The War On Kids

Why do the shootings happen in schools? because they are made by the same people who make the prisons and have the same chairs and tables. Because they have no windows and no wood. The children are amputated by the blank, textureless walls and subsequently their own eyes like nothing they see and their imaginations, schooled by darkness, can only articulate themselves through violence. They fire bullets into the dead walls to hear the only thing that has resonance: grim fame and death.

In a place where nothing grows, where no one listens, where the teachers are police, the loudest sound you can make is a well publicized murder. If these environments were more alive, if there were knotted wood and old brown books and trees imploring against the windows the kids could not understand murder because they would understand that the world around them is indeed a world and is alive. It's a problem of alienation and big guns are a symptom of that. These children are so powerful they never have to leave the throne of their armchairs and are fed genocidal images on command. Increasingly the schools are incorporated and so the minutes and the mentorships and the epiphanies are portioned out according to policy. Spontaneity and beauty is actively discouraged. At a time when people are already heinously self-conscious, that self-consciousness has been stoked and embellished to a point where by the time one makes it to the end of puberty (if), they have forgotten entirely who they were born to be and so can only relate to each other in terms of consumptions. What you buy is who you are. They can be whoever they want, as long as it will not ostracize them from the group and said identity can be sold to them.

Their inner world has been erased too. Words, which used to give them a way to share their hearts, have been withheld from them. Language is the way we detect an decipher what's encrypted inside of us. The whole language could fall in the space of one generation, one technological leap. When confronted with the forgotten, threatening traces of real language, the real texture of living things, they will learn to reply with guns, with seeming power and dominion over nature. We can't seem to locate our old hearts, the hearts perished by indoctrination, and so we drive the hearts of the innocent against the overhead projector screens and dry erase boards smeared with the afternoon's answers in an attempt to get them to speak to us, to know that there was blood in those veins after all. Our hearts will be written in a confusion of blood across the inoffensive walls.

The schools have been made into war zones, but not by the kids.

Poem About Our Politics

Loading...
Loading... Loading...
Loading.................................................................................................
Loading... Loading... Loading...
...

Girls

An apartments the size of a grave
and just as expensive. It costs a life
to be buried on Avenue A.
Two girls reunite in their street corner booth

where many nights have been spent confiding 
about boys, the plausible deniability
of taxicab blowjobs, flights home over
one bridge or another.

She's just returned from a semester in Africa.
The unencumbered smiles beaming from
the children's faces linger like a sunburn.
Her friend is agonizing over a guy who believes in her

wholeheartedly. She commands him like a drone
with the send button on her phone.
She asks her friend if she saw the article in the Times 
about women in Afghanistan who die for their poetry?

Is it still warring over there? the friend says.
Her laugh is ambushed by a new feeling, something like
regret at having allowed herself to be wrapped
in the personality of her dresses for so many years.

First thing when she got home she pulled her grandmother’s old fur
out of storage and wrangled the antlers onto the cat
but the smile didn't come. Tonight, we're going dancing.
The boys are meeting us there. Does that work?

She nods. A button is pushed and a car carries them
to a warehouse in Bushwick which twenty years ago
was a wonderful crack house. Oh, it's so good to see you again!
She laughs and pretends she is living the night like it's her last

the whole time thinking about a young girl
across the world speaking her poem
into a telephone so someone else can hear it
before the line goes dead.

A Video of Me Reading My Poem "CAPTCHA"

THIS VIDEO DOES NOT EXIST

Song of the Open Road: The American Machine

For the wanderer doesn't bring back from the mountainside
to the valley a handful of earth, unsayable to everyone, but
rather a word gained, a pure word.
-Rilke
The Ninth Elegy

10-20-98 Columbus OH: Much different than other shows I have done here. More people than usual and a much better venue.

Ohio is flat and the people are trapped on the flat plains. The endless small towns, full of American flags and bad food. All that time and television. You want the real America? It is here that you will find it. Ohio, Michigan, these are the places where the American slow death plays itself out over the seasons. Football and raking leaves. All that heritage. Depressed towns that are now shells of the boomtowns they once tried to be. No one told them it was a joke and the joke was on them; that the American Dream is only for a few, that the rest just serve their time in this tortured land of beautiful fugitives. Small towns are suppliers to the American Machine. Soldier boys, food, patriotic air, good sturdy racism and separatist spirit.
-Henry Rollins
Smile, You're Travelling

You said: "I'll go to another country, to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

-C.P. Cavafy

The City

Young French would-be punk-rock stars

listening to American westerns on the juke

trying to figure out

how to get out of town

-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home. Enclosed, curtained, sheltered, intimate. The sound of rain outside the window, the spirit and the body turned towards intimacy, to friendships and loves. One more enclosed and intimate day of friendship and love, an alcove. Paris intimate like a room. Everything designed for intimacy. Five to seven was the magic hour of the lovers’ rendezvous. Here it is the cocktail hour.

New York is the very opposite of Paris. People’s last concern is with intimacy. No attention is given to friendship and its development. Nothing is done to soften the harshness of life itself. There is much talk about the ‘world,’ about millions, groups, but no warmth between human beings. They persecute subjectivity, which is a sense of inner life; an individual’s concern with growth and self-development is frowned upon.

-Anais Nin

The Diary of Anais Nin 

I want the city

but I want the country too.

-Jonathan Richman

City Vs. Country

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,

Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,

(But where is what I started for so long ago?

And why is it yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman

Facing West from California's Shores

"This shit's all fake. As long as you remember that when you come out here. It's all movies. Everybody's an actor. The money's real but everything else is fake."

-Dude on balcony in Hollywood on his cell phone

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer — a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels.

****

What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?

****

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only, — when fences shall be multiplied, and man traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road; and walking over the surface of God’s earth, shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities then before the evil days come.
-Henry David Thoreau

Walking

Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.

-Bruce Chatwin

The Songlines


Where you been is good and gone
All you keep's the getting there

The Peach blossom follows the water

-Li Po