The Dream is not for The Awakened

The American Dream
is leveraged to the hilt
if you must know what
became of it.
For those whose dream is
America alone--they have it
but for those told that we had such plans
luxurious, great, unbelievable?

Our borrowed education and
mortgaged homes
and credit cards to bandage over
our occasional failures of making
rent remind us that our freedom
to dream is not free
and our human capital
gives us only so much credit,
and it is so very amortized
over time.

The dream of steady work,
pensions, savings,
time to enjoy your spouse
and kids--translate to flexible schedules,
personal savings plans,
and occasional leave.
But none of this was the dream.

There was a time when you or I
settled, eventually
by our fig and vine,
and drank deep of the richness
of life and the reward
of upright and righteous living,
our future generations
planning their way
where a way was clear-cut
and paved.

We drop our generations
into gorse and thistle
and we ourselves beat
among the reeds.

The dream was sold away
by those with seller's lips
and coster's eyes to sell to
us the fruits of our own labor
at a price so dear,
we pass up material comfort
because dreams are cheap,
and success is
priced out of our market.

Why don't we dream?

Because we know.

Why don't we dream?

We have seen.

Don't sell your pitted wares
from this gilded pulpit
and forget the labor that
our wallet means--

You think a dream is our birthright--
but some would sell it gladly for
a hill of beans.

The Scar

Between each hip
the scar runs
crosswise
beneath the navel,
an abdomen bisected
by the blade
to take out
so many pounds of flesh;
as once flesh itself
cut her
below the navel,
her life
bisected
to idly insert
new life within.

Those who never saw
nature's bloody claw
will never see that scar,
for the modesty we give
children
will leave it, for them,
veiled in a mystery.
But those who know
that bite and scratch living
and the pain that throbs in
the vital thrust

that drives the arteries and
the veins and muscular torsion
of all our mammal descent into
life know
this reminder will always stay.
This is the nature of such scars.
One beneath the navel
to go with the half-remembered
cut between the legs.
The incision where
a decision was made
for her
because her body
was too small to protest
and too small to comply.

This reminder will always be
a line to the first
brutal time, and every
brutal time confronted
with the link
her body helplessly
formed in a fear made flesh
and brought into this world
with the violence
doubled.

A connection to that man.
To his rights.
A gift to him
of fatherhood
unwillingly given
from her who was
called his
sometime child?

And as for well-wishes
and congratulations?
I wish those who made this happen
also wear a scar
being far more culpable for all
that transpired,
dear child,
than you are.

These children,
mother and child--
neither to be shamed
but in no argument
where "consequence"
is spoken of
can it be separated from
the moral frame.
That she "must" suffer
the curse of Eve--
her child,
(although one hopes not)
a mark of Cain.

I could wish you both a better world than this--
this one is always less than safe,
and has a logic worse than sane.

What Matters

What matters is the terror
that makes the indignity
pale before
the need to cry out
in self-defense
of your body,
notwithstanding the
threat to your mind
or the threat to your
voice--
but the terror of control.

That word,
control,
the specter of unseemliness
and the collective distaste
at the messiness
of so-called undignified
or unrespectable people;
the idea there should be self-control--

it's a lie.

When others have control
of you,
they strip that dignity and
they determine what seems
and make a new story
from the silence
of your stolen voice.

That undignified self
is a self robbed of dignity.
That unrespectable self,
is a self denied respect.

That control--
that some people have when
they shoot themselves while in handcuffs.

That control--
that some people have
when they find the strength to heave themselves up
by a bed sheet.

That control--
that some people have when they remain a threat
after ten or twenty or thirty
bullets fill their bodies.

That control--
that some people have when they
can provoke getting their body slammed
with a certain look in their eyes.

That control--
when all the education and self-determination
end up in an altercation
and a trip to a weekend
incarceration--no round trip.

That control, is a control
done unto,
and is done without respect for
your life.

And that is what matters.

And that is a situation very much out of control.

What it Takes

That phantom spell,
that dinner bell
that wreaks the breaks
from the ribs to the legs
My story swollen bellied to tell
richly feasting at
a wishing well.
My addiction lies between my brain
and my hips
to have something pass my lips
my dependency on carbon
fuel and simple sugars
and fats make me all that this body can be--

otherwise in the ditch is me.
Simply stating the biological necessity for sustenance
and who doesn't crave it?
But while we are here
where there is life save it--
restore the ecology that makes
menus complete and feed the faces pleading
that want for feeding
Unless we can feed the least of us--

Understand
the worms will make a feast of us.

To the nines

The cordite smell
can not linger
where the scent
of blossoms overtake
the senses,
borne in the arms of
ten million dakinis.

The oldest ruin
can only be so shattered,
but even atomized
it existed
somewhere, somewhen,
in our shared eternity.
And every burned book
contains an unburnable
idea.

My muses are better than
your artless god,
and give more joy
than your jokeless farce.
The diamond mind,
crystal sharp,
cuts through the
dross of hateful cant.

The clear sight
of creativity turns
force into a rainbow
that paints the universe--

mark me,

I will illuminate you.

Asleep

When I pretended I was asleep
and rigid,
I felt something
and my heart sank
for what felt like hours.
And it was weird.

And I sat with myself,
not asleep,
for hours, wondering,
why and what, and what should
I even do.

And nothing came to mind.

I could do nothing, or say
nothing.

Because nothing good comes
of saying something,
and nothing is always right,
because in the beginning was
nothing,

and that was good.

And if I were good, nothing,
no, nothing happened.

And after all,
the best dreams come
when one is asleep.

Memorial

Leave these
newborn graves
unbaptized with
fresh blood

and plan no
new battlefields
on the still-unsettled
dust of the old,

and have these parades
file silently by,
and finish
with "Taps"at twilight;

for we have
hallowed-up the dead
to deny to ourselves
that war is hell,

we have justified
our foibles on
their deaths' sake
and romanced

the gun that cuts
down lives
over their dead bodies.
Right or wrong--

their service was paid,
in the fullest measure
and should be played
for no dram more--

we honor them best
without glorifying war.