LEAVES OF GRASS
I was banished or else
I was trapped. I couldn’t move
without a passport and several
fingers on my scalp, four
contouring my hips, two
of a stiff drink. When I was fired
and required by law to have
my health insured, I fell
ill. I assured my children
they would live if they
quit growing, kept moving, stayed
out of the sun, stopped
only in well-lit areas, rearranged
their skeletal scaffolding.
My mother was forced to have
the child of her would-be killer,
was thus archetypal, was
historical then sterilized and made
symbolic of progress.
In the fouryear before
it again came down to
sycophant or psychopath
I overused the word haunt.
I had choices. Craft beer.
French-pressed Sumatra each morning.
A Prime membership
to discount my Whole Foods.
I had a deconstructed soul
food renaissance to look
forward to. New neighbors
sweating through candlelit
hip-hop yoga. In order to cope
with mourning the money
I earned but never touched
I worked until I dreamt
of work. I lived nowhere near
nontoxic water. I walked
and was accosted. I drove
and was accosted. I gave
up driving, but the poles
had already begun to collapse.
The infrastructure collapsed.
The trains collided. The winds
collided and nothing remained
anymore of our time to exhaust
a reversal effort. Only those
in the business of killing efficiently
could travel. Everyone else
was told to go back to a continent
where the business of killing efficiently
was booming. I was bombed
and denied refuge. I was sent
missionaries instead. I was given
an immature god and told to be
grateful. The faithful believed
in bombs and not refugees.
I slept in a bed and the children in cages.
I slept in a bed and the children in cages.
The children died in detention.
I paid my bills and was therefore
perpetrator. I paid taxes to be
more effectively terrorized.
Long-Range Acoustic Devices for all
the local precincts. I had a gun
because they had a gun
because I had the manner of a thing
on which a gun was found
planted. The bodies of activists
turned up shot in locked cuffs
and burned in locked cars
in the century after
a century of lynchings.
I was part of a citizenry
ruled by corporations that were
legally people who
could tracelessly erase
everything but plastic
which outlived us all,
but not before it became
customary to swim home
past flat fish and yard signs
mumbling [resist] above the headlights,
to emerge lotioned in a thin film
of oil, to be a homebody
and always on homeland
security camera,
shiny and pornographic
while hunched fiendishly over
the hot plate. I was not
there, I told myself.
You are not here, agreed
the bluetooth headset newsfeed.
