Chorus (12 page)

car bombs exploding

colorful sparks.

  A crimson flame

  igniting the soul.

Violent forces

that destroy tranquility.

A war for freedom

puts us in chains.

Slavery of the mind.

A forcefulness upon the spirit.

My name has been added

to the list.

Barbed wire dreams

that result in

split cells,

split atoms,

a clone of humanity.

Brainwashed and burdened,

a flock thrown into slaughter.

A whimper clinging to hope

echoing
on mother's flesh.

Upon the mountains

the rocks slide.

Upon the islands

the rain pours.

Upon the deserts

the sun blazes.

Always a fight,

a pursuit of unhappiness.

A pursuit of misery is

a pursuit of the unjust.

And I am to raise a glass

to an unforgiving land

that feeds on the blood

and tears of us all?

1.

Self-immolation.

Freedom
spread
s like fire. Burn the names of martyrs into the lawns of your governments. Each day is a revolution of the planets.

2.

Taking up arms that hold you in the night. Clicking bullets against your heels. Piercing a statue of a dictator in the heart with an arrow.

3.

Sleepless dictators in their palaces watching Home Shopping Network marathons and buying water features that will run blood.

4.

Ailing dictators running out of veins. Veins collapsing
like
borders.

5.

Their
war
crimes
on
YouTube
.

6.

Waking up without fear.

Black to black uniformed riot police.

Back to back revolutionaries.

Bodies bending under water cannons, like cards in the hands of a dealer. The valentine saints offering roses,

that soldiers forgot.

Kneel and pray. Kneel and pray.

7.

Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Côte d'Ivoire, Palestine, Syria. I wish I could give you my blood for your wounded. I wish I could give you anything.

I.

everyone has cried a wall of tears witnessed brutal massacre watched countless others mourn their precious
freedom.
trusting that when we awoke we would still be among the living. we felt so helpless here on a level of compassion for one manifests itself in gestures as daring as saying they are no longer citizen. compassion for those must be practiced, to demand an end to the absurdity being fed to us by daily papers, stand with people the world. self interest exists in the reflections we are proud to be equals with the globe

II.

vocabulary fades, ghostlike in the world of last week
. the date admitting is eternal describes those to draw a circle of definition. holding our breath waiting for the time for new sets to define the limits. it allows meaning to emerge retroactively to take shape in light of everything. some say it's a hinge turning open to wait and see proliferation of the impossible means it's possible. we pour out into the world from a cloud of dust and debris the unstoppable waits suspended, wondering what will take place.

III.

in the first days there was talk about using the unthinkable to dissolve into possibility. more people called to name themselves making it easier to contemplate. in the first days after it became clear that nothing could be ruled out.
another act in another place took form
: (an uneven wave of devastation moved outward & the immeasurable happened). we find ourselves at a remove that widens as the day passes. wanting to speak and care for those who are far but here our throats are closed. we listen to talk of unity as if debate and
dissent were on the freeway.
in brilliant sunlight blowing on the beat we pore over the details until the details prove
d
too much to handle
. moments when people meet consciously sudden as it was thought was too important to talk and be aware of what happened. we are at home together out of silence.
we are fifty billion

IV.

there is a meditation on dying on evenings when a photo framed of peace is the only weeping. bitter tears that linger. i spoke to people who wanted to jump into suicides but couldn't see the sorrow that i had felt. it was a logical thing to hold their hands. there is a meditation on dying on mornings when a song is played and the only crying of bitter pain is pressed into pillows. i laid in their sorrow and tried to understand their discomfort but i couldn't see the sorrow they had felt. it was a logical thing to hug them. there is a meditation on dying in the afternoon when the world goes on with their day and i stand in the middle of crowded streets trying to ask people about their loss and they walk past me like ghosts. i extend my hand and only one woman takes my hand and she said it was a logical thing to shake my hand.

I am holding my friend Gino's hand

and
asking the army recruiter for more information
–

About the Marines, please
I say. He fidgets with his

cuff links, paws at his first communion crucifix through

his shirt, drags the back of his hand across the close-shaven

sandpaper of his chin. Gino is staring

him down through the eyeliner he wears

like a middle finger.

We watch this stranger. Caught between the trained

movements of a machine and the churned butter in his body.

Just like mine two months before when I said hell no

to a trip to the gay club.

I just don't want to lead anyone on. It'd be, like, colonizing the space

I said. Which sounds a lot better than
I'm uncomfortable. I wouldn't

know how to stand.

What do I do when a song I like comes on?

In east Africa, I walked the dirt roads of a violent slum, my pinky finger

intimately wrapped around the smallest digit of the most infamous thug

on the block. He was my friend. It is how friends walk the streets.

When I greet my Iranian friend's father, we embrace cheeks, twice.

In Thailand, my host casually patted my leg at the first family dinner.

I nearly jumped through the window, thinking he was reaching for something

else. Everyone laughed.
Probably confused
as to why this strange foreigner

had been trained to be so foreign to the gentle touch of a man.

A passerby gives Gino and I matching names. I tongue the word around in my

mouth. Feel the tender sting make a home in my torso. Stare at the word

Brotherhood
splayed across a camouflage banner.

The recruiter stares down at the table, as though it holds the secret

code to life's great questions. His corrected stutter and slightly overcompensating

stance, blends into the decorations behind him.
So much so that I can barely even

tell he is still there. He pretends as if we are not. Begins sorting and then resorting

the three lonely pamphlets dwarfed by the large rectangular table where they now sit.

Boys, seriously, I'm just doing my job. Please . . .
his mouth begs in a voice so small

and so human it makes me feel like I have just blurted out a secret this man has given

his life to guard, like freedom.

The seventy-nine-year-old American
war hero
, a Medal of Honor recipient, a pilot once known among his troops as ‘Striker' or sometimes simply ‘Ace,' sat alone in a retirement home, diapered, morbidly obese, in bed, in the corner of his dim lit room, before a closed window, beneath the projection of a muted TV, crying, his thick thighs chafed and rife with broken, cold blue veins, his gelid eyes leaden and weary—a soldier who was among the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star award, the Bronze Star, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the WWII Victory Medal—now seventy-nine, at 2300 hours on 23 August 2009,
crying into the quiet
, holding his chest, stooped on a stiff mattress in the corner beside the window, 5'10", 275 lbs., his wizened pallor transparent and flecked with blood-dry ulcers, also bald except for the thin strands of white matted from ear to ear at the bottom of his pasty scalp, his brows beaded with sweat, the hair on his back white and curling out of wan red scales of psoriasis, the joints of his arthritic fingers bent and inflamed, his left hand shaking and clutching a Colt, his right hand also
trembling and loading the chamber
, a box of bullets strewn between his heavy legs, his small wrinkled penis soaked inside the moist diaper, his sore shins aching, his bare toes curled in angst against the cool wooden floor—a recipient of the Flying Cross, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart—now fallen to his knees, hysterical, mumbling for God, and occasionally inserting the cold barrel of the revolver into
his mouth beneath the muted TV before the closed window in his bedroom, alone; he, himself: a trigger down in the lean, desperate hours.

I met my grandfather for the first time

when I was spoiled

and thirteen

at a Central Valley IHOP.

We had driven four hours to meet him

I wondered all the while where he had been

and when his arrested presence

would begin to rot

like breakfast for dinner

The year 2001 was littered with Y2K wonder

and the world was becoming

red-cheeked

by its wet dreams for change

thirteen, for me,

was a pile of
bloodied
boy-shorts,

Columbine clippings
without
context

hidden beneath my trundle bed--

a time of pay phones at PJHS and

Collect Calls for changes

of clothing to cover

over-stuffed chests and greased new thighs and

all of this was just a tribute

to the roll-your-eyes “dittos” of my days

and my incapacity to

open my throat
and

swallow Kahlua

made me a cross-legged

sitting duck

amongst long-legged,

deep-throated swans

and when my grandpa pulled up that day

(left-footed on the brake)

with his girlfriend, Evie, and

the six of us crammed into a booth built for four, I lied

and said I had never tasted poached eggs

(or booze,

or cock)

or turkey bacon

“can you imagine?”

and assumed the position

of the child I thought fit

for this smelly relic

of my father's dine and dash father.

And amidst this screeching introduction,

I
push
ed
the
hypothesis
around on my plate

that change is a convention and

that forgett
in
g is “growing up”

tha
t
f
o
rgiveness is a sloppy mess of scrambled sides.

And I wondered when
my
poached,

baby self would finally return

my calls

and agree to drive with her family to

breakfast--

to make small talk

with our
mouth
s full of cracked times

to declare them over and easy.

The trick of any city is to
find
who gives the free toast and eggs hot water for coffee and

if they'll let you bathe by them

it's a good thing, but if not there is always the Pilot.

In Portland it's Sisters of
the Road
,

they will make you a meal if you'll promise to clean something

but everyone promises to clean and there's really always nothing

that needs to be done, so they'll give you a rag and tell you

to
clean the walls for a while.

In Santa Cruz there's Subrosa where they'll trade you any book

if you'll act like you care about the coming
revolution
.

And they're all such good people.

And they're always doing something.

They'll make you really hope their silly dream might come true.

There's the Star House in Columbus,

where they won't let you curse

and everyone's got a baby and the babies are very rude.

And in Pittsburgh I forget the name but they'll put you to work.

They've got hammers and nails there, I forget what it's called.

Any time you leave a place,

you will speak a lot more often to the people you've left.

For a week or a month, you will know that you've gone

and
you've ruined everything.

All the good memories seem to resolve themselves

in mistaken eternities. We're always thinking

we've destroyed a forever.

But all of God's creatures deserve to be eaten, or

even without Him, we're all lackeys for something.

In one small evaluation, that's what all of this is:

the
acceptance
of “creature,” giving up the claim to “god,”

bopping between homes because you know you're not the story,

you hope only now to become a worthy trope,

a messenger of something,

where “the medium is . . .”

In Missoula, in a place at the base of Mt. Jumbo, there is

a girl named Kate. I want to tell you I know her but that's the thing