Saturday, August 06, 2011









YAWP





Walt, under my bootsoles you smell like napthalene and paint
whenever the water table rises, and no one is held accountable
.

Generalists with cell phones selling wellness products on the
beltways of America at eighty miles per hour beli
eve

they are the first to ever want a life that’s more than labo
r and
have made that aspiration a creed. Their pr
ayer: May I get
mine.

Your beautiful roughs have been trained to kill a dozen ways,
contractors n
ow, not camerados, and none can
be heard

above the mating calls of money sounding in t
he air now
everywhere instead of the flocks of sparrows you heard
in Camden.

Do I sound bitter? Very well then, I sound bitter
. I am large.
I contain the entire betrayal of our country, Walt, it
s feudal lords

for whom democracy is an obstacle, for
whom humans are
resources, a cost of doing business, regretta
ble expenditures,

and I’m not feeling especially amative, lo
afing here, my soul
so far declining my invitation, maybe becaus
e a camera in a tree

is beaming my image to a satellit
e tracked by a monitor
in a subterranean office somewhere deep
in These United States.

— RH 8/2011