Treadmille to Armageddon

Borrowing a pop music allusion, Donovan is
encouraging us to think of this as the season
                                                of the witch

All right but this day in March 2020 finds us
walking Spanish along the traditional path
                                          of most resistance

We are being braced by the usual stiffening
vile wind usually accompanied by other cool
                              aspects of the 3rd month

There is little hospitable solace in a thought
that only the starch of March could bring us
                                    to this birth of oblivion

Improvised B R O K E N Typewriter Poem

Thanksgiving Day doldrums
on Long Island and we
witness the usual stripping

from suicidal broiled turkeys
leaving the usual holiday
carnage and see great galaxies

rising out of ordinary mist on
the gray November water span
spinning us all over the Sound.

Fishing craft roll and loll and
loiter on top of the long rolling
rush of ocean towards Flushing.

Storm clouds are getting ready
to eclipse transcriptions in the
gradebook blur of our past

academic applications and literary
journals that have no need for
penciling or crinkled ink.

The beat majesty of shoreline
comic-book poetics will until
further notice replace the hot

typewriter ribbon and the return
gear will be getting us back into
words as black as North Atlantic

Patriotism at the Motel Cafe

                                                      Truth is a metaphor that
                                                             we forgot was a metaphor
                                                                   - Nietzshe

Patriotism is a star-spangled breakfast
Patriotism is out to lunch
Patriotism is a parking lot full of pickup trucks
                  with gunracks & axe-handles
Patriotism is police beating up people too poor
                  to be protected by lawyers
Patriotism is corporate criminals diverting millions
                  of dollars which could have been used
                  to house the homeless
Patriotism is killing nuns and priests and Communist
                  peasants in Central America, in order to
                  promote a neo-Fascist regime
Patriotism is a conspiracy of racist hatred in
                  the Southern faction of Africa
Patriotism is getting your mitts on a gun and
                  getting yourself killed in an already
                  victimized foreign country
Patriotism is cinema with a star-power movie hero
                        commercializing patriotic murder
Patriotism is being persecuted by American
                  government greed-Capitalist
                  social injustice