We can recycle the machine(s), but we must not use them: the barrel of a gun can protect us from the thorns of the rose.

Love must be protected, so we connect and communicate before and after the inspiration and orders come.

I think I can pedal harder, but I need to make sure I can pedal tomorrow and the day after tomorrow because there's still a long way to go. A marathon is heroic, but it still only happens in a day. I only have so much to give without you these poems would have no meaning.

All negotiations take place in the present. You can annotate Blackstone's Commentaries all you want, but you're only doing what Blackstone did. Maybe the seller should shake and lie to my face. He claims to be a person after all.

America needs something to grow, spread, take root in the heart, the innermost parts and stop the beating.There is a drought: the valley of death is highly combustible and can be set on fire. It should be lit;  the rich deforested its hillsides: They wanted the commute to be short and they wanted a view to watch the protesters get beat in the free speech zones below. Fuck the police.

The schools start tracking too early: Why would you stop teaching someone because they don't know enough?  You don't hand out food to the innocent; you hand out food to the hungry... Another cracked and potholed back road, another flat tire; buy a car and the American dream dies. Remember that time in the 50s when we had public transportation? It wasn't perfect and it never was, but a car cannot take me somewhere perfect either. The road begins in the mountains like a river and ends before it reaches the city. We'll never make it to the heart of the mountains or the cities on the roads the 50s paved. Who are they trying to keep apart? The silence is bothering me.

together. The local millionaire can't employ us all on his farm... there are only so many horses to take care of. The safest place is always the warmest pocket, so I'm sorry if I keep my hands in there. Your hands belong there too.

I know it's tempting. Stories remain seductive and some say that's what art is; but don't let the past forms limit our future. There are three dimensions... not just a world. Click the link in the blog post to read about the present situation of Ras Baraka and Newark. Sometimes I think the origin only matters if you're trying to write a novel. I'm trying to say something. 

Maybe I've spent too much time thinking about the past. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll still hope even if science proves I'm wrong. I can't describe all that's wrong with the world in one poem, but this world is a world of continual fear and danger of violent death.  Our contracts will always be unfulfilled; NAFTA was passed; Get a gun. Your national interest is not your interest, my interest, children's interest.

Maquiladoras and violence across the border. We only have violence here.  Terrorism continues: an African-American boy found hanging, and it's ruled a suicide without investigation. What list of tragedies do you see on your TV and what meaning do you take from them?  Hand me the political football, and let us answer. Don't pass it: We're not gonna play football unless you pay us. He's seen us broke too many times to feign ignorance about why we want to unionize, why we want to hand in a collective list of demands. We won't be treated as individuals anymore. 

When meeting new people you always think about the person you're not with... we could've done a trivial and intimate thing together: if you want you can teach me how to cook with saffron or we could've finally watched the Goonies together.

Consciousness was late again, and it was a good a thing: you said something funny. We laughed. I made that first move or you did and now maybe we'll be friends: I think the joke was about George Bush and that time he almost choked on a pretzel... Or maybe neither of us made the move; at least that's how it felt... That's how I knew it was meant it to be, if only for a second.

Sometimes I feel like a rural town: I don't put up signs. If you really care you'll find your own fucking way.  I know where the old road used to go before they had to plant the Great Green Wall to stop desertification; I wrote the book on it, so I'm sorry if sometimes my facts aren't user friendly, but if you cared about the same things this conversation wouldn't be so fucking difficult: That's what alcohol's sometimes for and we all see you sipping it more. 

One day I'll take this poem out of the museum; it is work that must be done from London to New York City and several other cities that I'm only just becoming familiar with, unfortunately.  The evidence is building... not a museum, but something that knows that one day it will be gone.  We looked at pictures of pictures to try to determine what the original photographer saw; the black velvet case, the stock background made for a surreal scene: what happened to the people who this was taken from?

If ‘barely anyone is talking about’ what you care about then you need to read different things, watch different things, talk to different people. Sometimes the trains don’t run on time and shouldn’t. The useful Nazis returned to work so drugs could be developed and so the Cold War could be fought. One day you’ll smash your combination coffee maker and alarm clock. The oughts return: It’s easy to see what failed in a time of crisis, but more difficult to see the failures of a recovery. The interviews were never impartial; why did we consider that white man impartial when he was clearly an egomaniac.

The water will run from rich to poor, and the manhunt will end and not reverse. The hourglass has been turned too many times: we have the internet and each other and violence.  The occupation has begun amid the penile geometries of the neo-gilded buying loitering laws for the powerless to feel powerful enforcing.  The language we walk is rebellious: it has to be. Nothing is ours, and no one knows the rules until the police turn up. 

The curvatures of these nonlinear geometries are becoming too much: Why'd they curve the hallways of the new middle school?  We can't see each other and we're in the same hallway. Is this a crowd control tactic? Is something that should be yelled at every town hall meeting.

The board is rigged. They can frack under your house probably.  The mineral rights were lost long ago: ask the American Indians. The conspirators never conspired. They were taught the same things; their formulas were written long ago and your 'family history' is not a variable.

The apple won't fall on Isaac Newton's head; Eve cannot eat it: It's not your fault anymore.  The apple was last seen in transit to the Caymans.

Video games have their own physics. The last time we had fun was playing a zombie game. Our society in the game made new rules; the rules were similar to those today, but we were actually involved in making them. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.

I have a wee vulnerable garden out back. Please don't step on it. I'll cry if you do. It is and will be my life's work. I'll be devastated. It doesn't get as much water as it used to. I have to buy bottle water. I'm getting older now. The trip down the back steps feels far. We'll make it though. I always sit and watch color return after I water my little garden. I think the soil's getting thinner. I don't know how or why, but it is.  The circumstances aren't ideal but I'm committed.

After I write these things, I feel like I need a hug. I wish we could talk now, but I don't know how to find you. Something's happened. Everyone's been cloistered and is praying to the same distant God whose signs are growing vaguer. I can't hear your prayers anymore. This happens every winter. The wind howls; it howls more and more each year like it's being channeled into sharper and more jagged corridors. It slaps my face harder too. I think the wind wants to escape its labyrinth.

In the winter, I read less and pray more. It's not light for very long. When I worked my office job during the winter, I would leave before sunrise and return after sunset. I never saw the sun. During that time I began to believe seasonal affective disorder was more a response to terrible working conditions than anything else. I used to love the winter, but now the snow falls less and the wind screams more. The climate's changing. I know the jury's not out, but we all know there's going to be another technicality...

Soon I will hold you. We need our conversations, our dialogue. I used to write poems at work. It reminded me of Frank O'Hara, but I'll never get paid to write, and I don't know that I should be, but I do believe we should be paid to live together. It feels like a universal right, or something better than that like a home should feel.

The mistakes we made as cloistered monks and nuns will be for forever: the scanned scrolls are riddled with the mistakes of a shivering hand. We've been alone for too long. We're still learning. I'm sorry - these are the words that are closest to how I feel when I realize I may have hurt you, hurt us, damaged what we decided to build. There is nothing I would rather do than build with you even if we have to change the physics of this entire fucking world, even if it means changing the mass of the earth.

These decibels The evidence of the visual henceforth replaced Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood. Thus a great wind cleanses, as a new ruler Which I am not ready to discuss, not am not at all ready to, Be of no help to you. Good-bye.

Returning from chores, the milk frozen, the pump heaped high with a chapeau of snow, But there's no personal involvement: And slowly the incoherencies of day melt in For I am condemned to drum my fingers Not that I am not afraid, but there is very little time left.

Yet I shall never return to the past, that attic, Yet certain kernels remain. Clouds that drift past sheds- They in fact represent the backbone of the island economy. Scarcely we know where to turn to avoid suffering, I mean The point where they meet is their vanishing point. An American inventor made a fortune with just such a contraption.

In a Paris street in 1932, and all the clumsy seductions and amateur paintings done, Of April sidewalks, and young trees bursting into timid leaf A postman is coming up the walk, a letter held in his outstretched hand. No hope is to be authorized except in exceptional cases. Sure enough: in the pale gray and orange distances to the left, a A lot of bunk, none of them really care whether you get any sugar or not.

The main point has already changed, but the masses continue to tread the water A few snowflakes are floating in the airshaft. Across the way "All up and down de whole creation," like magic-lantern slides projected on the wall of a cavern: castles, enchanted gardens, etc. Soon there is to be exchange of ideas and The election is to be held tomorrow, under the trees. And it is December again, And the prudent benefits of sun, but still the postman comes.

These decibels Made for masses of inertia, and hips Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time Disappeared in a bigarrure of squiggly lines. The image with the crocodile in it became no longer apparent. A girl slowly descended the line of steps. Taking a separate line to its end. Returning to the mass, they join each other She knows now. But the floor is being slowly pulled apart And the whole house of cards comes dinning down around one's ears! Mild effects are the result.

It is madness to explain... We are part of some system, thinks he, just as the sun is part of A general wishful thinking of night To the aqua and silver waters where stands the glistening white ship That mazy business through darkness and mist I am convinced these things are of some importance.

The figure 8 is the perfect symbol Looked at from this angle the problem of death and survival Can be made into a practical telephone, the two halves being connected by a length of wire. Yonder stand a young boy and girl leaning against a bicycle. A postman is coming up the walk, a letter in his outstretched hand. Yet the lovers congregate anyway, the lights twinkle slowly on. Not for long though. And now they too collapse, Now you must shield with your body if necessary (you Understand? This is all a part of you and the only part of you. One black spot remained. If I should... If I said you were there Nature is still liable to pull a few fast ones, which is why I can't emphasize enough Your most important activity. But the sawing motion of desire, throwing you a moment to one side... never would have remembered.) Yet it is all offered as "today's news," as if we somehow had a right to it, as though it were a part of our lives That subsides quietly into plain historical fact. To have it all be over! To wake suddenly on a hillside postpone the explanation.

The whole brilliant mass comes spattering down. That has always been behind you. How far from the usual statement I mean this. Through the years A joke of silence. Oneself.

These decibels Think them important? So back we go to the old, imprecise feelings, the I'd like to bugger you all up, But war's savagery... Even the most patient scholar, now As we pick up a lemon-colored light horizontally Ages slightly. For the solutions are millionfold, like waves of wild geese returning in the spring. There are so many places.

The bed well made. The whole place scrupulously clean, but cold and damp. Sure, but a simple shelter from this or other phenomena is easily contrived.

Smooth out the sad flowers, pick up where you left off Sure enough: in the pale gray and orange distances to the left, a Steam pours out of the espresso machine, fogging the panes with their modern lettering Excuse me, may I have the sugar. Why certainly-pardon me for not having passed it to you.

Wasn't there some time in my American childhood, when we felt whole? I used to look in the mirror but that was before our teacher explained modernism. 

Sigh.

Have you ever had a moment where you've wanted to hug your teenage self? No love - from the skies above we cannot love. As I get older, I look towards the future more.  

I used to find so much funny: "Let's go." They don't move. First as tragedy then as farce... except I was brought up pretending nothing was new. 

For me, there was never a tragedy only farce. The tragedy happened long ago, before we were born, centuries ago. The British did it. It is over. Nothing can be done; there is no alternative. 

If we walk side by side staring at the same thing long enough we'll remember we shouldn't be riding our bikes behind the tractor spraying ddt and in a few years we'll blame our parents and a few years later realize they didn't know either. 

The guides we sought were funded by the Ford Foundation; I like Jackson Pollock, but there's more to 60s art than what the museums frame.

Justice should be inexpensive, yet it is demanded we wait, walk miles across the great sandy desert of politics, a result of climate change, or maybe because Jefferson's fucking tree wasn't watered:

The rules were unjust from the start; the dream only existed for 30 years: wealth is inherited unequally, dad left, and too many teachers are racists. Hurricanes hit, but mysteriously the lights in Goldman Sachs stay on.

The Danish have protested again: I hope some people made new friends and read the Federalist Papers and learned 'special interests' were meant to govern us. My favorite works of nonfiction were never completed

One day we won't be asked to 'own' what we destroy: capitalism never owns what it destroys; capitalism does not own the earth.  Maybe one day people will read books instead of being centrists.

The forces have changed; the inclusion of corporations has failed: Maybe those guys should've asked their mothers first; we certainly did; even before Greg was killed mountain biking on that power company trail... or maybe it wasn't Greg; I think Greg died in Iraq. I'm not sure anymore.

Maybe one day 23 year olds cars will slow plazas won't be corporate the tasks will be accomplished before the list radically present

Work is a place for not dying: secrets are removed, but everything is opaque: It's politics. Sunshine won't survive the office ambiance, but we will. In my bones, we feel 1968 fading. The revolution won't be fun this time because fun isn't fun anymore.

The trees revolted and fell into each other: They finally touched, so we will too. Soon. We move frequently and reshelve our personal libraries. The order made sense, however briefly, and we feel like poets dusting plastic plants. We're alone in homes, in museums, in cars, in plazas.

There is something common, though what it is is hard to say. Someday, someone will say it; they'll parse the things we call fragments because they're rarely put together in a way that feels whole. The evidence is mounting every day, but that only makes the work easier: there was a crime: someone once denied it, but there was a struggle, and now as we exchange fragments we recognize something is broken: something shattered us and holds our loved ones hostage for a demand on a horizon that exists only to those drowning in their own flows.  It feels overwhelming, but in a fragile way, like being told to climb a supple seedling that cannot support your weight, and never will because your task prevents it from growing until one day you finally kill it and you rest, realizing it is dead. As you rest, you realize you are covered in sap, sticky. Everything you touch is reminder of your failure.

The witty sayings come too easy because the revolution is near: all our favorite aphorists either died in the French Revolution or were heroes of its participants and us. They always said the funniest things in our textbooks, or maybe it was just me laughing at my textbook like a nerd... I don't think so, though. Pronouns seem to have lost their meaning; who are 'we' anyway? Every time you hear them say 'we' it makes us want to join another 'we.' We're not alone; sometimes it isn't obvious but it's true.  There's a computer screen between us now but it brought us together originally.  One day you'll look at a Picasso and laugh: It was so obvious, and why did he have to appropriate 'African art' to do it?