Explore Poems: History & Politics

in the DMZ ravines north of the Kaesong wastes edging
south of the perfect ruler’s pink and prisoned paradisethere is a climate paying no attention to us where cranes
repopulate serpentine deltas

Every morning opening the newspaper, I am faced
with the thin line that divides disaster and deprivation
from a world of luminous wealth. Tuesday, January 29th,
for instance, bodies, many of them children, lie on the ground
They drowned in the canal trying to escape a weapons depot fire
and explosion in Lagos. Their heads are twisted in straw and dust
near the feet of on-lookers whose cries we cannot hear

This is how the story begins: a touch, a bump, a hot mouth,
jostled skin in an elevator, escalation, …

  "When one is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and…

These are your stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield…

evidence     is
sustenance
     is
support
     is
the law...

1
listen carefully—there is land or there is water,
and a time where
you may mistake one for another.
there…

a•ver•y (ā ver'ē), n. dark(iss) ¹blk-male chile foundate(id) in luv unlimit(id) fuc(k) anthem(s). ²jee…

At last I’m taking off this coat,
      this black coat of a country
      that I swore for years was mine,
      that I wore more out of habit
      than design.
      Born...

I: My beloved is called an inconceivable beast, a spectacle diagnosed with teratoid genitalia, a chaos…

This love dares not speak its name
in some states
until your eyes say it
on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale…

& even when we said we were alone there was [       ] noise on the radio & there was [       ] noise in the car & there was [       ] noise all over the...

Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What's…

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her…

Un club nocturno no hace un verano
Mas creo en el perreo
Eterno recreo
En la agitación de la masa crítica…

A nightclub doesn’t make a summer
I believe more in perreo
Play everlasting
In the agitation of a critical…

Water minus air becomes wound.
Her blowhole, bursts of breathing,
trapped in an endless curtain of netting…

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not...

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war...