poems 12

golden cage

if you're insane and lonely
there's nothing to do
but write poetry
as the dead flies multiply
on the windowsill
cuz the sky is cracked
and humanity is cracked
and you can stare at the walls
till the end of time
or till you lose your mind
completely.



broken bottles

I remember walking home
from work—
streets littered with
the broken bottles of the past
and there was my fat queer boss
and the Polish girl
who always wore
a tight black miniskirt
showing off her fat white thighs
that I still can't stop
thinking of
and lonely parking lot nights
under a full moon
and I remember thinking
this is what you get
for $5.50 an hour in this
rotten, broken-down corner
of the universe.



city life

another cancer Monday
and you’ll see a light in the sky
pulled by an old man
wearing dumpster shoes
and the brick walls
will be innocent
and you’ll open your palm
and find a butterfly
resting there
and you'll forget about
all the slaughter
in the name of free markets
and you’ll say aloud
all wisdom is found
in the heartless gutters of the world
and it’ll mean more
than all the bullshit
you hear on the corporate news.



the ugly truth

war is blood
and cracked skulls
and the murder of innocents
beyond far horizons

—war is the zombies
of the military-industrial complex
devouring human brains

—war is the dream of every Wall Street bankster
every sham-elected President
who wants to go down
in bloody history
like Caesar and Hitler
amid the adulation of the Pentagon media

—war is what the poor do
when they can't pay the bills.



swan

doctors give me
pills
and some of them
make me feel
better
and some
make me feel
worse
and there's so much
blue sky
in these
April mornings
I often find myself
spinning
or floating
through the nothing
of the past
and the nowhere
that
surrounds
me
I see a speck
of cloud—
maybe it's just
a piece
of
someone's
broken wing.



the keeper of time

sun crashing in
like an afternoon whore
I lie in bed with my belly
and my luminous forehead
like an exiled prince
from the kingdom of rats
the phone rings on the hour
and it's always some woman
with a pretty voice
delivering some fresh new piece
of horrible news
the productive citizens
drive to work in the morning
and all they ever produce
drains into the economic gutter
or flushes down the great old
toilet bowl of time
the sun is always there
like a terrible lover
and the homeless
are always there too
sitting or sleeping on the benches
and the answer is always no
the boys in green
are always ready for war
and the world is a giant hairy ass
and when you get diabetes
you can't even eat ice cream
anymore
DAMMIT!!!



my third eye …

sees a cowboy dying
in the desert
even though he's wearing white
and bares the USDA
stamp of approval—
a blue damselfly
is one kind of goodbye
as a red neon sign flashes
DANCING GIRLS!!!
over a deathly street
and the crows know
and the mushrooms are
looking ominous
and defiant
as the rocks meditate
and the people in the supermarket
keep getting fatter and fatter
as a white picket fence
guts the white air
behind a lone headstone
beside a long, sad highway
in West Virginia.



the skull and the rose

when the face
of the clock
shatters;
while
the flies
crawl
the walls
dreaming
of libertarian
socialism;
while
America
goes broke
from
endless
unwinnable
wars
in faraway
lands—
there'll be
time enough
for
the skull
and the rose,
for
the raven
in the fire
of my endless
night.



another anarchist manifesto

in your democracy
of corporate jets
and homeless families living in shelters

in your republic
of killer cops
and nuclear bombs and drone strikes

there's still a handful
of noble Marxists
that you've locked up in your
prison-industrial complex

or you've buried them six feet under
to fertilize your fields of Monsanto GM crops
somewhere out in Kansas

so long as the sheeple
keep paying their taxes and keep on
keeping their mouths shut

and you can kiss my fucking anarchist ass

while the ghost of Howard Zinn chuckles
as the empire smolders away into the ether
just like he said it would.



modern times

you make a new “friend”
on Facebook

then one day they stop posting
don't reply to your emails
you don't know
if they're alive or dead.

I think one of my Internet friends
died recently.

I think she died
but I don't know for sure.

she's got a thousand FB
“friends” and
none of them seems to know
either.

what are these new
“friends”
who don't even find out
when one of them passes on
and don't seem to care?

you might as well be
some nameless drifter
out alone somewhere in the desert.

it's all so sad, so pathetic—

this is how low
we've sunk.



we need more books of the dead

what happens to the soul
when the body dies?

does sit atop a mountain
contemplating the Tao?

does it go to the Western Paradise
to sit at the foot of Amida?

or does it wander in some distant woods
where it's always sunny and breezy?

the only thing to offer the hungry
is food

and the only thing to offer the sick
is prayers

so I say Kwan Yin of the gentle hands …
and throw it to the eight winds of heaven.



the long struggle

the leaves
are
turning
red
yellow
and orange
as
the kids
go
back
to school

the patriots
watch
Sunday
football
as
Wall Street
sends
their
jobs
overseas

pretty soon
even
the kids
and
their
parents
will
realize
what's
reall
going on …

as
Unlce Ho
once
said
We'll fight
one day
longer
than
you will.



little Eichmanns

for Ward Churchill

getting fired for telling the truth
is nothing to be ashamed of

maybe it's for the best

maybe the little Eichmanns
reflected on
the evils of their ways
while praying to their
blond, blue-eyed Jesus
on that fateful day

or maybe they didn't

at any rate

America's vengeance
for 3,000
translated into
1 million dead in Iraq and
a somewhat smaller total
in Afghanistan

it depends on how exactly
you figure the numbers,
I guess

whether you include
“collateral damage”
and deaths from starvation
in the final sums
of the Empire's reckoning

anyway,
who's counting?



what it is

a small rented apartment
one bedroom with water stains on the ceiling
from when it rained 5 days straight
a TV that fills my eyes with all the lies
that the powers-that-be want me to hear
and moronic bullshit
like Friends and Dancing with the Stars

my only escape is
100 books about the Mayans
and my rabid imagination

I imagine 10,000,000 Buddhas
falling from the sky
on clouds made of jasmine
I imagine North Korean troops
liberating Amerika
I imagine some topless beach in Denmark
all the girls playing volleyball
in the sun

I gave up on life getting better
a long time ago
so hand me another bottle,
friend.



you gotta write to keep from going insane

sitting on the steps of an art gallery in the hot sun
no one ever goes inside
(I once went in there …
you wouldn’t believe the garbage I saw)

sitting on the steps of an old white building in the hot sun
doing nothing
wondering why I’m here and
not somewhere else
as the sweat crawls down my hairy back

sitting on the steps of an art gallery in the hot sun
doing nothing
admiring the thighs and asses of young girls
as they walk by in their summer shorts
(did you know that the age of consent in Mexico
is 12?)

sitting on the steps of some old building in the hot sun
doing nothing
as the benches burn
the parking meters boil
and the world gets ready to explode.


she harvested

I once saw a photo of Anne Sexton

she had the face
of a real slut

many of her poems
say as much

her best poems
are about fucking and
a long one about her stay
in a mental hospital
(she had problems)

the rest are boring shit

some critic wrote
that many of her poems
are “unfinished”

those are the only ones
worth reading, you prick

well, she ended up
committing suicide at
age 33

another sad story

but those poems
and that photo
will outlive the Gods
all of them.