Mouthfeel 1

lit
tel

chi
hauhau

whip
et

For your eyes, only

I stood in the hallway
actually leering
at the people
really sexing
on a couch
under a nylon blanket

At their ferocity
and their ability to cover themselves
completely

with this beige blanket

and for a second I
stood there

until I realized I was just watching people
have sex on someone's couch
and the blanket was their enforcement
of some sort of privacy

and this was not a zoo, but a home

I was impressed

If they saw me,
that's what they
should know

They were fiery, tweaking rabbits
in a tent

Or a pulsating,
autoerotic ghost

Dancemoves
called "stabbing"
or sexmoves
like "jackhammering"
all fit

When they came, I hope someone yelled

YEEEEEHAW

Broken Open

The window tells

the end of telling

as it breaks

Wind refuses a message

Outside shatters in

The land cannot approve

or teach. Water cares nothing

for prophecy

Your love, not your fealty

will find expression

when the sovereign

stops granting freedom

to what is free

We will eat, sleep and speak

with others and someday die,

this is all

The last cage standing is your mind

And it, like others, will be defeated

What it seeks to contain

could never be

How to Survive a Shipwreck

Become a fish.

Fireworks

Yesterday you were singing

and now you are enslaved

The screen turns "help"

into "having a good time!"

Understory rusts

russet, 

birds clap silent

Those cowering hiss from sparks

behind teeth

Those disfigured mass:

It is now their time

When I am so lost,

the well of my desire to see

all life held as a newborn

it is obvious to care for

inverts,

erupts in caustic smoke and

I imagine plucking

my own head from my shoulders

and flinging it to the sky

where it explodes in announcement

I have opened myself to the belief

that this is how I will die

In My Movie

The movie
is flickering yellow
on the screen

An old onion a mirror
of voided eyes

Thorns shred
the screen

hoary lead-swelled
leaves drop through

swell toward
artificial light

When the filmgoers
know that this is not

the show
they shift

While fifteen
whitetail deer flash green eyes
sing and corvids click their
tongues

Pollen hits the light
and splinters into colord spires

The audience moves to leave
but is met with blackberry
who bar the door

and a talk follows
which has been coming
which few folks wanted
to hear

An Understanding

In the yard, he was out there, out in the dusk. The sun was so low I couldn't see him, just his silhouette. Up this mountain, I wouldn't expect visitors. When I saw him, hunched over and rocking, the shape of his body, like a child, an adolescent kid and the sly little laugh, a giggle he let loose when I opened the screen door with my thirty aught-six and cocked it.

I could see the shape of his head: pointy. His ears were pointy, too, and he stood and a little tail, quick as a snake darted out from behind his and swished. His eyes were bright yellow.

I didn't know what to say. I said “Get the fuck out of here!”

He said, in this little whisper voice: “You can't escape.” And then he jumped through the underbrush, laughing louder.

I went inside. I was cooking an elk steak. I looked at the shelf with my ammo, with my water skins and leather. I knew what he meant. I had heard the voices at night. A deer had come through that morning, through the yard and growled. At me, a doe. Lowered its head and growled like a bobcat or something. I had run inside.

I went outside with a cigarette and up to the sky I yelled “Okay!” and an oak tree fell over and crushed my cabin. I ran down the path, down the side of the mountain. The earth began to crack and shudder. In the gathering dark, I heard bodies all around me, rushing through the grass, drawing closer, crying out, braying. I got to clearing, a draw that went down pretty steep. The animals came forward, pushing me back toward where the draw tipped down. The sun went down. I saw the animals come toward me, closer. Gathering. He was there covered in yellow ivy and they all broke out in blue fire.

I said to him “We had a deal.”

He said “We never had a deal.”

Mise en place

Her hair was made out of mostly garbage. Her braces were full of what looked like seafood and her skin was like a new burn. Her dress smelled like old milk. On her way home from school, after a day spent mostly running from the outstretched hands of her classmates, who were trying to hit or shove her, she'd crawl under a chain-link fence, into an abandoned lot and sing. Quietly, so that no one would find her. She would tap out beats on the back of her hand and stutter.

The best time of the year for her was when the barn spiders started to come out, in late spring. She would pick through the shrubs that crowded the lot and watch them grow from tiny little spiderlets into big, bloated fruit in summer, ripening to kinked tigers that would ultimately go immobile in the fall. There were some blackberries, but they were tart and had the texture of wet ash. They were delicious to her.

She saw no one here, was brought out of knowledge of herself, transfixed on the weeds and amazed when a hundred ants would carry off a writhing caterpillar on their backs into a tangle of grass. She could see the sun, same as anyone's, through one weird old apple tree that looked dead but was barely alive.

When they built a grocery store on that lot, she fucking burned it down.

Amuse bouche

The telling listed

the ant-swarmed candy

in the mouth

Propped on browning tooth

of the sleeping boy

His song, his song

was insistently sung

I want I want

I want

He dreamt of the

green falling fire

all night long

His hands pawed

the suffering clutch

Wet

In curtains and waves

cold hands colder hands

hold one another down

rain and rainer breathe fog

blanket cloys with shiver

Tulips slur jokes

into cones of daffodils

they break through

deaf clay to hear

Birds! Birds! Birds!

yelling at the sky

Muscle strummed quakes

still gooseflesh to still

the pavement's colding sweat will burn

Watch your buds breaking

it is coming

but please while it is wet

wear a coat

A Letter to Occupy New Paltz: Fuck the Police

A Measured and Moderate Response

I lived in New Paltz five years ago. New Paltz has a deserved reputation for its progressivism and its tolerance; it's a small community that was avowedly rebellious on the subject of gay marriage, with town officials presiding over gay marriages nearly eight years before New York legalized it. It has a vibrant commitment to the arts. It's a wonderful place and when press such as the New York Times has sought to describe it, it flails to encapsulate it, using adjectives such as “funky”.

It also falls into the financial imperatives of the region, offering a rural getaway for well-heeled residents of the city, so it must strike a delicate balance between its rootsy authenticity and its economic growth as a destination for them. Then, as now, New Paltz was minor hub for street family, by which I mean hobos, Rainbow Phamily, scumfucks or feral townies and any other transient community, themselves a difficult bunch to put a finger on or, sometimes, to embrace. Even on an individual level, the same wizened, reasonable, face-tatted guy you could have a conversation with in the morning could drunkenly grope your girlfriend and threaten to kick your ass at night. The problems this community faces are the same meted out to the impoverished everywhere: lack of consistent food, shelter, material security, an uneasy relationship with the more well-to-do around them and sorely inadequate access to mental health and substance abuse help, should they seek it. A reluctance to seek it. That New Paltz could host such a community is a testament to its commitment to real diversity. That some members of the community should be thorny or difficult to get along with at times is the price of admission for that diversity, but as long as we are known and accountable to one another, we're at peace and the likelihood for egregious behavior is almost none.

A couple years ago I was eating at the Main Street Bistro, having a late breakfast with a few friends. I was sitting and looking out at Main Street when I saw three or four police cruisers pull up outside. Cops got out and started grabbing people. A group. It looked like some sort of raid. I got up to see what was happening outside and when I left the Bistro I saw a short, aggravated man pointing out people to be arrested to the police. The police grabbed whoever he pointed to. Alarmed, I stepped outside asked what was going on and expressed some disapproval for the scene. People were being escorted up, down and across the street, into the backs of squad cars and the only commonality between them was their dress and assumed affiliation: they wore beat-up work clothes, were sunburned and had blotchy tattoos. They were poor.

There wasn't a lot of time to ascertain what had gone on. The gist was that there had been a minor dispute with one of the people being arrested and a manager of a coffee shop that had just opened on Main Street. The man pointing people out for arrest was the landlord of that building. It seemed the rest were being targeted by association. My friends and I paid our check and got some cardboard and tempura paint and made some signs. We stood in front of the offending business. We didn't chant or go near the entrance. We stayed on the sidewalk. Within ten minutes the police had come back and we were all arrested.

The details of the arrest and court proceedings were boring. We were charged with violation trespassing. We wanted a bench trial and went to court on numerous occasions, meeting with our public defenders. There was some cumbersome discussion as to whether the landlord owned the sidewalk in front of his building. Because everyone who had been arrested were, on a few occasions, not at court, our dates were pushed back until a newly-elected judge just gave us an adjournment conditional dismissal, basically a fast-track to not hear the case and shelve it, dismissing it if the accused stay out of legal trouble for six months.

There was little drama, but some: On the day of the arrest, we were told we smelled like shit by a village sergeant as we were being booked. One of our party, who was cracking wise to the police was arraigned with a misdemeanor, disorderly conduct, and sent to Kingston. In the newspaper story documenting the arrest, our accuser, the landlord, referred to the first group arrested as “street urchins”, a Dickens-era slur, granting human beings the same respect as bottom-dwelling barnacles. No one was hurt, or killed. Much, much more sensationalistic things have happened in this town.

I remember certain things, though. I mentioned that the first people arrested were part of the community and the arresting officer told me no, they were from Tennessee and Florida. He had missed my point. They had detained us on the street and barely spoke to us from behind their wooden, sunglassed faces, obeying the command of our accuser, but in booking, they were mostly genial. I remember the fear and anger of having my friend booked into the county jail for such a small transgression. I took no satisfaction in the silly, overblown nature of the afternoon, but I was elated that my friends had come with me; we were in this together and we did it out of some sloppy, improvised solidarity with people, some of whom we knew and some we didn't. Given only enough time to react, we had stood up together. By attaching our arrests with the ones of the first group, we were together able to moderately improve the legal outcomes for all.

I offer this story because poor people are still here. Police are still here. Privileged people with an over-inflated sense of power are still here. The most immediate lessons we can learn can be ones that transpire in our hometowns. And the lessons we can never forget are the ones of force, perpetrated on our bodies. This is a small example.

I moved to the west coast. Occupations have gone on here and been violently evicted by the local militia of the governing and elite: the police. I have been chased by riot police, hit and shoved. I have seen people pepper-sprayed and beaten for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, trying to remain on common space to protest our great economic disparity and the very real, human actors that make it possible. People that, to this day, profit from it with impunity. We are learning that for real, tangible and ethical human freedom, we have to grow our capacities to work together, to solve our problems commonly and not punitively beat or confine those that fall outside the acceptable standards of our society by their mere existence. Because a lot more of us fall within that category now. While we have spent our lives internalizing the values of our economic system, the ones who control it have manipulated it to their own ends and they were allowed to, as long as we could have their scraps. As we have seen, their greed knew no satiety and they took us down with them. And while we fight in the wreckage, they were spared. The police have always existed to enforce the demands of the wealthy with a message we are thought to understand: physical force. They have hunted slaves and beaten their children when they courageously fought back. They have violently put down those striking for basic labor rights. They hunt immigrants who have committed the sin of coming here without papers. They keep the poor away from the reasonably well-off. Whether in passive acquiescence to their force or when people have decided to challenge them, they hold the power to kill us, at an order, if they wish.

Occupy is just another chapter in our fight for a livable and just future. In the movement, we have had a few months and many spectacles that will act as lessons going forward. We shouldn't forget them. A lot has been said about the police being potential allies: they are unionized wage workers and no one can deny that they are fellow human beings. Their actions and their office say that they will not join us. And to do so in their present capacity would only give us the tools of oppression.

At present, it may be hard to envision, even fearful to do so, a world without them. But human beings have lived in a myriad of ways since our beginnings on this earth, without need for police or prisons. Nearly infinite ways of living are possible. Yet we are kept from these by a privileged class, who are few in number; we are their labor, their consumers, and the ones deemed surplus are their oppressed. We are making a conscious decision to fight those people, to take responsibility for our existence and turn it away from the exploitation of the natural world and its people, its literal destruction, for short-sighted financial gain. And it is telling that, at every turn, the same people show up and prevent us from doing so: the police. They are not beating the bankers or their enablers in government; they are beating us.

Not much longer. We are in the early stages of open revolt. Collectively, we are withdrawing consent to this world, consent we never really gave and our villages and towns will look quite different. We will lose the police and gain brothers and sisters as their institution crumbles. We will make room for everyone among us and we will mediate our conflicts and amend our transgressions with compassion and fierce love. The presence of which makes this moment possible and the opposite of which we will turn on those who prevent the birth of this new and necessary world.

Solidarity, New Paltz: You're a part of me forever,

MK

Squat Candle: Prologue

They got out of the rain. Four of them.

They were in northern California, in October, had found no work and hitched toward a town that did not exist. They were stuck in a state park. Miles of road on deep ravines with rapids charging up from below, forested mountains in every direction. No lights, no chimney smoke, no cars for hours. The rain had picked up while they were on the shoulder, fighting and they had trudged an hour before finding shelter, an old cabin, or just its porch; the thing had fallen down with just the roof of the porch still standing. The light faded around the huge hills and it got colder and the rain hammered the roof they were huddling together under. They rubbed their hands together and took off their wet jackets. Dick Metal took off his soaked Chucks and wet socks, hung his sleeping bag up to dry. They sat close to one another. Percy, Enid and Squalaura took their sleeping bags from their stuff-sacks, unzipped them and draped them around one another as evenly as they could.

Enid made a squat candle: She took a metal can and broke off wax chunks from a plastic bag of busted candles into the bottom. She took a chunk of waxed, corrugated cardboard from her bag and tore it into a wick. It was slightly shorter than the height of the can when she placed it inside. She feathered the end with her thumbnail and lit it. The flame took and they saw each others faces again. They all held their hands to the flame. Dick Metal moved his scummy feet toward the fire. They took out their crackers, their peanut butter, an apple, Slim Jims, one flask of whiskey, a pouch of tobacco and shared them. Enid fed chunks of wax into the can and acrid black smoke poured off as the plastic lining of the can burned out.

They had not known one another for more than a week, had come together hitching down: Percy from Bellingham, Dick Metal and Squalaura from Oly, and Enid from Eugene. They had all stumbled down to work the marijuana harvest, their heads filled with meager dreams that a few thousand dollars could fulfill. With no initial leads, they had found nothing, had talked to some old hippie in Arcata who sent them southeast, into the mountains, towards a town he guaranteed would be full of work. The town was fake and no drivers had corrected them.

They were not friends, had crossed one another frequently during their brief association: At one point Dick Metal had tried to grab Enid's tits. Squalaura drank too much and always bitched about her hangover. Percy cried one time and everyone laughed at him. But tonight, considering their situation and bathed in strong yellow light, Enid felt expansive enough to recite a poem she wrongly attributed to Robert Duncan:

For friendship

make a chain that holds,

to be bound to

others, two by two,

a walk, a garland

handed by hands

that cannot move

unless they hold.

They took turns telling stories. Dick Metal went first.