The people who became us lived under oaks. / In the canopy two rat snakes were in love, / spending their days in a warm caduceus.

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Don’t bury your images in the yard. / You’re supposed to starve the faeries, / mow down grave mushrooms, / take off your Scotch bonnet and / burn your scalp with moonlight.

If you held to your guns you’d still have guns. / Mean like Lenin without the mean, wrap / yourself in Jacobin bylines like a letter jacket, / forget the golden rules.

Don’t worry. / Don’t hesitate. / You are good. / You are righteous. / And righteous goodness / can never be cruel.

One day I woke up / and somebody called me “elder,” / and I almost checked my pulse. / Then I remembered— / queer years run on dog-time.

You’ve been hiding in the closet / of the abandoned K-Mart. / You’ve become a pastor to pigeons
nestled in trusses and rafters. / They coo to your sermons of / plentiful seed and a multiverse of millet.

1. The first thing you smell when you hit Main Street is: A. Burnt oil and fryer smoke. B. The ghost of the factory, coughing in the dust. C. Your own nerves. D. All of the above.

Naugahyde seats crackle and groan under my knees, / sounds like taking shoes off at the end of the night, / when I remember that the first computer / was a woman named Ada Lovelace / who worked from home, mailing numbers to a Difference Engine

We walk in the firelight of foreclosed homes, / smoke thick as the ink of old contracts,

“Sorry, can I have a Woody Burger with cheese and a medium vanilla Chipper Chilly Chompachino?”

After a few cycles, the clicking ceases / The diagnosis / Determines what a disease is / Until you die, gnosis ----------- is only a thesis

If Venus were the moon / your voice would still / smell like gunpowder 

there’ll be snow on the tombstones, / snow and something else / soon enough

And these, / throwers of caution to wind / are guardians of fire; / the living; / marching shoulder to shoulder with death, / ahead of death, / still living even after with death. / And forever with the name / with which they lived. / Since decay / passes beneath the tall horizon of their memory, / hunched and shamefaced.

the wars that bind your plowshares to the capital of others /the wars that take you / the wars that break you / the wars that make you/ a little bit less / a little bit at a time

I see it in the folds of your hyacinth mouth / I hear it in the splintered syllables of your culling tongue / I’ll carry you with rough hands / across the waters / into nothing

Ungrateful of their blessing, They were. / And the hands insulted, humanity they cursed. / Since their rightful place, was not crossed on chest, / in bowed servitude.  / … And the fall began.

Here’s a shit in Warsaw, / flying the Polish flag, / the German in Bonn. / In Lyon the Tricolor / sticks up from the dump.

I’m almost positive that / I’m dying. / Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. / I haven’t told my wife yet / and I expect, / at your age, / you should be able to keep a secret.

Where they hung the jerk / That invented work

His work is better suited / for panic attacks / than anything smacking of pride.

these parasitic hours sitting through the night

Free as black ants in a bladed line.

‘Hot roasted pigs will meet ye,

“Lay down your labors, good worker. 
Put off your boots and gloves. 
Enter, and be among your comrades whole.”

I heard scurrilous things: 
babies with two heads
locked in the attic,

exploit, object. St. Louis as beeswax, resin

You, from inside your  
publishing house of  
unearned income, 

Tenderness has no place here. / The long lineage / of gentle touch severed / by jagged images of the instant.