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.
political poetry
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
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.
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.
Taking Time
One called Victor, a Dutchman,
The other a Scotchman called James Gregory,
And the third being a negro named John Punch.
They had run away from Virginia, were caught, tried, and sentenced in 1640.
The Dutchman and the Scotchman were condemned
To serve out the remainder of their indentured servitude
Plus one year.
And the third being a negro was condemned to serve out his life.
John Punch became the first piece of chattel.
And so, we took his time.
Eons passed.
One man might own a hundred lifetimes.
One fattened tick
That could never live a minute longer
No matter how much time he sucked.
No matter the genteel civility lavished on his equals.
The tick’s cause was lost:
Chattel disfavored;
Wages more efficient.
And criminals… who cares what happens to them?
Oh, by the way, if you don’t have a job
We’ll have to arrest you for vagrancy.
And now we have moved on from that barbaric dispensation
All the old problems have been solved.
We join together in harmony
And ignore the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Every day in the paper I read about time.
Time taken before it was due.
How much time does it take?
We Are Kept Awake at Night by the Cries of Starving Children
It’s August now, and the stores are gearing up to save the economy
The holidays are coming close and spending has been low
To cure what ails we need to spend, the price of liberty
We are the best, we need the best, as everybody knows
Ghosts and goblins frighten children until they laugh with glee
Throughout the neighborhood they scatter, to every door they go
And bring home treats they went to earn with costumed trickery
But Hind Rajab, phone in hand, cries the tanks are coming close
Thanksgiving next as leaves turn brown and red and orange and fall
The turkey fat and steaming, plucked and stuffed so we can savor
And everyone gives thanks to God, that we could gather one and all
But Nabhan’s bodies in the orchard marred our grace, ungrateful to the Savior
Then Christmas time, with all the snow, and elves and gifts and wonder
Santa Claus, he’s at the mall, with manger scene prospectus
Parents wink and purchase gifts which to the tree go under
But Mohammad Al-Motawaq, that bony babe, should starve; it’s all genetic
Would that some high stationed man with money and a suit
Could find some way to hide from me the children destitute
For their cries are shrill and feral and they break the season’s peace
I don’t feel bad; I’m just annoyed: I want their cries to cease.
Saccharine Under the Circumstances
I hate the whiteness that surrounds me.
That feeds me
educates me
pays me
celebrates me
disciplines me
shapes me
abets me
trusts me
gratifies me
winks at me
suffocates me
I hate the whiteness that moves through me
I hate that there is no way to separate
the color of my skin
from ostensible beauty of limits and thefts
from a normativity beaten from difference
from an entitlement of birthright without blood
from a divinity that crowned my father clean
from an objectivity that erases inconvenience
from a destiny that steals futures
from a nation that murders to make me
I hate to be marked
I hate to be favored
I hate to carry a history of rape and murder and engineered famine—
crushing the bones of little children like apple snail eggs—
and unload it with a thud
while knowing it’s heavier than I can perceive,
and you must work around it or be broken
by the weight of our knowing
I hate that the only word I have to describe this feeling
is as saccharine as “hate.”
Postwar Reaction
Had the Nazis won
There’d have been a
Nationalist Atlantic Treaty Organization,
staffed by high-ranking Wehrmacht officials—
men with names like Speidel, Heusinger,
Gehlen, and Globke.
Perhaps a man named Werner
would build rockets for the Reich
under the stars and stripes.
There’d be an industry for tracing ancestry.
People might say things like:
“I’m 47% German and 33% French.” And respond:
"Aren’t you glad to know that you’re pure?”
We’d compete for purest blood,
and purest German grammar,
and German ideals—
such as Efficiency,
Individualism,
the Value of Hard Work,
and Law and Order.
The police would be held up
as heroes
and paid as such,
with bonuses for cracked skulls
and hidden lists kept confidential.
Had the Confederates won
There’d have been a white supremacist United States,
with a white language,
and white neighborhoods,
and white committees deciding
who speaks
and who dies.
They’d issue identification cards:
Eyes: blue
Hair: blonde
Blood: Hexadecaroon
Neighborhood: Birchwood Reserve
The police would stop you
if you looked like you didn’t belong.
Villains would write our textbooks,
name our schools,
tell our stories—
and we would call them heroes.
All the Difference
What use is
Knowing
The mouton has nearly finished climbing.
Clench your fists
Grit your teeth
Gaze into the empty eyes of the heads in the basket
Perhaps you could shout
Some too radical words for the jeering crowd
As the white paint peels from the dry, cracked lunette
And a panorama of empty eyes
Hunger for someone else’s blood
You have time to think
And feel regret
Every time two paths diverged in a wood
You chose the guillotine
The frame shudders at the mouton's climax
What use is
Knowing
The blade is shearing through the air
And once you’ve stopped knowing
It will take another
Gimme A Dollar
I found, as expected, a card in my mailbox.
Sealed with a sticker
Embossed: “Happy Birthday”
I wondered if there was a gift card inside for a bloomin’ onion
(There wasn’t)
Let me fish it from the trash–I don’t remember what it said–
“We hope that your birthday was as amazing as you are”
It’s management dogma:
Never give a worker anything useful
Wages are kept low
So we are kept weak
I wonder what a birthday card costs–I never buy them–
Everything costs twice as much as it did yesterday
(Except labor).
Signed with love, from my [redacted] family.
My [redacted] family,
Who’d just turned my brothers and sisters
Out in the cold
I suppose I should be grateful
For the chance
To feast on their flesh
My parents took me out to eat for my birthday and gave me a hundred dollars.
They spent time with me and we talked about the world.
They know I don’t want a card, though I’ll still check it
For cash before tossing it in the garbage.
How wonderful it would be to come to work on my birthday
And find a crisp one dollar bill
With love,
From my family.
Sophistry and Solipsism in the New Millennium 