Nod to Spleen

I know a lot about life,
things, and stuff
so when they question
the credence
of my knowing
I get angry and have to
spit. Then feel
better that they don’t
know how much
I know about who
they are, and remember
they know nothing
of me and what
I know about
them, things, and stuff.

No snow so go.

Letters from the past tell me things,
thoughts,
snippets of truth from other men:
“There is no snow in Hollywood, there is no rain in California.”
Some chap once said,
as I thought of clouds and planes and the
beating,
burning dream
of the endless American sun.

The Disconsolate of the Land

Buried basements of the free-butveryexpensive-world behind heavy hung doors, rusting industrial bolts and locks, dripping alleyways linking subterranean darkness, mystery flickering in networks, a lack in linking that never reconnects. The body of darkness, the spirit of the dirt. The soil of turmoil, the filth of the earth. Mouthgagging relations to silence family discussion. Terrorists shopping in supermarkets, posting love letters, smiling in the sun; how we shock, they are just like us. We snap and kill, crimes of passion, the desperate hate of endless loss. All in the name of love. We sit and watch the grotty hovals that blister and brim, spilling out with symbols of uadaltered, universal sin. We forget before we found the hole in which Sadam lived, above ground in light is where he, we, me, sipped from the rim of that diet-coke icon global tin or considered in passing which tooth paste would give us the Hollywood ‘ching,’ that plastic smile of shining white. Human, all too human, the philosopher would say when we try to make the distinction between them and us. We must remember that it is we who have plotted the points along that axis of evil, we who absent mindedly forget the lies behind this axis of diesel. And so they hide underground, the tribals fleeing from genocide, the infecting rape of the other side, contaminating and splicing traditional blood lines. Fugitives, the bankrupt, the destitute. Because towers of gleaming New York can never understand the psychological materialism of secret gentrified desire. The desperation of the wretched. The west can never understand the freedom of difference born in thought that bubbles in night-blooming foam from back-bedrooms, from cellars down steps, from the illegality of squats, where mental masturbation reawakens the pleasures of the soul and the skin. Because when beautiful Narcissus stare eyed that dark pool mirror, only a dollar sign stared back at him. We glue eye the TV screens watching the protruding bellies of famine, the shining bling of poverty glittering under the African sun. With eyes that are really more flies, than eyes, they look back at us: “oh dear oh dear...awfulawful” Aren’t we glad that this isn’t us? There are no glimmers of hope on the dry desert sand, just the coruscating sparkle of millions of swollen abdomens, writhing reflections of the burning midday heat. Meanwhile, lazy, laggard, indolent hicks plug porcine bodies into the inorganic grey of the machine. Living out lives in the glowing radiation of LCD lucidity with tortilla chips spilling from between folds of corpulent skin. Shielded from the world behind the windshields of carbon spouting automobiles how can they know the ache of bitter anguish, the violent throb of misery, the helpless throes of despair? How can you ever know the hopelessness of the world when your feet never feel the dust and the heat of the naked earth, feel the cracks in its skin, feel where the poison is seeping, working its way in.