The sky is brown dust
at dusk on New Year's Eve
hovering over
grimly tented nomads
& the night quiets
into an avalanche roar
& slowly I went low
behind the orange & white cones,
hiding where I've never hidden before
as the last night lights up
into a firecracker blow.
Meet the New Cruelty.
Meet the new universal scream.
All connected by silver strings,
pulsating seas of love & war.
Grasp the leap of faith it takes
to believe anything is quantum real.
Look & see: That chaotic madman
of heavy-handed governance:
He nailed a closure notice
to the door of the library.
Thomas Jefferson's rational animal
bows before the burning
& doinks the kick toward
the field goal posts of autocracy
in a dissipation of the glories
during that holiday ditch betwixt
Christmas & New Year's Eve
when the Earth lets out a breath
for those moments spared
from all the trampling around,
the compromised ground littered
with tricksters & tomb raiders
& the know-how of Aknaton lying dead,
coal-black cables of Bad Bwana disrespect,
crazy white people shit
like salt-water aquariums
in the mile-high desert,
fresh-catch seafood at the ski resort.
Nothing but blunt pain here for growth.
Feel the new cruelties
pressuring the pineal pearls
in our oyster-fried hind brains.
Whisper beneath the muttering
of the so & so suckers
in the neo-liberal mausoleum.
Meet the monk in his cloister
rolling hysterical on the river dancing.
See him speaking to vaporous ghosts
held together in some sudden
revelatory silent tsunami,
trying to make the words shimmer,
make them shine & shine & shine.
Him big Edward R. Murrow,
speaking truth to the ivory towers
with reports of rainbow smoke
mucking up the Mars-red Moon,
glaciers cracking & fizzling into herds
of Fibonacci sequence seahorses
& firenadoes raging across the cities.
Please spare us his year-end review.
Enough to say sanity was rare,
irrational animals tossing about
the singed globe with "passionate intensity ..."
Oh dear, Mister Yeats, I'm getting lost
in your reveries, gassed by your prophecies ...
And here's another: Look. Let me
introduce you to the new looming cruelties,
tight as the security at Times-Square,
pompous & pumped & primed
for the new Nero & his Trumpigarchy ...
Can't wait to get a selfie
with the next Ground Zero's dead heroes ...
But Captain! There aren't enough
metallic cages for them all!
No worries raging in, no worries raging out,
just shake your piggy banks all about.
Hear the tinkle & the shout.
Just wipe away the human stain
with your family's black rifle,
your Sheriff Joe Playbook,
your racially profiling amigos.
Gotta get me a Bible because
at the American greed-head
fireworks display before the transit,
the entire neighborhood
percolates like popcorn at midnight.
On the first day of the year,
the barbecued shreds of the celebration
tumble like weeds in the terrified wind.
