The Lord is Everywhere.
It is the Lord who deviseth the drive-by.
This is the Lord’s TV, The Lord
Likes primitive social games.
If there were a foursome of Lords
The streets would be their fairway,
But there is only One Lord.
And He is not amused by golf, except
Occasionally when he runs lightning bolts
Through the ground into the punter’s spikes
And they wilt suddenly and fall over
Like daisies, their heads hitting the ground,
Their clubs scattering, their carts close by,
Mute chariots, witnesses to their whimsical end.
The Lord is not only tolerant, but obliging,
And complicity is not in the question—
Complicit with whom? Some bystander?
Does anyone imagine the Lord
Seeks ratings? Blood and bread,
Altar and victim, terrorist and terrorized
And everything nonconformist
Is written on the palm of The Lord.
The Lord is everywhere. Truly,
The Lord deviseth the drive-by
With the weird haircut driving,
As well as the nullification of gun control.
The Lord inhabits the heretic’s explosion
Permeates its rage and resentment.
Jehovah is The Lord’s hand puppet.
Off-the-Books in Darien
Meanwhile, in the Fourth World,
In this century of counterfeit freedom,
After the lime is scattered on the surface
After the paraffin is poured in the pit
And the rotting feet, infected bone of peons
Marching in place through the dead of night
Stamping out the vintage where the slums begin
Where the red dresses and shoes of the whores
Congregate around their priests
On the high corners of urbana,
Those who wait for Ali’s Justice wait in vain
Because there is no breach in the traffic
Engineered by off-the-books profits
Of the false prophets of Christ, where
The Ethos of the State and the Ethos of the Church
And the Ethos of the Traffic cross, which
Constitute the Cross and the evil of secret power
Conveyed by the Bishops of misery and supply
Arriving nightly in their opaline windowed Limousines
Still reflecting the eternally white peaks
Strung along the distant Andes like beads.
Corsica
BONIFACIO
Long deep harbor perfect for sea robbers
and banditos from classical times
limed with steps on sheer stone walls
twelve kilometers from Sardaigne
across an island dotted strait now
said to be infested with mafia yachts
Odysseus’s instinct wisely kept him back
from entering this attractive shelter—
seeing no ploughed fields or other
signs of human activity, catching sight
only of whisps of smoke rising from upcountry
a scouting party was cooked on sticks
By the Laestrygonians who came
running in their thousands at the news
more like giants than men, possibly Archaics
probably descendent from the neolithic dolmen
carvers, whose sites lie in the cork oak forests
hidden in the hills to the north.
All the ramparts are now lined with restaurants
and the water has turned to Heineken
but no danger from the interior now
or the stone throwing maneaters—
the pirates own the nightspots and the harbour
and run the trips to Grotte Napoléon on the hour.
Petra Kelly—recalling German Green, 1992
When Petra Kelly shot herself
I was right beside her in my heart
and my admiration for her steadfastness
was complete and totally unlike
what I feel for the black-boy whips of McDonna
or the earlier pretenders like Jane and Joan,
in the brief history of corrective sensibility.
The careful mediation of her
American accent, the pure Georgetown
german weltwaves in the background.
Certainment, why hang around
for the land to fill up with genetically resentful and
overproduced Southerners just so the pretenders
can get their carpets vacd?
The history of the world has been written
with the disappearing ink of those accounts
and the pilfered wages of their solution—
the sine qua non of population dumping.
¡Salute! and so long Petra.
For the price of a single round, you ducked
the destiny you described, and gave the colour to,
and framed—the born prophet
of a finale full of Fall Out,—Bye Bye.
Mordecai
Mordecai Vanunu was the most brilliant Israeli.
He was the merest, secret whizz
in what’s left of the conscience of the wilderness.
Well named for Mordecai Day (Purim),
the celebration of Spring over the destructive forces of Winter
and the rainy season, The Fallout,
and the dark night of radiation, so says my Hastings.
First they hounded him in London, and they
ferreted out his weakness with an irresistible
sexo-sensational woman—they’re like
the Russians in that way,
they really know how to run women. Indeed
he followed her like a frothing dog, dripping the foam
of hydrophilic submission right into the planeseat
to Rome and then on to Tel Aviv. And the Mondo Press
slavered too, for all the world wanted to know the route
Mordecai took to his eternal incarceration.
He would have been thinking of Blowup
when he slapped the window of the van
with the ballpoint message on his hand—
patty cake on the paddy wagon,
as it rolled him into Sinai oblivion.
And when the film was developed and blown up
it revealed the whole secret archive and picture
of everybody who’d made the bomb from Chicago
to Moscow
with the metaphor on the palm of his hand—
Hail Mordecai! the most brilliant of the Israelites.
[October, 1986]
Sniper on the Roof: the cheap elimination of heretics
The equipment has a certain cost—
the supertech Remington Police Rifle.
The training is laid on by the Central Force
for those eager to kill, but not just to kill,
no, to kill a human, from say 90 meters,
a man, not a woman no, no, not a woman,
not even a worthy man, but a trash man, drunk,
emotionally distraught, unable to see a way,
black probably, but even better, white—black—
black is too obvious, too recurrent,
too easy, too repetitive, too predictable
too apt to generate confirming statistics,
and affecting a part of the white population
who don’t care a whit about a loser
whiteman getting gunned down for,
apparently, the amusement of the media.
North American dogs get more respect
than the man raving with family trouble
at the sun in the day or at the moon by night.
No jail time, no room and board on the county
no rent due for putative privatized prison space,
this is population control, pest control
straight out, no more thought to charges
than would be due rats in their subterranean
urban towns,
Some of this mankilling
is called suicide in the “officer do your duty” style
utterly ignorant of the sniper lurking on the roof
waiting for the signal, the checkered flag
signaling the start of the frozen race to eternity.
Cheap beyond the imaging power of the target
this is not so cheap as doctor death’s plastic bag,
true, but then this is state murder, not
the legal, struggle between a pathologist
and a pathological state, this is not big fauna
sought by rich men, this is not the wrack
the back of the inquisition, only now
there isn’t even a question before the answer.
But the Mexican or other Meso-americans
in the crosshairs too much resemble
shooting dogs streaming across the border,
a chain loop in a carnival, alien culture,
cinco de mayo, the day of the dead, muerto
built into every gesture, a waste of ammo,
and in fact demeaning to the sniper. This is
palpable desperation, this targeted man
doesn’t have a computer, or even a primitive
weapon, this man’s hunter is Raytheon of course
via killer personnel in full swat combat dress.
fresh from an Abudabi arms fair. Every
jerkwater police force will apply for the grant
of a state sniper who can eliminate
the non-cooperative, those who are now
the public nuisance, the epidemic of just
plain trash, to be picked up, put on the stretcher
and hauled away to the dump of postmodern
American madness by the lackeys picking up
after the Central Force—anyone with
good eye test and a steady finger and
no conscience whatsoever at all can apply.
FROM CHEMO SÁBE
Tribe
My tribe came from struggling labor
Depression South Eastern Illinois
Just before the southern hills start
To roll toward the coal country
Where the east/west morainal ridges
Of Wisconsin trash pile up
At the bottom of the prairie, socially
A far midwest recrudescence of Appalachia
My grandfather French Quebecois
Master pipefittter in the age of steam
Indian fifty percent, very French
Who didn’t derogate himself
As a breed, showed none of those tedious
Tendentious tendencies. Came down
From Chebanse, from the Illinois Central
In Iroquois County, to the Chicago &
Eastern Illinois line’s division at Villa Grove
In one of the Twenties boomlets,
The last precipitous edges of the great devolvement
These forebears on my mother’s side
Owned a nice clapboard house in old town
Where I was brought up off and on during
The intensity of the depression, parents
Wandering work search, up and down
The bleak grit avenues of Flint, following
Other exodus relatives, Belgian in-laws
From another French connexion
Michael Moore-land from the beginning
Manmade poisons in the cattle feed way
Before Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and angry cows—
Governments always conspire against
The population and often
This is not even malice;
Just nothing better to do.
I’m with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis
And every defiant nation this jerk
Ethnic crazy country bombs—
World leaders can claim
What they want about terror,
As they wholesale helicopters
To the torturers—
But I’m straight out
Of my tribe from my great grandma Merton
Pure Kentucky English—it would take more paper
Than I’ll ever have to express how justified I feel.
Sketches from Edgewater
Thin sheet-ice on Sloan’s lake
“dark white” shine, late February sun
Big red balloon tethered over Cub Food
winterpale shoppers, struggling with the load
like overweight ants dragging their take
away from an abandoned sandwich
A long ghost-white buick idles at the zebra
black glass, chrome gone, white tires
A deal in every aisle, every hour, every day
says a colossal signboard on the vast hanger
Trenchtown plays over Calliope’s system,
Automatic misters drenching the leafy veg
lots of root food, caros, manioc, cocohuitl
and exotic tamarind shells and subtropical fruit
Bob Marley whispering ethiopian over all the aisles
Immense bins of hard candy, hills of choc drops
individually wrapped, stacks and stacks of snacks
Twenty-five yard long strips of freezers full of Stouffers
which should smell like cat-puke if the power gets cut
As in the Gulf War, when Iraqis had to throw
thawed food to the dogs who soon got fat and ran in packs
like the customers, maybe, in Edgewater
if it ever got bombed and the power got cut
Idle comparisons at the checkout
cash only, bag your own, Alaska style
Just then a zippy old man drives his cart up—
“Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s, I think I got it!”
I tried not to look at him, thinking I might catch it
he smiled and winking, turned to the checkout girl
“Sheila, my dear, the girl of my dreams”
Sheila smiled, displaying nice dimples in her full cheeks
He was really charged now—“See this?”
he swept a copy of People Magazine from the rack
On the cover is an outrageously famous star
modelling a bikini—“That’s my wife!”
Sheila shook with laughter, “Alzheimer’s Alzheimer’s,”
he hummed “I think I got it.” Then, a change of firing
in his temporal lobes, set off a sweet
and very passable rendition of You’re My Everything
I liked it, Sheila liked it and the old man
sung while he put his scant fare on the belt
Outside again, the sun was higher than a shopper
on sugar and fat, and the lot was aswarm,
drivers bearing away their dietary burdens
all backdropped beyond the lake
by the powerful agnostical structures of Denver
optically far away it seemed, but O, so near.
February 1996
The Drugs Are Over-rated
The drugs are way over-priced, but
they are scripted and dispensed
as if they’re ambrosia,
which as far as I can see
is a very peculiarly American
stupidity, mention morphine
which is designed to put you
asleep and the whole DEA
pharmacopoeia swoons in self-
adulatory self-righteousness, why?
Who knows, because they are
known lovers of pain, for others.
Oh my dear auditor, how can I put this?
The drugs are very bad,
but more refined than civilian dr
ugs
the “dope” from which
the agencies draw their unholy levies,
their off-the-books war loot,
that seized money they pay the dogs.
Well, the dogs don’t actually get it
but they get the love returned by the trainers
their sniffer skills are theirs forever
along with the presumed habits
which keep them on the sniff!
Tylox can put you out there for a while—
relief from generalized pain.
Vicodin seeks the street, a pilfered bottle
here or there, which is a poor comment
on the cold forlorn rue, paved
by the engineering state. And then,
there’s Atavan, Shelley Winters says
makes her life wonderful, which is O.K.
but way low on Wonder. If it is wonder
ye seek knock on the door of a wizard
not the hollow counter
of the pharmacist at Rite Aid.
Infusion Day
On Infusion Day
every thing comes back.
The big fat lady who will
never learn to use a needle
even if she has a line of my