Now that I’ve figured out my life is a dream
Now what?
Now that I know I’ll be gone soon
My time on this planet drawing to a close
Now what?
What really matters to me?
Cause I don’t give a fuck about the Tribeca Film Festival
While so many plants and animals are disappearing
And I don’t give a fuck about Obama vs. Whomever
While the world’s third largest dam is being built in Brazil
Obliterating tribal cultures like a tsunami
Making the world safe for soybeans
And I don’t give a fuck about the new iPad
Or the hundreds of millions of people
Posting snapshots of themselves on Facebook
While the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
Turns a collection of plastic junk the size of Texas
Into tiny pellets ingested by the smaller fish out there
Which then are eaten by the larger fish
Caught in the nets of endless floating factories
Looking to satisfy the worldwide hunger for sushi
I turn my face away from this dumbshow and ask myself
Now what?
Now that I’ve figured out this life is a dream
The world as we know it a flash in the pan
Fool’s gold
Now that I understand
Now what?
Vertical integration in the United States once meant
White people on top and everybody else layered in below.
It has come to mean control of a product and its profits
From conception to consumption
Employing all the formerly middle men
Into one sleek unit of production and delivery.
In the case of poetry I’ve done that:
Dreamed of a poem
Captured the poem in the dream
Reduced it to representational linguistic fragments illustrated on paper
Bound it with other plausible reductions
Into the pages of a book
With barcodes, prices, photographs, and blurbs
On the back cover and covered it with the art of friends
To be sold if not in open markets
Then at the Walla Walla farmers market for years.
Does this make me then a farmer of dreams?
I decline to bring any more dreams
Thru the trap door of commerce
From which they so turbulently spring.
Retired dream farmer in a collapsed poetry market.
The poems and the dreams to which they are inextricably attached
Remain hidden in the dream verse
One of many multi verses I am told.
I want to thank all the wonderful poets who allowed us to post their poetry on Arthur while I was the Poetics Editor. I had a wonderful time reading the work and comments and helping bring a poetic flavor to the content posted here. Many people asked me how I was chosen for this position and I tell them it was my resume. When asked to provide more color I refer them to my resume which I’ve posted here.
Thanks to everyone for a great ride into the world of Arthur poetry.
Drunk on Bacon
by Dan Raphael
sitting in a claustrophobic, slat-sided shed for several days
in a world of clotted smoke
where meat falls like rain
no one dies no one inhales no one churns
to love is to have whenever the appetite
pigs are born small
trees are smaller than grass but singularly thicker
from sun to fire
fire retards time
when the sun goes out our clocks will surrender to gravity
my wrist is a video portal
since i am so many places its always breakfast somewhere,
always the first drink of the day
when i smell myself approaching, swallowing lit matches, stealing firewood
my flame will never stop
every night a new tree falls, three more sprout
when stars turn green they’re moving sideways
Fiesta frisbee legs running a gun. Raspberry look a little giggle and a little tongue pulling in the sweet fruit. Jungle gym girl, jungle jim standing up on the bars, jungle gym chasing Rocko’s gang, hey baby you remember this one.
It was a spiral of metal mathematical bars, must have been our kid attraction, the dome pentagon top, triangle sides, reaching off the great earth and the huge playground, with sparse attractions. Most of the space was vacant and earth. Jumping high above the scotch 79 soccer field with up turned mesh chest shirts behind the head. Blake Edwards. Blake red and white windbreaker, Dreamed of christmas UFO nights with blue parades of blue snowmen glowing and nearly two-d christmas lights and the magic was fading from the evil yard. It was disney land alight but it was alien, it was prismatic.
It was on my street, and before on the white and yellow pink day on the driveway crest I saw a gold governing movement, a great glittering gold tray or sleigh craft, a flat disk, with an unforeseeable army, There he was, the burger king, with his scepter and crown, blank fiberglass stare, and all the spirit of a cartoon god.
now let me tell you
what is a Brahmasastra
Brahmasastra, hindu weapon of war
near as I can make out
a flying wedge of mind energy
hurled at the foe by god or hero
or many heroes
hurled at a problem or enemy
cracking it
Brahmasastra can be made
by any or all
can be made by all of us
straight or tripping, thinking together
like : all of us stop the war
at nine o’clock tomorrow, each take one soldier
see him clearly, love him, take the gun
out of his hand, lead him to a quiet spot
sit him down, sit with him as he takes a joint
of viet cong grass from his pocket . . .
Brahmasastra can be made
by all of us, tripping together
winter solstice
at home, or in park, or wandering
sitting with friends
blinds closed, or on porch, no be-in
no need
to gather publicity
just gather spirit, see the forest growing
put back the big trees
put back the buffalo
the grasslands of the midwest with their herds
of elk and deer
put fish in clean Great Lakes
desire that all surface water on the planet
be clean again. Kneel down and drink
from whatever brook or lake you conjure up.
Trickle-Down Theory of Technology by Dirk Michener
Rich people get the newest in technology Poor people get the oldest Then later, Rich people also get the oldest Poor people get the not quite as old Then later, Poor people get the almost newest But not the Most New Only Rich people get that Also the very oldest Only Rich people get that too Poor people get shuffled around Rich people get everything Then later, Poor people get everything But it’s shuffled around So they forget that they have everything But Rich people always remember They have everything Poor people forget Poor kids and Rich kids Like watching Betamax Rich kids like watching poor kid movies Poor kid like richie rich movies Rich kid like lars von treier Poor kid like jeff Foxworthy Jeff Foxworthy had everything But didn’t know it Jeff Foxworthy had a Betamax player in his basement But didn’t know it Lars Von Treier had a Betamax in his guest bedroom And he would sneak up there at night, After his wife would fall asleep And watch “The Prince and the Pauper” Until the scene where they were found out Then later, “The Parent Trap” The original version Not the remake version Poor people movies made by Rich people Everyone loves those best Nobody likes John Waters It’s where I first found out what “Emasculation” meant John Waters Betamax tapes go for a lot of money A Dike got her post-op sex-change penis emasculated By her weirdo Mortville lover In Mortville everything is backwards Externally
I lived here nearly 5 years before I could meet the middle western day with anything approaching Dignity. It’s a place that lets you understand why the Bible is the way it is: Proud people cannot live here.
The land’s too flat. Ugly, sullen and big it pounds men down past humbleness. They Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and terrible sky. In country like this there Can be no God but Jahweh.
In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago passes its natural gas in flames Bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high. The stench stabs at your eyeballs. The whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton steel of a bombed-out town.
Remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men doing strong things in Showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light and the furnace door opening with a Blast of orange like a sunset? Or an orange?
It was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or a Nazi who wished there were people Behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers, whose old man spent most of his life in there, Remembers a “nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand.”
It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity. Friends helped me. Then I put some Love into my house. Finally I found some quiet lakes and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.
Standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. Smaller than raindrops, and only Here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away – and the Blue Gill caught that afternoon Lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! Jewel in its ear Belly gold so bright you’d swear he had a Light in there. His colour faded with his life. A small green fish…
All things considered, it’s a gentle and undemanding planet, even here. Far gentler Here than any of a dozen other places. The trouble is always and only with what we build on top of it.
There’s nobody else to blame. You can’t fix it and you can’t make it go away. It does no good appealing To some ill-invented Thunderer Brooding over some unimaginable crag.
It’s ours. Right down to the last small hinge it all depends for its existence Only and utterly upon our sufferance.
Driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I knew again that never will the Man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel monstrosity. It Snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a blind, red, rhinoceros. It’s already running us down.
You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away. I don’t know what you’re going to do about it. But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just going to walk away from it. Maybe A small part of it will die if I’m not around
While our attention is distracted by Iraq Take time to object to some of the other wars The American empire is fighting concurrently as well, such as The war in The Philippines, the war in Columbia, The war in Korea, the war in Afghanistan, The war in Israel, the war in Pakistan, The war in Yemen, the war on Terror, The war on poverty, the war on drugs, The war on The Bill of Rights, The war on common sense itself.
The war of America against the world Can’t be about anything grander than The president’s pathology and popularity.
Not since King Lear have speakers of English been mislead By a leader so completely ‘round the bend. Power is dangerous enough in the hands of ordinary plodders. In the hands of the crazy and uneducated The danger expands exponentially.
The last time Congress declared war was 1941. 62 years later the siege mentality still rules.
The 18th century supposition behind the Separation of Powers, ie Congress shall have the power to declare war; The president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces Presupposed that a declaration of war would precede Any armed forces to command
Since we devolved to a permanent military With the president as the commander We have perpetual war With Congress towed along like the tail of a kite.
Someday we’ll lift the siege and see The pitiful men behind the curtains pulling strings.
Consumer Imperialism
1 In 1946 the Truman Administration cobbled together policy That will guide America and the United States into a grave: Stimulate domestic consumption and search for foreign markets.
World War Two propelled Americans across the world Destroying their distinguished isolation And Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of self determination of nations, Putting Hershey Bars and atom bombs along with GI Joes Into the world word bank Along with the great American coinage, OK.
OK can mean anything from yes to you are on your own. OK, if that’s the way you want it, OK with me.
It might have been OK if they’d confined domestic consumption to The simple facts of warm clothes, adequate housing, and nutritious meals, The need for which food stamp Americans have in common with everybody else. “One third of the nation is ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed,” FDR declaimed seventy years ago. It’s still true for radically different reasons one depression later.
In 1946 the American people were hungry to forget The Great Depression With its soup lines, dust bowls and railroaded hobos As the speculated roaring of the twenties simpered out into The savage thirties whine.
The exact point in the relationship between Dying early to save the system money and Working to consume yourself to death efficiently Hasn’t quite been worked completely out to policy maker’s actuarial satisfaction.
Americans stood 19th century Maytag frugality on its head: Build it well and make it last, Darn your socks, grind your wheat, make your own soap, Do without until you can afford it, Into a plastic credit card throw away civilization Destroying the environment on the side as a Mildly regrettable cost of doing business Symbolized by the shopping cart in the trough with Wal-Mart’s predatory criminal labor and retail practices.
2 In the old days prior to 1946, except for Mexico, Louisiana, Oregon and the Indians, The United States government had confined its actual imperialism To the Roosevelt Doctrine’s annual obligatory invasion of Latin America
With a few cruel Hawaiian exceptions such as when their empire of ironic slaughter Was taken to the limit in Aguinaldo’s Philippines Led by Teddy Roosevelt’s “secret” admiration of the British Empire
Who goaded American into building a navy Sufficiently enormous eventually to make the basket catch Of the British Empire’s bases and other falling stock in the Atlantic Charter.
Post 1946 when imperialism became the way of life Colonial wars piled up in the history books alongside Syngman Rhee’s Korea, Hoh Chi Minh’s Viet Nam, Salvadore Allende’s Chile, And Saddam Hussein’s broken Babylon.
Some of the secret history rarely gets recited in public Like General Eisenhower’s perpetual overthrow by his CIA Army of Governments in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, The Congo, Indonesia and Vietnam.
“It’s about jobs,” George Bush the 1st gesticulated nervously When asked to rationalize the Gulf War he’d goaded The allies into reestablishing the British Empire’s toehold on the oily Emirate of Kuwait.
The United States military has been under siege Real or imagined, Sometimes both; never neither, Since the bombing of Pearl Harbor– Sixty plus years of the war that never stops.
It’s what these southern kleptocrats desire Under siege like the Confederates Where they lost the battles and built the shrines The basis (es) of their military theocracy preys upon.
Semi-Colon half an asshole Powell used to claim with a straight face that The exit strategy is the most important aspect of Colonial War. There is no exit from Consumer Imperialism.
Consumer Imperialism, World War 3.1
World War 3.1 was a knife fight at 20,000 feet. Have your will up to date.
Never lose sight of the fact that the “faith based initiative” Which took out the twin towers of the World Trade Center Was carried out by trainees of the CIA once removed Unleashing a relentless wave of video military fascism.
Win the war on terrorism by training counter terrorists To terrorize other people in a war on abstract nouns. Government by sarcasm is an unfit substitute for self rule. Help wanted: somebody to shovel the horseshit off the information superhighway. . With each side referring to the other side as evil It makes one wonder if both sides are right. Evil is that which has power over you. God doesn’t take sides; that’s what makes God God. Human beings have no faith in their own story, So they drag in God as the author of Their Christian and Moslem shenanigans.
Flying hijacked commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon Was a reckless act of freedom Rather than an attack on it or democracy as claimed by the unelected President Bush who obtained office by judicial fraud, Hardly an unimpeachable spokesman for Democracy.
There was no attack on The Samuel J. Tilden New York Public Library or The Statue of Liberty. That would have been an attack on Freedom and Democracy.
The world trade towers were a symbol all right: A symbol of the Rockefeller brothers’ capacity To manipulate the public policy of the New York and New Jersey Port Authorities into Rescuing some of their down in the mouth real estate At the lower end of Manhattan.
The attack was on World Trade and Consumer Imperialism.
The design competition will create a monument to the victims. How about creating a world trade system that is fair to all participants? Now that would be an enduring monument.
War is now perpetual when it used to be punctuated by peace. America is a winner’s tragedy; freedom destroyed in a pitiful exercise to save it.
Et Tu Bruté?
There’s nothing left of Caesar except a salad and a haircut. Klipschutz
Caesar, Julius, who Killed half the able bodied of France To bring those reluctant frogs Into a Roman pond
Who bridged the Rhein near Speyer In ten short days Without an environmental impact statement Or German permission.
Comilitones, he intoned, I have crossed the Rubicon. Cut the Gordian Knot As Alexander did. Cut the umbilical cord Across his mother’s belly Up out from down under her narrow birth canal. This is the way to the Cesarean section.
Not everybody born by the knife Can grow up to be both The Queen of Bithnyia And the Emperor of Rome.
My fellow toddlers it is still Government by assassination. We can’t avoid the history of The Meiji Restoration and Eisenhower’s CIA. Brutus honey, is that you?
American presidents elected every twenty years since Lincoln In zero years to match their accomplishments Have either been assassinated or the attempt was made: Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan. Among these august dead did the living Have even half a chance?
What if Bush the younger Brought into office by black robes In the year of double zeros Would take a silver bullet To match the silver spoon He’s been porking out in The public lunch box with.
If some Shakespearean character in a play would say: “Bush should be assassinated To meet the rhythm test of history,” She’d be making an observation Not a threat.
Pity and terror are the Draino of literature According to Aristotle and Herb Ruhm. Therefor, making war on terror is an infringement On poet’s rights.
Bring me the chicken Caesar Hold the haircut.
Terror is half our stuff. What’s next, A war on pity?
The Rocket’s Red Glare
The empire can be managed to a soft landing Or it can be kicked apart By the idiots who rule it and their intended victims.
The second half of the war on Iraq Suggests the American empire will Fight colonial wars ad infinitum Until they exhaust themselves.
Knowing this doesn’t knock me out with happiness But it would save protesters a lot of time If they can agree it’s the inevitable Fate of empires Who imagine they’re immune to history While merely being ignorant of it.
the satellites slowly drive past my attention which is locked in the static key of the tiny ravines that criss-cross blisters on palm sunday as i crawl towards another beer for repentence
old pieces of laundry turn up at a magic show and fly away as doves afterwards backstage i tackle the moustache in the tophat and steal his sleeves but all i find is a few ochre coins and a dead pigeon no socks
so i mow myself under a fog of manspray and collide with the field of twinkle twinkle and
the stain on the satellite looks like texas but no one has the eyesight to tell for sure so no one believes
long measures of breath shy of the water bowl where grapes drift on their backs pretending to feel sad about the raisins as they graze the stars for something ancient to turn into
but the third gate is rusted shut and armies of ants swell to defend it from the wrinkle in the poets knuckle
i’ve been building fists out of sleepy pills shoving them into the mouths of story book statues who complain of gigantism yet can’t lift higher than a pig’s knee (napolean’s knee being an exception)
a dazzle of splintered jolt strangles my ankles in shoots of static function stumble stairs crumble step and drop into the seed well where I’ll sleep under the occasional shade of the beanstalk that sways over the open cavity
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