I AM YOU

A re-cognified

re-cognification

saying I am you—

First nitrogen

then chlorophyll

then id

now I

then you

forming us

to perceive some inhuman/human beyond,

being this ladder, ascending/descending

from this step then

over to another, where

I and I am the tide wearing

I and I wearing the evening air, wearing

I and I wearing the moonlit night, wearing

I and I wearing the vital you, wearing

out, crying into the cosmos

I am you!

I love your disguises!

I savor the taste of seaming your road dust

relish the flavor of seaming your chickpea

adore the comfort of seaming your dog

enjoy the aroma of seaming your camel

[a new path into Heaven]

delight in the sound of seaming your poet

My passion passes through you

finding our clarity

their laughter

Its generous love

transforming enemies into friends

haters into lovers

becoming essential platelets to this life’s blood

this splattering, dancing laughter…

An echo calling back:

I am you!

GETTING YOUR HOOD BACK

The clematissed sky shimmers like a

dome. The phosphorous firmament uses a

machine’s grammar, spitting missiles wet with

prayers to Jesus blessing grandma and

all the soldiers “over there” uttered

in a bunny suit, face slapped,

innocent. Warmer’s what you get with

a biased epic in your hand.

Your sentiment’s vain, for it surpasses

its goal: getting your hood back.

Surrendering seven times to the war

for the word: Good night untried

poets. Going nowhere, wee Anglo hamsters

re-publicize the ceilings of some mosque

burst open like a spinach tin,

like the condom factory, ejaculated upward

bathing a woman’s form, tripping up

Martyr’s Way, moaning and murmuring, head

aglow, awaking to that detail

you’re dead. You doubt that rose-breasted

grosbeaks form flocks, or knot then

buy the jacarandas in the loaming.

The tulip blooming like some doubled

helix tuning with precision, so sincere,

really. Vernality encrusted into a narcotic

nipple like some memo from beyond

your deployment of criti-poesy writing the

metapome, suggesting the self-reflexive surpoem espousing

a proper feeling, as numbed by

these row breaks evaporating implications. The

way drones melted kids who were

just growing up over there. We

react with loud, poignant communal sighs.

This lion would need bigger wings

than the eagle’s. Would you abandon

your poetry to make him complete?

Judge not before I incise your

eyes hunting for a muse, gaping

into who mother was, a wretched

shadow chipping into radiance. I’ll come

no closer, for this breach twain

she and he seams hallowed space,

a heather brush of carnage for

the calm of bloodied skulls and

torn limbs. Not only are you

an alleged killer, my precious far-out

poesiest, but you also stand accused

of bigotry by those on the

periphery at Darfur, to which you

counter you’re not sure. How candid,

non-denominational reflection and prayer and the

making of bombs inside the spirit-schooners

of the Sahara outside Khartoum, sans

slurs or ignorance, confer over UBUWIM

and the Warrior Poets, none of

whom were ever be-headed in Nicaragua

by Green Beret trainees called pequeno Contras,

or blessed. They would not believe

the frail could inherit the moon

(unless Newt Gingrich sent them there).

AS GAUTAMA TENDS THE GARDEN

[A POST-DHARMA/BUM POEM[1]]

Thoughtless giving

Wordless conceiving

A fresh dressed ancient spins America, wandering

Sensing the Sufi

true sleep

Calling out

Vast wise spirit building,

Embellishing Earth with industriousness,

I’m something that’s nothing to you!

*

Inhabiting foothill huts

a friend says “see Yabyum”

floor bound cross-

legged pillow sitting

face to face

round each neck

swaying sighs

Nothing

Sacred rep

aerational Republicans

fuck four priests chanting

Yee-haa! Lightening Strikes the Pink Hole!

**

and tediously developed ideals

evolving gray corporate censorship

inform me my karma was

born to be where freedom’s

a belief

no one believes

and there ain’t no kicks

boys

something’s always made of Nothing

BLAH!

***

Illusions of Nothing manifest something

Nothing illusions something manifest of

Something manifests nothing of illusions

Jesus Christ

****

Stillness

Ululating with eyes closed, seeing power

*****

The campus eccentric imagines himself the only actual man there at the middle class programming institute for obscurity and homogeny, whose adherents find a moving expression of success in rows of white and pastel-colored homes with chemical lawns and cyber-realities everyone’s bathing in and feeling the same about:

*******

All this while Dharma Bums stalk their wilder-ness listening

finding ecstasy in the stars

searching for the Dark Secret

The origin of stagnant invisible shit civilization—realizing everyone has white ceramic toilets to take big dirty craps in like bears on the mountains

But it’s all washed away

and nobody says shit

or realizes they come from it and sea scum

They spend days washing their hands with soap they’d rather eat

********

And though I love America

I hate hunters

they slaughter alert beings

And for each victim, they’ll be reborn a thousand times

To re-suffer the ensuing horrors of being

lectured to by me, trapped

in rustic mountain taverns

cozy to parlor-puff scribes

but wretched to the Psalmists of pond and peak

Yet charming still to Armenian grocers

who sing Choke, Choke, you do not see how great Ah-mary-kah eez

And those well-meaning tongue-tied Baptists on a church binge forgetting to insert the contraception

They must be assholes

********

When they heard I didn’t kill animals

but only clumb mountains

swam in ponds

they dismissed me

a hopeless eccentric

a void perimeter stuffed with illusion

Where the milk is fine

but more cows feed

than people

Whenever a sparrow might hop along some veranda with wet feet

**********

And the secret of ascent is bop

vast hop empty-

skulls dancing

rock to stone not

dithering, awake

the mountain

***********

Praying all thoughtful things will quit fussing and jobbing and feel It

Serenity, madness, ecstasy

Beginning and ending

simultaneously

praying for all to be

just as bare

likewise loved, also

a growing flower and

see the eyes of All and

behind It composure and

exactitude

************

But we’re all sunk in shit, mules vexed by whatever system we choose to plow

*************

But we can’t fall off a mountain

**************

What’s it all mean

The plum is ripe

The Buddha’s in the Garden

***************

Cheer up slaves

horrify your despots

at home and abroad

Be Zen lunatic bards bopping old desert paths

****************

The whole thing’s a world adrift

A dharma bum refusing to consume

or work for his rights

Refrigerators, microwaves, I-pads, hair oils, deodorant and junk

Imprisoned in the privilege system

Produce, consume, work

Produce, consume, work

Automatically renewing everything every year

I call for a rucksack evolution

Billions of visions wandering Earth

heading for the mountains

rivers and seas to

see, pray, meditate

making children laugh

old men glad

young girls happy

old girls happier

Everything seams a Zen lunatic poem writing Its mind without reason

Being kind

and by startling acts of benign oddness

keep infecting everyone with dreams of undying autonomy

Go fucking viral

As Tathagata plays in the Garden

*****************

And there’s wisdom in Zen lunacy

Just walk down any suburban street and pass house after house after house on both sides with the lamp lights shining golden, and inside the little blue squares transmitting electronic clouds of information among minds

Every family glued to the spume of electromagnetic dust

no one talking

silence in the yards

Then dogs barking because you pass by on foot not wheels

The symbol being the symbol itself

seeming

Gautama tending the Garden

******************

The billions and billions of the One Eye

believe they’re not hurting anyone

hiding in there

the apparent I within that Eye

And I see myself in my world prowling suburbia

and Main Street

passing blue electronic-mirrored windows denoting false matrices

Alone, my thoughts seem the only thoughts not glued to the Master Switch

*******************

“Who played this cruel joke

on bloke after bloke,

packing like a rat,

across the desert flat?”

I’m telling you, a big police revolution’s coming

“Was it God got mad,

like the Indian cad,

who was only a giver,

crooked like the river?”

No! There’s going to be a rucksack evolution

“Gave you a garden,

let it all harden,

then comes the flood,

and the loss of your blood?”

Everything is possible

“Pray tell us good buddy,

and don’t make it muddy,

who played this trick

on Harry and Dick,

and why is so mean,

this eternal scene

just what’s the point,

of this whole joint?”

I am empty space—I am all things

I am

********************

One man practicing kindness in his wilder-ness seems worth every Temple his world pulls

*********************

I am emptiness

I see starshine in a puddle

I spit in the puddle

obliterating the star

and ask

“Is the star real?”

And scream safe from earshot of the Lunatic Bus

“I won’t come down again!

I’m a blank being ecstasized in the Infinite True Body!”

then I see the star’s re-appeared in the puddle

The Buddha’s in the Garden

***********************

Among the Dead, in the rich silent hush of the Pure Awakened Land

I realize I’m a bliss heir

and that the final sin, the worst, is righteousness

because there is only Silence, then

a silence so intense you can hear the blood roar in your ears

and louder than that the Unexplained Whine of Carbon-based Wisdom

The unsolved cry of Silence Itself

Reminding you of something you’ve long forgotten

the certain, definite Truth

The roaring silence of the Diamond

***********************

Deliver flower sermons to disappointed disciples

try taming the bull of mind essence

abandon It for Nothing

party with the neighborhood butcher

and next door car salesman

the murderers of dreamy Western philosophy

Then re-member your self

*************************

The Awakened who, leading

ants from her pantry with honey to her garden

speaking to them on hands and knees about new veins of Joy

Feed others

compassion’s the guide star

fighting is ugly

Beg! Be humble!

**************************

The world appears despite my ignorance

despite God, who emanates my ignorance

as the image itself, making

why sew, seamingly

significant

As Tathagata plays in the Garden

**************************

Dharma bums had springtime in their hearts when the blooms were girdling

and the birds dropped turds on surprised cats who wished to eat them

***************************

And the closer we got to real matter

rock, fire, wood and smoke

the more spiritual the world became

****************************

And it all ended in tears because those who were good remained in heaven

having been there from the beginning

A cosmic remnant not wishing for a personal god in all the impersonal matter

‘Look at the Void!

It seams ever stellar!’

***************************

The innumerable worlds of the Milky Way—just words

****************************

Are we all beat spirits

refusing to believe

nothing is nothing

that we’re born to lose

All

Our loved ones

and dear friends

One-by-One

And finally our Self

Only to see Death proved

O sad, kind flesh,

there is no answer,

only the limitations of Eternity

As Gautama tends the Garden

---

[1] A poetic response to The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. All quotes are from the novel.

SATURATED TROMBONE

Word like wound

            wound the metaphor

a strange attraction

            to ward the literal

Feeling the membrane sweat

from the inside

vibrating

Like this

            simile

of some black hole

            scattering ashes

As if blowing a saturated trombone

Alert the Offspring, Father’s

            mutating Mother’s recursive symmetries

an Arabesque that

Weaves patterns of

love

feeding

THE GOD OF THE MARTIANS

[re: Richard Brautigan]

Disdainful of hippies, you seemed Kafka’s queer cousin.

Knowing too much about your demons, you made peace with them, sharing the same world.

Feeling your romantic self the only self, shooting at the moon,

drunk on George Dickel, down a sloppy back road, you once threw a stone through a cop shop window, hoping to end up housed and fed, but got fined instead. 

It helped drive you mad, a little like that O. Henry story. Except for the big sky. You were in Montana.

Ferlinghetti, that old fuck, called you a child, like Emerson bemoaned Thoreau. You were more in tune with trout than Larry, who never got merry without revolution. A real man, he.

You dealt with them as long as you could, and then one day you just quit, feeling it odd how the plain things in life live on while life itself gets trickier.

After talking with Marcia, you felt like clay excavated from your garden.

As you looked out over the Pacific Ocean in your favorite chair, you decided to take a little target practice, using all your bullets but one to put a hole in everything she ever touched. 

The last was saved for your brain. She’d touched that, too. Everything touched it. Nothing would leave it alone. Not even the clouds.

When Robert found you a month later on the living room floor, the smell nearly drove him away. He wrenched the .44 Magnum from your stiff hand and found the brief note you left. It was under your right arm, spattered in brains and blood. 

Funny to the very end, it said: “Messy isn’t it?”

And the ocean breeze whistled through the holes in your house like laughter.

CHANT DIVINE SYRUP

Of humankind’s first a-spedience
and the flavored frowerin fop,
whose upliftin tenses invited disjoy
of Edenic fruits intraduh whorl,
until dys creetcha—
embittud—
displaced his in hern,
loosiniz perfik place: 

Chant divine syrup,
whose first taut elected dysgerm,
emergent from duh chemicals in ma mond—
a pathology:

Or,
if Turtle Island delights ya more
with its Niagara waters roar
quickened by this augur of po-rin spirit;
I here summon ye help in creatin disimpudent din

And you,
sacred resolve,
idealizin a candid wit,
indicatin Its self—
discernin; we at first
were here, potent wings out
spreadin squat gloomin astride

A pregnant chasm, in love.

What’s faint in me lot up,
What-air’s small heave high and protract;
that t’the size a this pozin task
I might assert me abidin trust,
exposin Nature’s totem to duh people
and fuck them.

PAUCITY

Few will sit here.
Most need liaisons 

To feel the precision and
the plethora

intensifying their diversity—
Some soap deodorizing clarity—

Cleansing every part of Its secret speech,
describing your lathering dance that

rinses away—
Revealing nothing.

TIME YOU WAS WEANED A THAT GUN-TOTIN, TOOTH-‘N’-CLAW TAMIN, LUSTY, SCREAMIN’ MEDDLIN NOVUS BALL-BUSTIN’ ORDO SECLORUM CALLED UNCLE SAM SLICK

A review of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, The Viking Press, New York, 1977

Richard Milhaus Nixon, molested by his father as a boy, having become perverse himself throughout his thought and actions, finds his career about to launch once he’s been brutally raped, anally, by a meme he identifies as Uncle Sam.

This sexual devastation seems a rite all future POTUSes must undergo at some point, a rite that instills in them the necessary presidential timber, according to Nixon, the predominant voice and viewpoint in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.[i]

The fact is, though it was published 35 years ago, this novel may be just as relevant in this Presidential election year as it was when it was published. Americans still [as always, apparently] demand a masculine Christian capable of killing for God & Country. And they’ve been lucky lately, getting macho-man killers in spades: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, perhaps the Clintons, and, now definitely Obama.

According to Nixon about halfway through the novel, which breathlessly covers the last three days of the Rosenbergs’ lives before they’re to be publicly executed in the electric chair in Times Square before a worldwide television audience, the reason Eisenhower was so great and had become President was that “he knew how to kill.” Nixon wondered if he could do the same. [258]

It seems that Nixon’s primary inner conflict about the Rosenbergs, according to the way Coover speaks him, is between pity and heroism and thoroughly delusional. Nixon comes across as a communist and fascist appeaser, in other words enthralled by the authoritarian position, where such folks as “premature anti-fascist[s]” thwart the patriotic war against the Phantom where “justice is entertainment.” [121]

The kind of person Nixon is shows itself in the dimensions of his existential world: “I felt caught up in some endless quest, a martyr to duty, but duty to what? My self perhaps, its creation and improvement, the need to show I had what it takes, that I deserved no matter what I got…” [298]

Are there any delusional would-be or actual killers among the current and former 2012 candidates? They seem to be aspiring killers for sure [Ron Paul excepted], if they don’t already have a few bodies strewn here and there throughout their past. We know even Obama killed Osama and other bad people [a few of them American citizens. At least the Rosenbergs had a “trial”].  Coover’s Nixon is definitely in this mode, with a strong possibility, which he hints at himself, of a body already somewhere in his past, buried like its repressed memory. He’s a confessed rapist and sexual mess. But he can’t help but wonder whether or not a Quaker, raised by Grandma Milhaus, could actually kill someone, especially decent, possibly even innocent people like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: “Could I kill, I wondered? If it came to that, could I kill? Not something easy like the Rosenbergs, but this crowd in here…if they got in my way…? Why not? Killing was as meaningless as anything else.” [345][ii]

In the act of the Rosenbergs’ heinous public slaughter, Nixon realizes a few things that, if enough regular folks understood, there would be no America, no USSR, no troubles. Consider Coover’s tense choices. It feels a bit odd that Nixon’s speaking the past tense, and yet the action feels as if it were presently happening. Also, Nixon rarely thinks at all about the future, and when he does it’s a distant future that will build monuments to him once he’s gone. I think this suggests that Coover’s Nixon has lost touch with the present tense—an American symptom resulting from being trapped inside a Disney/Bernays’ spectacle.[iii] In this sense, especially toward the end at the bottom of page 473, it’s implied that the reader, who is by extension/in-tension the people, could be insane [unless part of some unspoken intelligence that knows better]. It’s the situation that’s insane. And Nixon personifies the peoples’ systemic situation…the mode in which we’re all mere actors on a stage.

Throughout the novel one might read echoes of Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord’s spectacle, the psychogeography of Deleuze and Guattari, the self-reflexivity and metafictive qualities of Coover’s pomo contemporaries in the way Nixon’s poetic neurosis/delusion becomes the textual pathology that seams the American citizen’s dis-ease together forming society’s schizoid insanity.

Consider Chapter 18, “The National Poet Laureate[iv] Meditates on the Art of Revelation,” in which Nixon says: “Poetry is the art of subordinating facts to the imagination…fakery in allegiance to the truth…objectivity is Gnostic…as an ideal perhaps even immoral, that only through the frankly biased and distorting lens of art is any real grasp of the facts—not to mention Ultimate Truth—even remotely possible.” [320]

From here on the narrator grows increasingly schizoid until it becomes quite clear that The Burning Game is an Avant-Pop presentation of the schizoid American psyche, that the USA has evolved into a pop culture spectacle and something that’s perhaps as dangerous, if not more dangerous in light of its nuclear weapons, thinning greatly any margin of error, than Germany in the 1930s. The social Darwinism of “manifest destiny” ranks right up there with Hitler’s Aryan master race when it comes to its mythomaniacal hucksterism. Each carries the “white man’s burden” making a pathetic, tragic mess of things.

Nixon’s deepest insight: “…this is not happening to me alone, I thought desperately, or tried to think, as [Uncle Sam] pounded deeper and deeper, destroying everything, even my senses, my consciousness—but to the nation as well!” [532]

The people attain their exceptional American timber in the way they’re screwed. What goes around comes around. The people will, at some point, screw Uncle Sam the way Nixon did in Times Square [read the book!]. So, to say that Uncle Sam or Ike or any of the nation’s illustrious leaders were evil, “you might as well say that America itself was evil…that exemplary transcendence, through action and beauty, of the strong man’s wild streak, which…is what the West is all about,” [241] is an evil endeavor.

When Nixon discovers the truth about Uncle Sam: “You didn’t have to kill them! You just did it for fun! You’re a … a butcher! a beast! You’re no better than the Phantom!”, Uncle Sam replies: “It ain’t easy holdin’ a community together, order ain’t what comes natural, you know that, boy, and a lotta people gotta get killt tryin’ to pretend it is, that’s how the game is played.”

“’You’ve…you’ve changed,’ I [Nixon] said, my voice shaking. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy!” --- “You’re forty years old, son: time you was weaned!...you gotta love me like I really am: Sam Slick the Yankee Peddler, gun-totin’ hustler and tooth-‘n’-claw tamer of heathen wilderness, lusty and in everything a screamin’ meddler, novus ball-bustin’ ordo seclorum, that’s me, boy—and goodnight Mrs. Calabash to any damfool what gets in my way!”

Ever notice when someone tells you to grow up, get over it, [or that you’re delusional or in denial or suffering from a messiah complex] they’re really asking you to buy into their fantasy and play your part in it? We’re all guilty of it. This review’s guilty of it. We cycle between plaintiff and defendant depending on the situation. That’s what it seems being American is all about in Coover’s The Public Burning—the willingness to participate in the national fiction because it’s the path of least resistance, which makes it a true and courageous novel. Courageous because Coover put himself inside Nixon while Nixon was still alive. He let Nixon possess him the way Uncle Sam possessed Nixon. He shows that Nixon, an indefensible cad at the time, was a human being like the rest of us. Coover is Nixon. The reader is Nixon. I am Nixon. We cycle between demon and angel depending on the perceived situation [“we” being a subset of “everybody,” you might not be included. Only you would know.].

Finally, there’s a difference between childish and child-like. Is it childish or child-like to pray for everyone before going to bed at night? Is it childish or childlike to engage in Nixonian phantasy? When you’re Nixon, it’s childish. When you’re Coover, childlike.  The difference being one nauseates, the other thrills. And The Public Burning succeeds at both.

---

[i] I find Thomas R. Edwards’ 1977 New York Times review an interesting counterpoint to my own. The difference, I think, is what we hear and how we hear it. I believe Coover would find Edwards’ view problematic on several fronts. But I’m only guessing…

[ii] This foreshadows the illegal bombing of Cambodia, the carpet-bombing and war crimes in Vietnam. Elsewhere in the novel, Coover plants hints of the future Watergate and anti-war movement and protestors. One sees Nixon’s political psyche starting to bloom, able to trace it from its seedling status, abused sprout up to the current messy stink flower.

[iii] Disney and propaganda; Edward Bernays 1, 2, 3, 4—Happiness Machines, The Engineering of Consent, There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed, and limousine liberalism [sic]; and spectacle, where in which authentic social life has been replaced with its representation: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation." Debord argues that the history of social life can be understood as "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing." This condition, according to Debord, is the "historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life." [Wikipedia, The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy DeBord].

[iv] The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Interestingly, there was no “poet laureate” from 1953-55. William Carlos Williams was appointed to serve from 1952-55, but had been investigated by the FBI for communist sympathies. He also refused to be fingerprinted or undergo other such indignities. Coover makes Nixon the de facto poet laureate for that time, which enables him to mock Faulkner by having Nixon sing his praises. The novel is stuffed with these kinds of pleasures.

HOME OF THE BRAVE

Jesus freaks, hallelujah

hands, sway in the breeze

believing they’re saved

But

they observe

without perception,

having misread Revelations 18

*

Jesus will rule without loathing

invited to act by the many-bladed mind of His Father

unmoved by the grass He’s mowing

**

These apes of “Christ”

[running their own experiments]

want a dis-ease they never believed in

to answer their trivial prayers

***

In the end,

they might fail to avert

the chilling fire

They never engaged,

lo[o]sing It in terror

terrified

FORCE

Phases do not probe.
 

The luminosity of desertion

subsists for those too petrified

by time

To say anything

about

Force not needing to

insist upon its function

or activity.

ETHICS

Some poets feel like parasitical mushrooms made of hallucinogens or poison, dependent on your point of view. They can pop up anywhere at any time in their black berets and avant-garde soldier uniforms, blood dripping from each of their punctuation marks, raping, killing, cooking and eating clueless [but not innocent] business majors who appear in their comp class because it’s a requirement, not just the cannibalism but the course itself. This requirement’s like Paula Deen taking Anthony Bourdain up her overextended arse. It’s all part of the program. So we must excuse them. Like Second Lieutenant William Calley and sergeants Wuterich and Bales, and the late great Gordon Kahl, we’re all just living out our missions the best we can. And don’t forget, it’s not easy being an avant-garde poet warrior in a financial world where everyone ignores you.

Remember, ambitious people have mothers who love them, too.

MONA LISA

On the veranda a child will croon
and the Earth listen, terrorized

And Heaven’s hoop will maintain the scourge
knowing nothing.

Therefore, dominate your enemies.

Look happy.

THESE DAYS [Composed 1-6-12]

You picked your guitar and sang like a farmer getting at something about jobs, but not quite, something about the walls and cages made by and for the People’s labor, rooms that left us broke and suffocated, but not as busted and choked (so they say) as we were before we built them and enclosed ourselves to borrow and consume.

“Neither a lender nor a borrower be” is a savage notion, but you didn’t write about Franklin, did you? You probably did. You wrote about everything and everyone. When you died you allegedly left a 400-page bibliography of your work. According to the Poetry Foundation, you were very productive.

Now we at least have, or recently had anyway, some dust in our throats for victuals to live on ‘til we croak on our feet numb with scrambled memories of booze-addled Saturday nights and sleepy Sabbath afternoons. And the town’s obits seldom run half the page.

Sixty minutes covers everything they want us to know. What they’re saying of your America they’re saying in a binary code that refuses to flip-flop, with the volken or masses or mob you so loved listening for their system’s inner child, as you once did, moved by its pulse not its diction, looking for the power.

They will not occupy their wilder-ness. That terrifies them. The wild is a scalping terr’rist Injun. Look Out!

These days our sense of time has removed us from the glimmering dawn of illuminated life amusing itself in meadows under vast heavens of falling, thoughtless rain. These days we’re marking voices that leave our tongues wagging and ears wriggling with nonsense and lies.

America before Columbus (did you write of him, too?) was a pond alive with minnows and perch, snappers and loons, reflecting a firmament astir with hawks and herons, surrounded by forest eyelashes occupied by Iroquois, a solid forehead roamed by Oglala Sioux and a chin carved of solid Cherokee.

Your problem became America’s problem, preferring Emerson to Muir or Thoreau, parlor over pond and peak.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Sandburg. They’ve found some rhyme in their reason thanks to your Lincoln, but we lost our freedom in the expediencies of gitter done and legalese. You were the humble, twanging Wagner of the Great Plains and kinda saw it coming cause you knew the city and such—