POLITICS, PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION

God’s Favorite Tree

Leaning over my garden is a balsam fir, 

a type little-valued in perfect health,

and this one is not. It is asymmetric, 

bent, bedraggled, rotten in spots, 

its branches spare, strange, misshapen,

sick. It is hurt. The bole is split.

And yet it’s alive, year after year,

and makes fir cones. It may well be 

God’s favorite tree.

Daylight In The Codroy Valley

Out of the yellow-painted steel bowels

of the ferry at Port Aux Basques we drove, 

in electric light, up a clanking ramp, before daybreak, 

into the dark, loosed like a long line of devils—

all headlights hurrying toward St. John’s 

amid the tractor-trailer traffic.

We went a few miles and turned west off the Highway

where the Codroy Valley at daybreak was.

Osprey were hunting the estuary, striking easily

again and again, carrying off to fire new feathers

wriggling fishes divided from life.

Common terns and Caspian terns were working the ocean,

and on the beach were sand pipers, all busy and lovely,

and a breeze blew and the sun came up.

What is man’s place in the sight of this?

What’s to be done but look at a map,

put a squiggle around it, large,

and say it deserves to outlast us.

God Stirring

Could God’s brain be the human brain

compounded like a compound eye?

We are not a fly, but suppose God,

for the sake of discussion, reflection, creation, 

is ourselves looking back—

not one of us, mind you, but every one—

that old God’s eye on the universe 

is not the eye of a single sage,

but countless fools and occasional saints, 

average people, geniuses and terrorists,

all blurred together.

Sleepy, He is getting the befuddled notion

He might wake up or go deeper, drowsing

to vile dreams and grotesque itching,

witless as nuclear winter.

Let’s hope He gets up and does not piss the bed,

washes His face and gets organized.

Most World Wars And A Sleeping-Bag Zipper

I buggered up a sleeping bag zipper

one pre-dawn in a snit.

I shouldn’t have done it. 

I know that now.

I probably knew at the time.

I tried to unzip it a couple of times,

maybe four or five, approximately three,

but the thing was stuck. There was fabric in it.

It was dark and something came over me.

Maybe I wasn’t fully awake,

though I must have been to remember so much.

In any event, I took the two sides,

and gripped them hard,

and ripped.

This is how most world wars are started,

I am sure, and why the elder should govern.

Let us all hope we can profit.

Feeling Sorry For The Philistines

I feel sorry for the Philistines,

Count me among them. I’m on their side.

Who says one group of people is better?

Who says which group deserves destruction?

Isn’t that what the Nazis thought?

Didn’t we settle that they were wrong?

What is this crap about God’s Children?

Chosen Ones and Philistines?

Gimmie a break. Give them a break.

We’re in this together to the bitter end,

which, if we stay at each other’s throats,

will come a lot sooner than it needs to.

Himalayan Dilemma 

The yeti has got to realize,

I said to my sherpas and gurkhas abruptly,

he must come down and negotiate,

that as reasonable as we have been, we're impatient.

Have you bawled out he's astronomically outnumbered?

Sahib, said Phoo Leng, as I'd asked he address me,

the yeti knows well there are many stars.

It is not his intention to count them,

and all you say will pass him like odors.

Has he heard of explosives? I asked, shortly.

Does he know we could level these bloody mountains?

He knows! said Phoo Leng. This is why he is hiding!

He thinks, when you make this a parking lot,

the highest things will be underneath,

and he wants to be up there with them.

The West (circa 2008)

Get fully armed and shoot your foot.

That’s the American, Anglo Way.

Coat your image in shit so thick

you are it, and spit, fist-thumping.

Define yourself by your many wars.

Lead the world with cowboy culture,

Gestapo, kick-ass, whatever you call it.

Destroy the weak because they won’t listen.

Believe in yourself above all else, and bombs,

your righteousness, toughness and goodness. 

Goodness!— that Christian-Jewish-secular blend

of muscle and money that has to be right

because it is you. Great!

The self-promoting Self among selves, the self-fulfilling

ignoramus of belligerent evangelism, Market, marksmen!

Pot-shot taker at your own feet!

On Hearing Of Trouble in Cairo

I should be over in Cairo now,

throwing Molotov cocktails.

Maybe I’ll book a flight tomorrow,

on points if possible, I like a bargain.

The thing is, so much is wrong with the world,

I probably should join the battle.

But it’s after five and the travel agents

have doubtless quit for the day,

That’s all that’s keeping me home tonight, though,

that and needlessly dying.

Two Bombers*

United States President Reagan,

a man well above the low pagan,

made use of the bomb

against kitty and mom

to prove terrorists badly mistaken.

His colleague in this, Margaret Thatcher,

while not up to being a hatcher

of plots such as these,

said President, please,

may I at least be a bomber dispatcher?

_________________________________

*On the occasion of a U.S. bombing of Libya from England, killing people sheltering in a bunker.

Be We?

Be we but fictions in the mind of God?

Be we indeed?  Be we at all?

Be we aware of the possibility

we be because He be be-we bent?

Be we a work of Imagination

so good at making anything up,

we believe in our own existence?

Be we, thus, a bit we-be bound,

afraid of the He-be-be-wes?

Going To Jerusalem

I am going to Jerusalem

and taking a loudspeaker system with me

I’ll use to talk to secular Jews

I meet by the stadiumful forty days

and forty nights

of hypnotizing gentility, me.

I am going to Jerusalem

and taking copies of most holy scripts,

holding them up to the public, saying,

we cannot read gibberish in this day and age

and have any chance of getting along,

we simply must get the shredders going.

I am going to Jerusalem

and paving the streets with platinum peace,

fallen as drops of tears and snot

from my molten face that will hit the bricks 

of The Old City and cling like solder

one molecule thick,

giving the place a slivery shine

that will cause everyone to wince and squint

and forget all hate in the glare.

I am going to Jerusalem

and taking a dollop of divine butter

to spread peace and joy and help the Jews

feel sorry for themselves less viciously (and others). 

The butter, it needs saying, will be shared out fairly 

among all races, creeds and colors, 

but to girls alone, I don’t like taking disciples.

The butter, it needs saying, will come from my wand,

which is peaceful by nature and little enough

reward for all.

I am going to Jerusalem

and taking my hide as a sacrifice

to tack on a wall or a tree for a spell

and teach the Jews to be nice goys.

I’ll say, Make believe I’m an Arab, brothers,

this is a public-relations disaster,

you need help.

I am going to Jerusalem

and preaching a realistic religion

that will be fairly bearably light, 

brilliant as soldered streets in July,

no pain to anyone but myself,

emphasizing the daily need 

of loving without despair.

I am not going to Jerusalem.

With Zen Perspective

There is wisdom in ignorance, whole

forests and fields of it, jungles and savannahs 

of mental virginity, better left,

like certain land, unused.

Take unclimbed mountains for a start,

great ghosts that loom up at us,

white and purple miracles 

ripping their jagged, chronic surprise

across the remote retina.

How else should we see them?—

frost-bitten, snow-blind, roped and exhausted, 

in danger of a beckoning crevasse?

It is the mystery of sanity I would explore,

but from the fringe, never squarely in one camp or the other.

Take the upcoming ocean for another perspective,

plunging in cataracts over lathered boulders,

joyous and ravishing, soon to be all salt and sorrow.

Go in. Change your mind in moderation.

In Order To Save The Libyans

We, The Arbiters of Truth and Justice,

have had to kill some Libyans

with surgical strikes from fighter jets.

We only killed evil Libyans,

those that really needed killing.

Our jets found their targets with Smart Bombs

and extirpated the rot like surgeons.

Now we can all breathe a sigh of relief

that Libya’s such a much a better place.

Still, we must watch out for terrorists.

Mary’s Army (Gospel/Spiritual)

They were singing and I was loving it:

Pharaoh’s army got drowned-ed,

Mary don’t you weep no more.

But the next day found me brooding:

Mary’s army got drone-dead

civilian blood on its hands,

War, the all-subsuming crime,

water-boarding and Abu Ghraib,

kidnapping and secret rendition

to possibly open-ended torture,

enticement of children in High School

to join and ruin their minds and bodies.

Mary, you’ve come a long way, Baby,

from the Queen of Peace to this.

Mary, can you weep at all? 

If I Was The Mayor Of Mexico City

If I was the mayor of Mexico City

I wouldn't learn to speak Spanish.

I'd say Holez! Amigos! No comprehendez!

This problem is bigger than Baghdad.*

With fifty million by around 2020,

what is called for here is a sense of humor,

and a cosmic sense of the temporary.

I say, Amigos, take up the guitar,

and we'll all practice standing

on each other's shoulders.

____________________________

*The poet would previously have been mayor of Baghdad.

Touring The Battleship, Missouri, With F

The Mighty Mo! said a jaunty banner.

Everywhere flags and pennants flew:

Pearl Harbor glittered, sun on the ocean.

Even the battleship grey was bright.

F, my escort, was nearly ninety,

a mother returning to her dearest issue.

Her generation had spawned the thing; 

now, all turrets, it was back in the nest,

And was, I admit, militarily splendid:

sixteen-inch guns that could rotate, go boom,

radar, anchors and chains, huge capstans,

wires and pipes and rivets and plate.

She was all you could ask at the end of War,

and All she got, absolute surrender,

something like Love and Peace, or Death,

certainly a lot of the last.

F, herself, was like Love and Death,

a skin on a skeleton, eighty pounds,

farded, she was, all painted and plastered, 

tarted up like a Hollywood star.

She looked as good as woman her age 

can look with notions of staying young: 

the face re-lifted, drawn and scary,

House of Usher, Horror, Honor.

II.

Here is the picture: us on the gangplank,

having ascended the steps to it smartly.

‘Oh! It is beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!

Sterling, I wish you could be here now!’

Her husband had worked for the FBI,

a long career, and then real estate.

Now all she had now was the likes of me,

your poet of Peace. I lent my arm 

To the lively old cricket who more or less took it, 

me along with it, in every direction she wanted, 

and hung on my other arm, her cane, 

lest we forget it, or I croak and she need it.

Off we went on the main-deck planking,

teak, we may say, to be concrete;

I, no doubt, looking conscripted, preempted,

usurped and conquered, said nothing, observed.

There was more life in that woman than in me,

retired or not, as she and It were.

‘We had so many just like this one too!

Where are they now?  I'd like to know.’

A litter, she’d had, of these steel death dealers,

big ones in Good God’s bathtub, the Ocean.

Nearby, another, The Arizona,

was still bubbling oil, a grave to her crew.

An even-more honored part of Pearl Harbor,

it was called, by a speaker, along with Missouri,

‘The Alpha and Omega of This Terrible War.’

Hats off to bigger thinking than mine.

Up we went, to the signing deck,

to look at the photos, plaques and names, 

‘The Instrument Of Surrender,’ they called it,

no mere document or treaty, this.

Here is MacArthur. Here is the Emperor.

Here are the names that signed after theirs.

What a momentous day they all had!

What a bad thing to end at last!

Maybe most wars are for the Good,

and that F should lead me over these decks,

all up and down the many grey ladders,

past the small rooms, short bunks, old pictures,

Paraphernalia, memorabilia,

things that led up to the happy ending:

friendly connections, commerce, Democracy, 

a better Japan and a better World.

I have no grounds for grander insights

than ships like these but a feeling that trust 

is essential for peace, a relative absence

of arms at heart.

III.

On we marched and she held me firm,

pulled me to fore and pulled me aft,

pulled me to larboard, starboard and midships,

around the bulkheads and powder, great guns.

Sailors answered our every question, on every deck

and at every turn: ‘Six of these one-hundred-ten-pound charges

went behind twenty-five-hundred-pound shells.’

‘Each?’  ‘That is each, Sir.’  ‘Manhandled?’  ‘You bet.’

She sprang so sprightly on every tread,

the ship might have been an amusement ride,

and, on that evening, more or less was:

champagne served on the big, stern deck,

Swing band playing to back up chat,

forties music. She wiggled a little but,

after a spell, finally sat.  I got her a drink. 

She shone right through.

That was when she showed me a picture

of herself in the thirties, in a bathing suit, 

quite a nice ass, I don’t mind saying,

(this is my area of expertise),

Gone today, though, and gone tomorrow. 

‘Here is my husband, Sterling, then.  

I took him from her.  Do you know who that is?’

‘Helen?’  I guessed.  ‘Yes, Helen,’ she said.

‘She had him first, but she didn’t care.

Remember that famous spy they caught?

The one they never got executed?

Well, Sterling caught him, and others too.

We were out here in forty-one,

Sterling was terribly busy, then,

tired from rounding up Orientals, 

subversives. Oh, he knew who they were!’

I was filling old Sterling's shoes,

he as dead as a fried spy, it was my turn now,

a private guy, to do the work of supporting F,

me nervous as a beatnik in uniform–

Up-right Americans everywhere looking

thick as hair on a dog's back,

watching, you might suspect, for me,

to stuff in a long, grey tube and shoot.

IV.

Fifty odd years had passed The Missouri,

herself and The Country, and proved all she knew,

as a matter of fact, was born knowing,

as true today as it was then:

Peace through strength.  Keep ’em on their heels.

Have lots of spies. Don’t take chances.  

Spend tons on your weapons. Never mind good will.

Honor your Military, especially dead.

What a tonic it must be to have such focus!–

Goodness so clear it means death to your foes,

feeling but joy in your bombers and missiles, 

the will to threaten and lead by force.

V.

After the tour we ate on the pier

where the best of chefs of great hotels

laid seafood, pork, beef and cheesecake, 

wine, coffee, fruit and butter,

Vegetables, even water and bread,

all you could dine on, pretty, exquisite.

Tropical night, soft air, bare arms,

the Monster above us, looming down, 

Floodlit now, only gently foreboding,

‘Beautiful!’  all her pennants, limp,

the water used to dance light off her prow,

the Mighty Missouri looked futuristic,

Not retired, but a trend to go on–

Star Wars, Sub Wars, oh! the grandeur!

killing, a mainstay of American thought,

where the lesson learned was: Do it first.

F moaned contentment as our evening ended

in fireworks, and I can hear her still,

orgasmic in my ear, victorious:

‘Oh! Beautiful! Oh!  My word!’

Sketch

U.S. assassins and Israeli assassins and British assassins and French assassins and assorted other, less-known assassins in smaller numbers from friendly countries, were meeting at the six thousand, seventy-second Congress of Respectably Aligned Assassins on an April weekend in Dallas.  The lobby was chock-a-block with salesmen for new designs in bombs and rifles, cyber surprises, conventional booby traps, plutonium, vehicles driven by child or remote, everything governments wanted.  In the ballroom a great debate was in progress, centering on the issue of membership standards.  The French were upholding The Rainbow Warrior as a level for other countries to meet, saying the Americans, by not killing Castro, could never be considered True Assassins.  American pilots said they had always killed someone, and arguments focussed on the guilt of these, whether or not some children were bad ones, a woman's ability to procreate evil, and so on.  The debate had gone on a long time, when there was a noise at the back.  Everyone looked and there was a beggar, in burlap, thumping his cane on the floor.  The chairwoman asked how the man got in (women had finally been elected to office), and the guard on the door shrugged in confusion.  Slowly the beggar advanced to the front, but just as he raised his staff to speak, his message was garbled by knives in his back and sides and throat, as well as his face, chest and groin... (he was struck fully several dozen times) and, in all, was instantly dead, dead.  It couldn't have been less clear who he was.  They bagged him up and replaced the carpet.  The body was watched over Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, when it hadn't risen, the conference was declared over. People went to the airport and the sky filled with flying assassins, most having breakfast.

Trying  To Understand

I can’t think of anything less

appealing than killing my own kind,

unless, the alternative, logical bind

of having my kind exterminate me

were offering itself as the other choice,

in which case I might partake with free

excitement and a loud voice.

But rather than get involved at all

in the killing and dying of armed forces,

mightn’t a better life befall

anyone pursuing other courses?

Digging Deeper

All my potatoes want to be plants

and all my potato plants, potatoes.

I eye them with curiosity.

Getting into me they become this—

this here idea was once a potato,

and before that, of course, a potato plant.

Getting into them I become their slave,

saving them, even, from having to flower,

which they do for the sake of art alone,

as I, this, the thought of flowers in mid-July

waving over the vegetable garden.

What is this flowering doing, I wonder,

rapt in the cycle of spuds and soul?

Has it any conceivable sense at all 

of how interwoven everything is?

If it doesn’t it may this time next year.

God is a revolutionary.

Is There A Difference?

Is there a difference between bad prostitution,

where people are made the worse off, say,

and fucking understanding where 

a woman and man may meet out of sight

and make a deal and it's win-win,

and society wins, so it’s win-win-win?

Where she allows he is not repulsive,

except, perhaps, in heart and soul,

which regions, normally not on display, 

permit her to like him and what they do,

as she might have even with great expectations,

And he admits he has nothing to give

but a fee for the license to leave as he's come,

and all the affection he feels for her

is amplified and annulled therein,

And they together think to themselves,

this is win-win-win, and this is the difference

between bad prostitution and satisfying

Economics and Nature?

The Socio-Political-Economic Fabric

I’m getting stitched into the Social Fabric,

a kind, benign smile on Mrs. God’s face,

her bobbin a-spinning, foot-pedal thumping,

my pale white face and shiny bald head

sewn smiling with all the Coloreds and Yellows, 

Bright Red Indians, Black Indians, Arabs and Jews, 

Inuit, Polynesians and Anyone Else I’m forgetting.

The needle is going over me now, stitching me

multi-ethnically in. It doesn’t hurt, I am pleased to report,

though it punctured my ego a while back. That let out

a lot of bad gas that stunk like you wouldn’t believe. 

All we could do was wait for a breeze. Finally one came.

Now I am pretty much fully sewn in: 

the picture is all of us holding hands, 

a great idea that was Mrs. God’s.

You honestly love this design from inside,

though it’s under attack from without.

Get in the tapestry while you still can.

Don’t burn the quilt with your acid will.

How Will You Be The Alpha Bitch?

How will you be the alpha bitch

when your teeth are soft 

and your hair is dags,

your dugs flap and your ass is flab,

the whites of your eyes are all yellow,

and everything runs but your legs?

How will you deal with a young she-wolf

with a gait that floats more than anything else?–

fur sunlighted, excited eyes,

snapping, hot-pink, lupine smile: 

new bone, new muscle, new spirit, new spit,

new sex that flaunts the state of itself.

And how will he be the alpha dog?–

his best bet too will be off to the side…

Unless you make up paper values,

money, titles, deeds, religion, 

stand up straight on your hind legs,

jam those tails between your thighs,

learn to gesticulate with your paws

and speak, of a moral system.

        Embedded 

Thinking of things embedded, I’d say,

we think of ticks and crooked teeth,

or bullets and pieces of glass,

the dirt and gravel from a bad fall,

        foreign objects in dirty wounds

        that are having trouble healing.

        Now let us think of a journalist,

        who ‘writes the first draft of history,’ 

        our man on the scene, or woman, these days, 

        but in either case, 'embedded,'

        Embedded with coalition troops!

        Will somebody pass the disinfectant!

        Hold a match to the parasite!

        Hold me down while you operate!

        Call a dentist! Is there a cure?

Amphibious

Into the purple prose of Pacific Commander MacArthur hop,

and wade with his biographer through the shallow truths of World War II,

through superlatives in mile-long clauses, acronyms and banal thought;

feel yourself to be struggling there in equilibrated undertow.

Of course you are lucky to follow MacArthur,

and yet must escape his sloshing about,

not follow forever, neither drowning nor boating, but never

hoping, being primitive, always keeping and putting an eye out.

It isn't the last step, where he leaves you, that photograph we love unseeing;

this is only amphibious Douglas MacArthur, believing like Mao, at last in the gun;

it's only one step in your evolution toward a higher and drier being.

And would you towel off, please, when you are done.

Mrs. Aristotle

This is what Mrs. Aristotle

said to her husband: I could throttle

you Ari, you jerk, you ass,

you idiot!  You may not pass

on this monstrous view

that woman is man deformed, you

are delineating misogyny

and perhaps perverting our progeny

for hundreds or thousands of years to come,

it isn't worthy of a street bum;

if you insist that man is boss

over woman, it will be your own loss,

and two or three thousand years from now

thinking people will attest how,

in spite of your efforts on the page

of philosophy, it was a sick age.

On TV

Television set to short, unmetered lines of modern verse

would doubtless quickly blow the fuse of ordered contemplation;

whereas, perhaps, its familiar feel is within our powers to disperse

if we inflate somewhat the tone and the formality of deliberation.

Television: what hole does it fill to excite everyone to have one?

If it were irrefutably bad, then most of us quasi-thinking folk

would abandon it as we have Church, and Poetry, for that matter,

alluding in parting shots of spite, and an angry spirit of pseudo-fun,

to its lack of originality, its being some sort of exhausted joke,

its irrelevancy and redundancy and deficiency as patter.

We do not, however, abandon it, but pretend to keep it at our loss,

using the monster to dominate our living rooms as the principal talker

whenever we want the polished drone of its usually predictable dross

to unburden us of thought; so instead of the fire observed from a rocker,

as in days of old, the sick blue light through which most of us stalk

an absence of any semblance of meaning affords a dull, hypnotic glow

which demeans our attention; but if we turn it off, we are left alone

to decide what it is that we might do next, be it read or weed or caulk

the bathtub, all of which require some effort, in comparison to the slow

sinking, further into living room furniture, mesmerized to the very bone.

So we’re lazy, OK, but if we turn it off, we also miss out on what’s extant,

be it news or sports, or wildlife specials, drama, fashion, cookery, ads;

the fact is, in turning the TV off, we are doing something we honestly can't

condone in anyone responsible– disregarding the whole spectrum of fads. 

This goes deeper than simply conforming; it pertains to knowing how to conform,

to seeing the vast, increased extent of the ever-expanding human landscape,

albeit, somewhat distorted, restricted, but mostly accurate, often engaging; 

and the trouble is, by not looking, we’re asserting that we will ignore the storm

and the calm, all that comes down the tube, all the material that we might ape

to be factually, fashionably, pseudo-rationally up to date on what’s happening.

Now, of course, there is no magic in television, no drug, no clever subterfuge,

nor is it only the ease of being passive which accounts for its popularity.

One must admit, there is some of this; the doing of nothing and taking refuge

in being both brain-dead and titillated, yet beyond the mere banality

there is also, in the radiation we drink, a portraiture of the whole organism,

i.e., how people fare globally; TV shows us how we are all doing

as a species; and though this is bad, with undertones of total debacle,

by being informed collectively, we can feel the need of less racism and sexism,

less destruction of the environment, less famine and other means of screwing

ourselves to the wall.  Togetherness is our only hope, and the spectacle

Of ourselves on television shows very well what condition we're in,

and creates an electric consciousness, a truly collective consciousness

to guide us in other directions than the largest-possible, wholesale sin,

which non-regulation of world events would bring in the form of terminal mess.

Because we're approaching a critical mass, where the end is in sight

or the end is insight, where everything hinges on appreciation

of a need for stable cooperation, and because this notion itself is too hard

for the masses with their creeds and guns, it requires the simple, average wight

to see that to save his skin he must yield to law, or be lost in conflagration,

that what we need is each other’s help so we don’t all burn like a pound of lard.

And TV, friends, is what teaches this.  TV is what best unites us in fear.

We have consciousness to work on together, and television is making it clear.