funerals are for coming together
and acknowledging a loss.
make sure you go. hug and cry.
something important has been taken from us
and it is worthwhile to see the corpse
to wash it
to dress it
until it kills all denial.
there is no back, only forward.
but all wounds must seal and scab to heal.
once the loss scars
we can pick up shovels
and hammers and go on the move.
Is evil something inevitable?
Something that must have its time,
like the darkness of the moon?
There will always be evil doers.
Power will always have its own gravity.
Some will always take lucre to tolerate horror.
The arc of the universe appears to bend
toward abundance. But that same can mask
totalizing power until it’s too late to overcome.
And yet, this has happened before.
And been defeated before.
Evil, like a candle in a jar, strangles itself.
We know we can do better.
We see others do better, as they see us
doing better.
And so
inevitably
we do
the work
the time
the struggle
the tears
the association
the building
necessary
to bend history
toward justice –
to give evil a smaller jar.
deletun zabaanetun-e, zabaanetun shehr-e
your heart is your language, your language is a poem
My soul. I say. How is your health?
It is not raining rain, you reply.
My heart is restless, you say.
Mine too, I admit. I have been blue all day.
Did your heart not want peace? you ask.
The heart did, I say, the mouth wanted something else.
We don’t send our best to lead us, I say.
From heart to heart, there is a path, you agree.
I am without words. I conclude:
I hope that this will end without more suffering.
May my place be green, you say.
May my place be green, I respond.
You might think to make yourself small.
They’ll make you feel ashamed
for sharing colorful ideas.
But when the rains begin to fall,
they’ll come asking for you.
You might feel the need to stay silent.
Trust is a luxury and yours
has been spent
on lottery tickets for someone else.
But when the rains fall
and the floodwaters begin to roll in,
they’ll come asking for you.
You might have to hide.
Draw little eyes on ping pong balls
so they think you never sleep
and draw a little mouth
that makes the same sounds they do.
But when the rains fall
and the floodwaters roll in
and the sea begins to lick at their feet,
they’ll come asking for you.
You might feel you need to run.
That things aren’t tolerable
any longer and it’s better to take
a chance on parts unknown
than to risk another minute
on this freight train ouroborus.
And when the rains fall
and the floodwaters roll in
and the sea swallows them
and they begin to feel the weight
of their chains in the icy depths,
they’ll wonder
how you could have forsaken them.
When they try to rule you,
ignore them.
When they threaten you,
laugh at them.
When they shoot at you,
belittle them.
where they kill you,
build a shrine.
When they bulldoze that shrine,
plant grass
and declare
that all grass
everywhere
is now a monument.
Every time anyone anywhere
stamps its blades with their feet
they march with you,
with us.
Breathless
It’s easy enough to take the firmament
for granted. If you thought
you could lose it
you might go crazy.
Leaving home is like that.
You feel freer than a cloud,
surprised at every turn,
and often bitter solitude
in spite of the new colors around you.
Familiarity is constraining,
but is also a scaffold.
Quite contrary, but then again
what might a fish say if
cast into the air?
He might say, I can’t breathe!
He might say, I can fly!
Let the thoughts flow from you.
Let them fill the page,
or rush down the drain.
Whisper to allies or
shout to the starry night.
Empty your vessel.
Spill them like tears
until they cover
the land and wash it.
You will not drown –
you will surge downstream
across the flooded plain,
they will become your river,
and you, its naiad.
Garden path
I carried a great stone up
a mountain for an age.
It would fall and I would
have to fall farther to catch it.
When all your progress can be
erased in an instant there is
no rest, no rest. Recovery
is for after reaching the goal.
I hauled that stone for an age,
filthy and twitching, then one
day halfway up I
realized –
this is not my mountain
this is not my stone
what if I never get to the top?
so what if I never get to the top?
and I turned off the road
and when I could no longer see it
I put that stone down in the moss
I remember the moss but I couldn’t say
where I put the stone,
I can’t picture it even after all that time.
I wandered all the way to the sea
and followed a great river
until it was swallowed by trees.
——————
when you go walking in the black woods,
go barefoot
so that you can better heed
the voices of the folk who live there.
After a star has lived its life
and run out of nuclear spirit,
after its atmosphere thins out
and its heart falls in upon itself,
after it explodes in all colors of the
rainbow and beyond,
diffuse rivers of its flesh pool
and form sunset clouds lightyears across.
Atoms from the star, in its grave,
encounter each other
one by one, maybe with refugees from
another stellar wake
and shake hands, come together, make
rocks and dirt, build houses, and eventually
sunflowers.
I automated cotton milling
then I automated knitting
I automated horses
then automated auto making
I automated chess and checkers
and automatically read the news
I automated chicken and pork
and automatically supersized you
I automated entertainment
before I automated art
I automated music
and I automated poems
I automated learning
I automated conversation
I automated relationships
especially transactions.
I automated life and
I automated love
I automated automation
And what was left?
sleeping and shitting
eating and gristle
horror and the wrath of god –
and cleaning up the messes
the robots keep making
