DISINTEGRATION
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
GIVE IT BACK
Give it back to the natives
Give it back to their race
Give up the occupation
And let honor be born in its place
Give it back to the natives
It was never ours to take
Neither the Spanish nor the English
Had any claim to stake
Give it back to the natives
Let it return to the source
Our settlements can’t legitimize
A title taken by force
Give it back to the natives
From sea to shining sea
Stop holding the people of this land
From the lands of their legacy
Give it back to the natives
Let them decide if we can stay
If we have enough to offer
Or if we need to move away
Give it back to the natives
Let the empire end
Stop invoking the victory
That makes it easy to pretend
Give it back to the natives
We robbed it from them in our youth
We’ve studied our own history
We must respect the truth
Give it back to the natives
Let them return to the land
Let them start the restoring
Where their nations used to stand
MEZZO RELIEVO
Wherever evils are known only by rumor
Harmony can feel like mediocrity
Decency seems a boring call unless
Bullies show us what indecency can be
Peace shows its depth of soul only in those years
One feels near the worthless maiming caused by wars
The aims of the masses sound too small-minded to protect
Until some unifier uses “Greatness” to bind us to his chores
Patience with injustice can be called the people’s cowardice
Until militias add guns in back to guns in front
Civil rights may not seem worth the drain on law enforcement
Before resisters to tyranny become the target of the hunt
Fascism may feel like a way of finally snapping straight
From a world clattering with unrestrained voices
Whose millions of clashing calls may seem our greatest frustration
Until someone comes to strip us of our choices
GONZALO GUERRERO DE PALOS
They come in earnest; this is not good
Better they should all shipwreck and scatter
Better for them, as well as for us
I have told you what they believe
I have told you what they desire
They have no concept of the worthy life
Their visions come from the decimating empire
The liberation I have experienced
When my last ties to my homeland shattered
And their Latinate incantations owned their unreality
All this now is threatened; and as I love your ways
I tell you, you must smash them when you see them in corps
Be brave, for they mean to efface all you hold dear
Let it be their disaster when they march upon these shores
COLLAPSING TOWARD RAWEST FERTILITY
Personal, Impenetrable
The momentary associations within one brain
The artist leaves small clues at the surface
If I’d read what you’ve read
Seen what you’ve seen, thought what you’ve thought
Sought what you’ve sought
Your art-mad clues would be the highest triggers
If I had listened where you listened,
The way you listened…
You want to transmit what you have for transmitting
Though you sometimes doubt you’ve added anything of worth
Perhaps recognizing old sources for your thoughts
You cannot testify surely to any originality
Nor weigh how much value you might have added
Perhaps your gift is a twist, like a strange filter
To overcome this quandary, you reduce to
“Value me for my strangeness”
And send forth a jumble of words, names, and outlines
Hoping the world sees your talent as a word-angular expressionist
Craft abandoned
Large, demanding ambitions having brought empty exhaustion
The abyss assails all spaces between the fragments
The fragments say, “Proclaim me as far as I have come”
But there is no proof beyond the seeming
The artist casts, counting on the audience
To see something
Where the artist was stranded with more passion than vision
After gambling all on their own breakthrough
Wanting to express more than they were granted
The universality of
Vertigo?
The universality of
Losing way?
Not even
But, the potent accidents of randomness
When sprinkled with the evocative?
Absolutely
NOON
We settled on starting the day
At midnight
We settled on starting the year
In the days of least sunlight
Conducing to a myth
Whether born before or after
That the cycles of the world are
The rise, and then the fall
What if the day began at noon
And the year at summer solstice
Starting at the height each time
Falling, then rising again
To reattain the same height?
The eternal recurrence of the zenith
Or the eternal recurrence of the nadir
Neither is less true than the other
But one makes the fall less fearsome
THE DANGER IN INVESTING IN YOUR SKILL
When they cleared the fields for easier tending
Of the grains from which they had learned to make bread
All the work they did for the welfare their kin
Just paved the way for the layering of rulers to begin
Labor is strong magic
But not the strongest yet
One can never make
As much as one can take
The harvest that families can reap from the fields
Unless they have armies fit against Sargon
Becomes an inviting prize
Despite any defense they devise
If you gather all good things in a storehouse
The freebooters will surely gather, too
And if they settle among you permanently
They will call themselves the nobility
Those who conquered, surely, became different
Perhaps their thought did elevate
From ravaging bands, fearsome and cruel
Through the mental challenge of having to rule
But their superior position was not born of virtue
And certainly not by creating the wealth
They saw others producing, and bullied to possess
What better-disciplined people had worked through to success
They thought themselves superior because they had won
Over people who, up till then, were outside their concern
Only once those people developed a revolutionary skill
Were they worth subjugating to crude, predatory will
WITH POUCH
Thinking about love
Trying not to think about terror
Slasher film psychic assaults
Undying supernatural gore
Recoiled like a snake
Frozen, unable to strike back
Pause, and mercy reviews it in a dream
Now, along a high desert path
Back turned on their world
I carry the potent mixture
Rattlesnake and sage
Clothed against the sunburn
Which is my chosen alternate risk
Ready
Should they try to send their poison my way
But, I am no longer in their box
Anyway
DESCENT INTO THE ANCIENT CRUELTY
“Not us,” say the liberal-minded moderns
“We only want our freedoms to be had in other lands”
Having fought once against clear and unquestioned evil
We feel we fight all wars with clean morals and clean hands
But other lands often see our tactics differently
And we assume they simply fail to understand
We think that we are offering only the good things we have
As our elites play to win, and our powers overseas expand
We got our orders from the money-elected
We got our motivations from cached film of tyranny
From miles up, above the clouds
We got used to inflicting injury
No ill will against the others was required
No indulgence of base vengefulness, no desire so rough
From miles away with embargoes and freezing assets
We figured, if we made things miserable enough
The people would grow incensed against their own rulers
(And not hold the harm done against us)
Though we starved children and bombed hospitals
We thought America would still shine and gain the trust
We accepted the morality of “collateral damage”
And were surprised at scenes of the ungrateful liberated
We’d had no bloodthirst involved, we said
(Never mind what we pushed into each 11-Bravo head)
We simply hardened ourselves to the necessity
Frustrated, perhaps, but not just lashing about
But these people hadn’t risen up, the lazes
Not because they couldn’t, as we initially reasoned out
Are we the only competent nation around?
Well, in aggravation and in pride
We had to move in ourselves
It was a shame if yet more of the innocent died
But perhaps, they deserved what they got
For not rising up when we wanted them to
What? No one here said such things?
Don’t tell any tales that, if you think, you know aren’t true
Yes, they didn’t greet us as liberators
No, they were contentious from the start
Many of them felt we had something against Muslims
Despite the PR palliatives we wanted them to take to heart
They remembered our President’s comment about a “Crusade”
Long, long after we forgot
And they thought we were calculating liars, rather than self-deceivers
Pretending the truth was cool, when we all know it to be hot
So, as we started redefining torture
And still going past our redefinitions
And we started secret courts, secret prisons, secret laws
We still pretended it was for peace’s preconditions
And not for vengeful anger against those who continue to oppose us
And not for gratifying our dark side
Because the “dark side” only belonged to the other
We were still Americans, decent even while we lied
Not at all like the evil militias in Bosnia
Not some secret Brownshirts under liberal veneer
Certainly not like terrorists (for terrorists lack the upper hand)
Those troops who acted basely, were simply aberrations
Our military is only doing its mission to destroy an object of fear
No, don’t search beneath our cloak for dark things; it gives our opponents courage
The truly loyal shouldn’t care the measures we decide we have to take
Much of the world thought we were becoming like the Romans long ago
They had no idea how far we were willing to go
DERAILED
The nation was in halves then, too
Though the momentum was pressing the other way
The rationale for hawkishness and illiberality
Lost appeal against idealism’s sway
New believers, with world-friendly sentiment
Were enthused by a visionary democratic call
New ideas of social justice caused echoes in Washington
Then fractured in Dallas, and in L.A., hit the wall
HORIZONTAL
He sat, contemplating the campfire
Alone with it, or as if alone
Trying to call up the vision of the future
Then it came, and he shrank back, vision-bitten
He saw houses rise, strong walls, not meant to move
Water re-routed, fields etched to plan
Pulleys, monuments, scribblings and doings
Sun-god strivings, sacrifices, achievements
Ascents and collapses, and ever-stronger ascents
He rubbed ashes on himself, still hot with embers
His kinsmen mixed more with water, pasted them on
His naked body sucking restoration from the ashen paste
He arose, and walked to the group-painted rock face
Traced his finger backward over his work, as if to remove it
And faced away to a smaller sun, a yellow heart
Only one seed in him wanted this upward-piercing climax
Only one seed in him, which knew the god-power coiled in man
Might want it released, rather than held in secret ban
The horizontal spends what it gains, but it does not exhaust
In our celestial vulnerability, we gain awareness supreme
Part of us wants eternity, and shall never surrender the quest
But where we choose to remake, we allow ourselves false perception
And, while we cannot resign from a place in the world’s transformations
Being part of the world, interacting as part of the chain
If we subtract our intent, we come closer to truer perception
Horizontal truth conversing with the vertical will
Man has more than his own greatness to fulfill
DON’T CHEER TOO LOUDLY
Don’t cheer too loudly when Bush hits the floor
And America goes back to what it was before
The rich a little less blatant about robbing from the poor
The hollowness less obvious when we lay the ground for war
Our resources sold off more quietly from the federal store
The CIA back out of the spotlight as it peddles lies and gore
Our habits tracked more quietly for law enforcement to explore
The growing gulf between the classes excused as free enterprise’s core
Rich lobbyists rolling back gains that took decades to score
Corporations deciding the policies we pursue beyond our shore
Centrists from both parties making sure we don’t get sore
While they pursue the same class interests that Bush make too clear to ignore