As mile by mile is seen

#king, rodney g,

#police brutality,

#victims of violent crimes,

#african american men,

#los angeles,

#crimes against,

#the 20th century,

#history,

#biographies,

#california,

and

#new orleans 

 

sometimes I make the same mistakes again and again 

let the poor bastards down, get sick, starve, drown

in the end, in a pool, in Rialto, Sunday afternoon

the toll is obvious

 

beatings help America focus: contented, sober and engaged

in passing

coming to grips with that night in 1991 of driving while black

mangled hands tell a different story

 

this is a work in progress

a contrast to the scared man and fires some 20 years back

to crowd-control using three-foot-clubs attached to leather straps

there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free

 

at Florence and Normandie 

at Retreat View and Twin Trees

asked what he’d like on his headstone, he replies: “Can we all just get along?

Can we all get along in peace?”

 

all of you are one, He says, in a terrible chaos withstanding

as everybody turned away from his fellow man

Is God the God of Jews only?

Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too.

You never sleep right the first night
                             in a new town
                             in a new room
                             in an unfamiliar bed, in hotel rooms, in the light and after drinking

it would be exciting I think, meeting
tonight
just like that, pretending it was just by chance

such a small world, Ill say
over the swirl of ice chips dissolving. it’s a new night
and we’re anything


Cambridge was nothing as I’d pictured it
middle aged and taking whiskey in dark denim and ballcaps in a bar that reminds me of Oregon
the cobblestones waving back like wheat fields through the shuttered windows and brown bottles confessing
I’ve crashed this car before


touring grave sights in the rain I’m reminded how very little has changed
for the dead 

                            in new towns
                            in new beds
tonight
                            in refrain 
                            in the rain in Boston

From The River Of News
by ROBERT PINSKY
The President and his opponent are both speaking in Ohio.
Both opposing speeches will be about the economy
The Egyptian high court has liquidated their parliament.
In the Iroquois language Ohio means a good river.

Car industry statements defend the three-crew workday,
Though the three-crew system is hard on workers’ households.
In Mozambique irrigation and agribusiness are expanding.
In Russian, the word “liquidate” is especially sinister.

Speeches and statements. Tongues. Poems, reports, parleys.
An Egyptian says, This is the smoothest of military coups.
“We’d be outraged,” he says, “if we weren’t so exhausted.”
“Economy” comes from “household” in ancient Greek.

The saying is, money talks; now, money is speech itself—
According to our own high court. In Mozambique,
The massive irrigation is bad for subsistence farmers, but
Africa can feed the world, says a corporate spokesman.


http://www.npr.org/2012/06/14/155001954/newspoet-robert-pinsky-writes-the-day-in-verse

gender is relative, I answer
2nd or 3rd cousin twice removed, once distilled
has your cheek bones and chest unsettled

make only connections with skin
fingerprints and heart lines
race is a complex of invisible strings

played out like viola and violins:
I could never quite tell them apart
(but that is white privilege too)

we’re japan and cincinnati, we two
really a world apart
coasters resting uneasy on a heavy sea

I believe that your hand touching
mine is the only messiah left
from all the places god had been

we spread like germs into the cities

frenzied laid claim inside the walls of another heaving cell

some ten or so years after puberty 

bodies and antibodies banging like pot and pan lids

spawned and sprawling through open channels

gaining consent, infectious hunger, bits of skin and life: fast

a potent stew of sweat, cosmetics, feces

awkward quiet and other shit

 

we grow virus like and ivy vines

the beautiful nuisance of flowering 

weeds. wind and wings of small birds and the bees

take us as flecks of sticky pollen so far

from what comes to mind when someone says  home

recollection is bruised to the shade of eggplant and amber

tender and subtle as the sun arcs back

to a fetal position to sleep

 

sickness is more steadfast than light

tonight we lie afflictions at bay

another day draws back into itself  

tobacco mosaic burn young leaves

the origin of everything in the evolutionary history of life

is unknown, we guess

                  we grow best where it’s crowded

                  unhealed, we’re moved for a cure

Essay on Adam
by Robert Bringhurst

There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.
Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:
he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.
Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to Adam.

The first, that he fell, is too simple. The fourth,
fear, we have tried and found useless. The fifth,
nothing happened, is dull. The choice is between:
he jumped or was pushed. And the difference between these

is only an issue of whether the demons
work from the inside out or from the outside
in: the one
theological question.

  1. wanted to go to the game with you tonight but didnt have the balls.

I spent $13.30 on something small -  told you

how politics and love are contact sports, and our elbows are sharp.

2. It will be a Friday

I will be rested, your

eyes settled in the sour yellow

swill of tobacco burning

and pit stains

hazel and hoppy tones

drinking liquor

until we’re green

saying things like

god is

like amethysts and absinth

and the summer is green

and will never end

 3. I will miss you to the slumber of rain

we won’t wake to together

to things unquieted in the last hours

sweat pooling in the clefts of limbs gone limp

new bark taut around it’s paler tree, I do not mind

rubbing like thighs in corduroy, the low whistle

from moments up above the knee