

lightly constricting the fan on my computer.

My brother had been to visit me

so she and I had slept on the floor

beneath my bed.

That breath from the past

was as bright as her hair was in the starlight.

It did not look its age,

as it had not managed to acquire dust.

I now no longer have that computer

or that lock that glowed

like an alchemically twisted harp string,

but I cannot forget that peculiar

freshness which seemed to have resulted

from just recently deciding to be gold.