What’s Next

The war goes on
They’re stocking drones
Sowing bodies
In wartime tones
Beneath the sand
And sprouting bones
And wedding gowns
The tanks come home

The war goes on
The guns come home
They’re aimed at eyes
And throats and phones
Less-lethal games
For New Jim Crow
As vision dims
The tanks come home

The war goes on
Mute prayers flown
And it’s been going
You could’ve known
You never cared
The tanks weren’t home
The blood not yours
Bright on the lawn
So where are you
Now that it’s done—
The tanks came home
The tanks came home
The tanks came home
The tanks came home

re: Cohen, Democracy

It’s coming through a hole
in the airwaves today
It’s not exactly real but
It’s still everywhere in gray
Across your simulacrum grave
All the lilies that I laid
Censored swastikas that
Didn’t draw a stare

There’s venom in the belly
Of the beast that knows our names
It’s weeping out of LEDs
And wants inside our veins
It’s pooling at our ankles
And it’s sneering at its name
It plays language games
Pretends it isn’t there

It’s coming wrapped in banners
That have seen their final day
And it eats up all the symbols
That invite it in to stay
It gloats its iron law because
It cannot hear us pray:
Democracy is coming to the USA

So sail on unblinkingly
O crumbling ship of state
Catching refugees and scapegoats
In its Leviathan gait
Never Again returned so soon
In overcrowded cages
On the border of pandemic
And cruel indifferent care

It’s coming in the diction
Of the ones it would devour
It’s coming as crude babble
Pitching denials every hour
It’s coming in electric
Letters laughing at your wake
And I wonder if you could hear it
Would you despair?

Would you sing your hymn amid
This dizzy ambivalent haze?
Would your prophecy of hope resound
Even so defaced?
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gay
From all the godforsaken
Bile we choke down every day:
Democracy is coming to the USA

So sail on
Sail on
O crumbling ship of state

Faraday Cage

Morning rain run along
Brick circuit cement rivulet
Dawn chorus rings
Somewhere else
Disputing metronomic arrays
By the window pane
Braced sunfall warming
Ninety degree planes
Birds sang first
We built a cage

Only rigid clock hands
Ticking millimeters lachrymose
Echo bone against stray
Action impulse handrails
Retina twitch sectional
Lull waking REM cadences
Column scrolling flow
Gate information haze
Daydreaming lax afternoon
Allotted quarter-hour stage

Keystroke labor quiet
Down and roar awake
Ion current bloodstream
Pulse public dreamscape
Settles into grooves carved
Somewhere else
Somnambulistic hum leaks
Time unbottled firmament spilled
Ledgers marking this panoptic age
My mind is a bird in a faraday cage