They installed a bookshelf in the faculty lounge
And congratulated themselves for
Trying to bring us together
With a battlefield.
I look for change every week.
Some proselytizer
Put Dinesh D'Souza on the shelf.
I stole into the lounge at night
And put D'Souza in the garbage.
I like to see the books nobody wants:
Two Dares to Lead,
And six Hillbilly Elegies,
Gifts from our betters
On how we can be better
Looking for survivors,
I shelved a copy of Settlers
And Labor Law for the Rank and Filer
But they haven't moved.
I'm looking for friends,
But I can't find the living.
Poetry & Fiction
Where the People Aren’t Real
If you could know a single man the way he knows himself
Or the safety that a child feels when cradled after pain
And every spark of unearned hate and clarifying rage
That burns through human history, page by bloody page.
If not one memory
Of one man's life
Could be taken and concealed
You would not
Casually toss your bombs
To where the people aren't real.
On Your Passing
Will I remember, young or old,
Your face as you were leaving?
Or maybe more, the face you bore
At the moment of our meeting?
You stole the food from off my table.
You killed a baby rabbit.
You sang with my harmonica.
You liked to smell of maggots.
You worked hard to smell refined:
You liked to roll in refuse.
Your teeth were always rotting out,
And your muzzle damp with drool
I'll recall when first I met you:
Wandering and hungry.
And then again when last I found you:
Stiff and cold and empty.
I'll think about the time between
When you, my friend, lived with me.
Without Pretext
They said if we broke the new rules
We would be sued.
We would have no backing.
And no one to blame but ourselves.
The boss tells us every year,
Before he jets off with his family for the month,
That we are the beating heart of the school.
He laments that there is no money for raises.
We’re supposed to do what we do
For passion and praise. It’s uncouth
For any of us to expect to be paid
For training the next generation of troops.
When Paul’s heart failed,
And they cleaned out his office,
They were glad to be rid of
His grandfathered retirement pay.
We’re a family, they say;
The kind with a narcissistic grandmother.
We’re all helping her maintain the belief:
We would be nothing without her.
Sooner or Later
At some point they will push the button.
God will demand it. Or some billionaire.
Same difference.
At the faculty meeting one of my coworkers told everyone a crazy story:
They're putting kitty litter in classrooms for the furry students.
The weather is pleasant.
It's December 28 in the northern hemisphere.
"It's horrifyingly nice outside," I comment.
Mom and Dad say they've planted some trees.
"You do what you can," they shrug.
Soon the army will be securing access to water.
I don't know what narratives my parents are absorbing.
They don't watch Fox and think they aren't brainwashed,
but they're usually angry at Kim Jong Un
I want them to be angry at people with power.
They've never asked me,
but I sometimes wonder if I'll find litter in my classroom
after the next school shooting
So I can help keep things clean.
It feels like the world is ending.
The way it was supposed to in 1999.
Evangelicals want to instigate Armageddon.
Everyone's waiting
Thinking they'll come out on top.
Cymothoa Exigua
The fish’s tongue,
Its vessels severed,
Rots and falls away
And Cymothoa exigua
Grafts itself in place.
It wriggles one way
Taking note
It wobbles up and down
It makes a dance that seems like speech
And becomes its master’s sound
And when the school of fish consumes
Exigua-serving lies
They can see the world’s truth
With Cymothoa eyes
Errata 002 (Fish Sandwich)
More than her pugnacious breasts
Or buttocks like grapefruits in hip pockets,
Men notice her hair first:
A great silken rope swinging to her waist
They flounder for weapons
Against her strength
And hope one day to bring her down to their level;
To use her body to wipe their feet.
They find fault to lessen the terror.
Her grandmother married her to a man with 60 acres--
If a woman is a mule, let her at least be well off--
But she left him for another man.
You cain't get her with no fish sandwich.
He demanded that she hide her hair,
And when he died she let it down.
All the men came running--
Each one offering to make her a mule.
She preferred managing the store
To managing her respectability.
Until one day Tea Cake saunters in--
Camels and Courvoisier--
"Oooh! it's a lady!"
She comes home from the store,
Finding him on her porch with a string full of fish.
"Hey, sweet thang,
Can I buy you a fish sandwich?"
2024
The most important election of our lifetimes:
Trump v.BidenHarris.
I remember the excitement
when she took the corpse-president’s place.
But then we were told
nothing would fundamentally change.
Fewer still hoped the killing would stop—
but Amerika did
what Amerika does best:
Genocide. Proletaricide. Anthropocide.
She needed our votes for the crime of crimes—
to damn our souls to everlasting hell
and save the nation’s empty myth
from a faltering husk of a man.
“The fate of the Palestinians is unfortunate,
but we must think first of our families.”
I voted for her.
Claudia de la Cruz.
The working people of Palestine are my family.
The King’s English
I wonder, before mass media,
How God named Light
In the king’s English.
Ecclesiastic hierarchy, sure,
But two men cannot see the same Sun.
And when the printing press came,
How far away was mass literacy?
How long until the masses can read the news?
Martin Luther put each man in front of his own Bible.
How could one book be read by two men?
Today’s stories come from the networks.
Corporate hierarchies, sure,
But we don’t have to read.
The internet knows things for us,
But we can’t read that.
Errata 003 (The Guillotine)
Every textbook read
Teaches us to take pride in your graft
Live for you and we can eat
And hope a few survive as children
They'll endure by tooth and claw
The world is yours, the anthem sings
Said bring you the bread
Clock in clock out pray to the calf
It's dishonorable to cheat
My blood becomes your billions
Your bloody hands stain every vault
All is yours but we have dreams
But guess what we got you instead
Don't bother dodging simple math
All for one was bare deceit
There's one of you, but we are millions
The blade is clean, and sharp, and broad
We'll only keep a headless king.
Sophistry and Solipsism in the New Millennium 