I’ll say one thing about Florida:
water pressure.
Let me say another thing:
palm trees, greenery,
sopping wet scenery,
beaches everywhere
where people are too beautiful,
disregard for human health,
stupid wealth,
the funniest billboards I’ve ever seen,
river queen, bugs aplenty,
whole cakes in diners,
expanding Shriners,
cemeteries groping for the living and the dead,
red hats on heads,
let me leave,
can I stay,
is this grief,
my family,
everybody spreading ’round the country like a –
don’t say that –
but it’s true,
if I want to hold everything that’s dear to me,
I’d need to be
a supersonic bird,
or the soil,
or a world.

I’m, I’m waking up
and reality
is more enticing
than my dreams,
because it’s made of them,
and I see
everything
and it’s all
more pretty than I’d imagined,
so come on, let’s go
and just fuckin’
dance.

Y’see,
if I’m driven,
then I’m just
a car.
A vehicle, a
vessel.
I don’t want to live like that,
I want to be
in control.
(At least some of the time.)
So I’d rather be drivin’.
Let’s take turns
at the wheel.
We’ll switch off:
driver <–> shotgun navigator.
I’ll smile
and share the ride
with you.

“You’re so literate”
she told me,
with stars in her eyes,
as though reading is the pinnacle,
and I felt like
the whitest man,
a most colonial man,
as if books didn’t only get me dreaming,
and thinking, and never doing.
The day I harvest my own tomatoes
while I listen to a hand-built radio
is the day
I’ve finally learned something useful.

They are not always the boots of empire;
sometimes they are the stocking/stalking feet,
sometimes they are the padded heels,

the
unsaid thoughts,

the quote facts and figures unquote,
history mangled by white pages,
neighbors estranged by zoning laws,
nature deranged by droning saws.

And now this:
vacation.
And now this:
self-care.
And now this:
libations.
And now this:
underwear.

Now this
money-drenched hellhole.

The world has been turned into a sack of coins,
politicians, the burglars:
purloining all our futures
for just one more vacation home.
How many homes do they need?
How many homes have they destroyed?

We cry, we bleed, we …
How many nights will we lose

restful sleep
for empire?

But I could piss on
the clock, not literally,
but while I get paid.

My fine rebel words
at the end of a work day:
I can piss at home.

And how do foundations work,
when there’s nothing but rocks
and probably dirt, I assume,
but I’m no expert
so let’s not presume what’s exhumed –
excuse me.
I got ahead of myself.
I saw a picture
of a beautiful museum
built on rocks by the sea,
like, RIGHT BY the sea,
and one of the comments said
“It’ll be really sad when it falls in.”
I don’t want that future.
So what kind of sutures
are sewn into cut-open land
to hold that structure there,
as sure
as a closed hand?
My words aren’t technical enough,
and some aren’t technically right,
but, well,
I just
wonder about these things.

I dream of a world
where all the buildings stand forever
and all the bones stay together.

I see smooth columns
lifting a ceiling near the shore
and I think
“What genius is this,
how many hands
came together to build such marvels?”
I forget
the modern marvels
right outside my door.
History
hits different.

The great lightning strike,
but it is Cupid’s arrow;
I am still waiting.