“What did the bears do to you?”
“Nothing, my love, they were indifferent.”
I am a black diamond from the asteroid of visions.
Furious, I have splattered my loot into the earth.
The thing is that I look gray
and gray things look half-dead.
The moon is the half-dead body of noon dredged
from those furiously remote acres of myth.
I wanted resplendent queer sex.
I pulled the hair from my head
like a Greek lament.
My head was a giddy gyre.
No one could do anything about it.
Out of the depths
of the stanza tragedy,
I cried for my body.
Wanderers, servants, maids, slaves, baristas, singing
with the dust cough, singing into the signing of books,
caught in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
Ivanka Trump’s blonde hair swishes in this gyre.
We were banned through small administrative steps—
Cookie woke up from her AIDS death, my colleague laughed,
“the scene where Cookie is at the Catholic Church and pulls a rosary
out of Divine’s ass,” things would need to get so bad
before the uprising, I have to write poems for people
so I can remember what this human thing is, but even
then, the protests might not amount to anything.
Louis, I drove around aimlessly to find you, the four
days without my children crushed the sun and I meditated
on one card (the Fool), read the warning from the university
that said I couldn’t teach the books I was teaching,
“The clitoris is too sexual,” and “Why did you bring your kids
to the protest?” The police at the back
of the gathering. “Move faster! The problems we’ve had with the police
happen when people are outside the group.” Lacey says, “Move forward!”
Regina in her orange vest, twenty-three years old, children
chanting, one little girl on the shoulders of her dad,
my kids’ small legs moving faster than the adults,
everyone knows they kick the poets out first,
climate change deniers, and Chris’s love in the pew,
I remember you, what you said spoke to me, the idea
of sanctuary, I am not religious, but I have been
broken, Lord, I have been broken
and, thus, am allowed to speak for the dead.
Feel the pain that grows
out like a nettle
from injustice,
and take that thorn
out of your paw, little one,
and keep walking north
through the snow.
Look at the people we have on our side:
Walter Benjamin is on our side
Hannah Arendt is on our side
James Baldwin is on our side
Sandra, they are all dead
But they are on our side
The other people,
the capitalists, who do they have?
They don’t have anyone
All of their ideas are shit
Listen, we have Brecht
I was going crazy
I picked up my phone
I was talking to Maged
Utopia Utopia
Utopia Utopia
Utopia Utopia
Maged is moving from Seattle
to Atlanta to be closer to his son
I dream of the New Jerusalem of love,
an Eden of sparks from the mouth of the rose cult
The rooster of Midtown cockadoodledoos,
crest shivers Floridian, last bit of cold
in these parts; I am the bold-hearted one.
Tallahassee on the “Dead Mall” Wiki page,
stock market up, earth crash, crypto-mining
the numeral seven like the delight of the godhead.
I smoke and ask my neighbor what he would do
if the government had him on a list of dissidents.
Demon of the windstorm, demon of talons and beaks,
I know you hear everything I sing, two children
huddled together, under the moon,
baby falling from a chariot of wildly shaped light.
What do we make of him? Wander the earth
in search of your brother. Brother, what would you do?
And something stupid takes over him,
“Well we are all on a list anyway,” as he backslides
into his drunkenness, restoration of the neo-Nazi’s
Twitter account and a 2:00 p.m. consciousness-raising
session, I wish I was high instead of inside
my body dragging itself to another action.
First National Women’s Liberation meeting
in Tallahassee, but now I’m drunk, high, and smoking
a ton of cigarettes with my neighbor, the one
who saved me from Hurricane Whatever’s 3:00 a.m. rainwater
pouring through the wolf-eyed tree holes of the ceiling—
then a MRSA infection on my elbow. No one knows
why a hurricane reddens the night sky, no one knows why
the ER doc says, “It’s the dirty water.
It