Bomb Your Phone

 

Bomb, 

blitz, 

bonfire your phone. 

Your $1500 phone you use

every damn day. 

(I use android myself,

I am not fancy. I call

my work and my spouse

and get text messages to confirm

my bills are paid.)

Are you relinquishing 

a consumer good

to signify 

a cultural bad--the desire to 

make whole companies perform

"Free speech" to suit Some one's ideology

instead of making a rational decision

re: the free market? 

How not conservative and specifically weird. 

Are you signifying you might surrender

the specific cultural good in your hand that you paid for because you are

a fucking schmuck who doesn't know

how the first amendment or 

the free market

anything else works, and 

lie in your teeth for clicks and likes? 

I think you should bomb your phone from space

to never Tweet again., being

bad at Twitter, history, the understanding of the moment. 

And also Tom Wolfe is overrated and that movie kinda sucked. 

Tears

 The burning tears of my anger

no longer flow,

but become steam

straight from my eyes.

They propel an engine 

of motion

so bespoke

no other fuel would do,

which moves as my 

emotion 

sometimes bids me to.

The Black Dog of It

 You must hate your life 

Rilke said--and it's true,

I do.

I would pull myself up by my roots

if I had to

and I have no one but me to be

bad to.

Sometimes.

The fury I feel 

is fear: 

a fire trying to make a light

to ward off the dark,

but any random spark

can set ablaze all I hold dear.

I see my black dog and pet him

even knowing he bites.

Both for love, and spite. 

Unknown

Will I see you again

anytime this side of the earth

if the frugal cosmos recycles

instead of dispatches 

souls to some other place

or, worse yet, disposes them?

Because I walk with

the unknown, alongside

the memories of those

I do not see

and while I know that they have ceased to be

they can not,

have not,

stopped being with me.

And what is left of them

and what is left of me, 

seem quantumly entangled,

and for the life of me,

I wonder about the life of you

having gone out to 

the unknown.

The Price Tag

 The price of Freedom(tm) is sometimes

littered bodies

abandoned strollers

walkers tossed aside

with no "hallelujah"

under a red white and blue banner

spangled with blood.

The price of Freedom(tm) is sometimes

a nation so gun-harrowed

we flinch at the early

rocket's boom

in the last gleam of twilight

and wince at

a siren's red blare.

We have purchased the freedom

to shelter in place and call

it brave;

from sea to shining sea

all around us is

a grave.

What You Are

 I am defining myself for myself

and not for your easy use

and handling.

My definition takes up pages

and increases while

I take up space.

When you define

some corner of me

to try and grab me whole,

it tells me less about me

than it does about

what you are.

The Sweep

 The inheritance of 

any of us is dust, and the 

birthright to settle anywhere

somewhere, 

the length and breadth from

scalp to toes, 

and the city ordained it wasn't so--

settle your dust elsewhere!

And in the cold of night

surrendered the meager things

of warmth and comfort to so much dust

and scattered belongings and persons

to the winds.

To the winds. When earth was the only home

that man would ever lay his form down,

of earth made and nurtured and all these

scattered dust motes once were enumerated humans

man and woman born. 

Where would they go, these forgotten children of your 

own ribs?

Where would they go, these houseless sparks of life

Once nurtured in human arms and human breasts

to be embraced by asphalt and condemned

by appearances and propriety to 

be embraced by the dust from which they came--

though in their dignity and vulnerability, they are

the same? 

The shame,

to deny a place at the table for those 

upon whom so much has been imposed.

To sweep away with indifference beings of 

dust, but sentience. 

and call it anything but violence.