impediment culture

In Oklahoma I grew up with Indians.

Didn't know that they'd ever left anything

but Florida, which at the time

didn't sound that bad to me,
as hot as it is there.
In Smithville
we were all poor

as possums going through the garbage;

it didn't bother me or my

Indian friend Steven,

who could barely enunciate because

of a speech impediment

but learned to say fuck long before

it ever occurred to me.

I'd always pretended

to be a cowboy,

riding right next to John Wayne,

where heroes wore guns, not face paint.

(And the ones that wore face paint

were usually white guys anyway,

so what difference did it really make?)

You would've figured I'd have gotten

a better idea of how things had been

if how things actually were

was not the normal human shit

every little no-light town has to deal with.

The sun comes up. Goes down.

People are poor, drive drunk,

go to jail, die alone or they
end up "killin' themselves"
in the seat next to Vic Hopper's dad, mysteriously,

and no one cares -
there were drugs in the car -

because it's just "thugs killin' thugs," that's all.

And nothing about their color, nothing

about their color at all,

just the shit we were all swimming in,

and the stupid mostly-

white men running the school.

partum

I keep wondering -

when the shit finally gets out of my head,

where's it going to go? Who's going to listen

to my babble when you're gone?

When you're across continents and oceans

and I'm still here, taking the bus to work.

Who'll hear me

when I read something funny

when I get up in the night to piss?

(for lg and tc)

thoroughly persuaded

"No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other's worth."

- Robert Southey

the present

"And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

- Kurt Vonnegut, from Slaughterhouse-Five

"Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most needs poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall. Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity. Nothing out of its place is good and nothing in its place is bad. He bestows on every object or quality its fit proportions neither more nor less. He is the arbiter of the diverse and he is the key. He is the equalizer of his age and land . . . . he supplies what wants supplying and checks what wants checking."

- Walt Whitman, from the preface to Leaves of Grass

sensible of conditions

"On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. "

- Annie Dillard

(we are) the body

I cast your foundation like a stone.

I lost myself - moving from home

to unknown, to seeds sewn,

seeds wild and lovely, and perhaps not in wisdom;

but in beauty.

My self had dangled from your back pocket

like a rag-doll,

off the edge of your limericks,

your repetition and your rhyme,

your song out of time. Too long. Too long now.

I'll show you how,

and declare:

I dove into the deep when I dove with her.

Now, right now,

to Hell with you.

You, you children of darkness.

William Blake will show you how.

Listen! Listen up, I'll say it loud!

Listen, you pirates of morals, you makers of locks

and locksmiths, you bastards, you blockheads:

I aim to bury you.

(Also, apologies to Emily Dickinson.)