every man to his junk-shop
-Canto 76
Usurper
I am no poet.
I have no right—none—to suppose I might
Impose myself
On a page
In verse
In the Age
Of the Screen,
Of “Living” Things with Dead Eyes.
Stately? Plump?
A joking Jesus
Crying out that I have been forsaken? (לָמָ֣ה עֲזַבְתָּ֑נִי)
Please—
Spare us the bitching and moaning—
Spare us the self-importance—
Spare us, please, your self-aggrandizing epic
In our fractured time of small dreams and small men.
Poem for Joan Vollmer
I
In Mexico cigarettes are cheap.
We smoked them together on the roof in the rain
In the Ciudad.
II
If we’d wanted to know what was coming,
We could have.
We could have taken preventative measures;
We could have developed the necessary antibodies.
We could have listened to Gillian Welch.
We could have read Allen Ginsberg,
Or Corso, or Snyder, or Kerouac.
We could have listened to “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” (B. Dylan)
Or Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces.
Then, at least, you could say you were warned.
Then you might have seen that my love is a gun.
III
There’s a big cockroach crawling
Up the wall by my bed.
I don’t move to hurt her,
She’s my friend, she’s my pet.
A fly that keeps buzzing
So near to my ear:
I try not to listen
But it’s all I can hear.
And there’s the scratching
Of the rats in the walls.
It’s holy Communion
And partaken of all.
This is to say: things live here.
Turn the light on and they’ll scatter, but
They live here.
They’re resilient and they can’t be killed.
IV
I still dream in these colors:
A sea, a winedark sea—
And a sea of white-wine tulips broken
Under polished black boots.
The Pacific—
The sea itself—
And a turtle who in retrospect was a warning—
An omen.
A yellow-and-black-polka-dotted Yayoi infinity
And a lone, slumpy water-lily
Still encircled at Giverny.
And—
The royal violet of a West Texas sunset,
Midland violet,
And in bold primary purple, yellow, and green,
A plate of white powder (sugar)
Piled high on our crispy golden-brown beignets.
Under the gray feathery clouds,
The soft pleasant green that grows on a grave.
White light shining down on the path;
White lilacs peeking up from dark earth.
And—
the dark red of spilled blood
a Good Hue
which I am trying to forget—
Though it would be liberation
to see his skull caved in
instead of yours.
That is—
I dream of a corpse.
I dream a faded dream of a disappeared self,
Of a person who once was me.
To be, or not to be,
Or to be someone else—
To be old Seamus with his hands in the dirt—
I did not yet know then what I was.
I still don’t know just what it is I am.
But I do know now what I was back then:
El hombre invisible,
Deep in the Basin, reserva extrativista,
Neglecting my duties.
V
The look in a person’s eyes
When they’re chained to a car battery
In the back room of a pulquería—
You never forget that.
One never forgets—
(she’s my friend, she’s my pet)
—one’s youthful fantasies of sex and murder.
But if you want to blow the sons of bitches away,
At some point you have to stop taking aim.
At some point you have to shoot—
To fire.
VI
Have mercy on the cannibal,
For in the end all things eat themselves.
We grow old, and we die,
Except for those of us who don’t grow old.
But there, I’m doing it again.
Telling you things that you already know.
This Lovely Administration (May Day 2025)
Argument
On the last night of the Autocratic National Convention,
Before they called the cops in,
I was in line for the Mar-A-Lago 24-Hour Breakfast Buffet,
Saying, “Take, eat, this is my body,
“This do in vengeance of me.”
The President gave his commencement address
From his podium of shit.
He said:
“You should be afraid.
“You are only a pawn in their game, and
“You should be
“Afraid—
“You should fear your own language”
—“precise terminology”—
“And thou shalt deathly fear thy true heritage.”
“The eagle flies ever South.
“The Centaur centipede spirals his body; he furls and unfurls.
“The elephant collapses under its own weight.
“The peccary eats its young.
“My fellow Americans—
“Let us pray for our Nation.
“Worship the paper tiger,
“And never forget that the earth is flat.
“As I go to my grave I’ll insist that the earth is flat.”
You can warp anything into anything;
It’s the American Way.
The myth swallows the mythmaker—
Homer speaking in a thick brogue;
Dante Alighieri with a midwestern twang.
“Poetry is news that stays news.”
A poem is one thing that should never stop speaking.
So speak plainly. Always speak plainly,
Even if your message is not plain.
There is beauty in plainspokenness,
True beauty lies in making yourself understood.
Response
Why did you assume the goal was understanding?
Who told you understanding was the goal?
Our present is a vulture
Tearing at the liver of the past.
I took my diploma off the wall.
In the end, the only truth that matters
Finds you at the end of the Mule Ears Trail
Or arrives on the Tyrolean wind.
The earth is always moving.
There is no such thing as tautology.
“He’s whispering to you…”
And outside of the Antica Locanda Montin I became Henri Matisse
In L’Asie, where it hangs deep in the heart of Fort Worth,
Before hurrying off along the edge of the canal.
And between the pages of Cantos scelti,
Leaves—
Plucked by “city fingers”—
Basil leaves taken from the grave.
“And none of these people is an extra.”
And what could have been different on the small boat.
What could have been different on the small boat?
And, I admit, there were times when I felt like chucking it all,
Chucking it all in the river…
But I didn’t.
Husk
There are two wet seasons.
One comes when the body is failing,
Leaking essential fluids.
The other just comes.
The dry season lasts so long.
