long before the stamps commemorating peace,
before factories resumed churning out grenades,
some made off with blueprints for conquest,
taped them to the walls of their dreams
If you’re looking for glamor, doing the most good for people and the planet may not be the place to find it.
Tonight I’ll dream that a colony of ants has dragged
me out to sea, where I discover my belongings and I
have become so much flotsam and jetsam.
Changing the language we use when speaking about injustice does not, in and of itself, overturn the injustice.
On a drizzly morning walk I stopped to let a hearse go by,
its pitch-black paint sweating polish, and as I waited
for the procession I thought about who profits from tragedy,
the business of loss, and who profits no matter what,
In Xinjiang, 7,000-miles
away, a morning sun, reflecting off the
glasses of early risers, the windshields
of commuters, is so bright as to redact
last night’s graffiti: Down with Xi.
If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect
computer simulation, do I risk waking up
to a world in which I can’t embrace you?
I want to touch what aches in us, the light
we guard to stay alive. My dear, come quick.
I hear a knock; I’m afraid. Is it you?
I dare to open and let hope come through.
I have lived as free as a fragrance on the wind,
as shackled to the earth as the vine that produced it.
May I confess in a poem what is forbidden us in prose?
I hire the police that protect my home from the hordes
that would tax me: I need nothing from the State, and so
give nothing to the State.