My Leader


I was under-performing
I had cut costs to the bone and was looking skeletal, sharp-edged
I lived in a cave with a few bones on the floor,
presents from the dog 
My hallway dark, 
wall plaster crumbling in the flat's big room, 
where the dog slept, so I wouldn't have to smell her
while I read Rilke and Lowell in bed after midnight 
and listened to the gay girls come home 
after the bars closed and the T stopped running,
the john in the hall,
the shower down the street
in the ancient community bath house,
that homage to the neighborhood's immigrant past

My nose stuck in a book,
I hid from the bosses in the mimeo room
and worked desultorily on each day's masterpiece, the Operating Room schedule,
my diet based on canned chicken, surplus rice,
and the cheap lunch in the cafeteria
   
We met in the hallways 
or through the occasional delivery of mimeographed wisdom, 
smelling of the wine-dark ink of sweet reason,
I posted to her precious fingers, 
till the day she walked me home
to my palace of mean exposure, 
its tenement window naked to my humiliation

She hung a sheet over the world's wide eye
transforming my hovel into a desert pavilion 
where we reclined, and loved,
a demonstration of executive function that left me 
speechless, spellbound:
'My leader,' I thought

Reader, I married her 





'Spotlight'


The new voice at the top makes a difference 
Its power no visual cinematic presence 
but in the light it sheds on a shameful past
You see it in the eyes of the sufferers, 
when the word stumbles,
the pain still so close after so many years it geysers out
on its own hurting schedule, 
a spotlight on violation. 

We know this happened
We didn't know how much
We see the awkward words, fenced and deferred,
in the glass conference room
We watch the truth ride the elevators 
pose amid the bland office furniture,
grope in the dusty annuals of an ill-lighted room. 

At the end, not the roll of the credits
but the parade of sickening disclosures
spreading over nations, continents
that is also a revelation, 
not in triumph but a graveside gathering at the end of the plague
for the proclamation of a truth terrible to proclaim 
though not in the end buried in oblivion, 
covered over like moss on the graves of the martyrs,
but blazoned to the heavens.





Sacred Land 

Author's Note: According to Indian Country Today network, the land an armed outlaw band is occupying is actually land that the federal government previously stole from the Northern Paiute tribe. The Paiutes used to own 1.5 million acres, but have now been relegated to a reservation amounting to 750 acres in Burns, Oregon, where the Bundy militia has occupied a federal building and begun  an armed standoff. The network states: “President U.S. Grant established the Malheur Indian Reservation for the Northern Paiute in 1872.... [It] shares a name with the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, site of the current armed standoff.”  http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2016/01/03/bundy-militia-musters-again-over-paiute-land-162939


They bring their guns to land we stole
From treaty's vow to make them whole 
We little knew or cared to know 
What crimes still darken white man's soul 

They graze their herds on Paiute land 
Where presidents once made a stand
And granted to a native clan
A way of life these guns demand 

The frontier closed an age ago
We take the best, the least bestow
Then blink when thumping yahoos gloat
Who now with guns their treason crow