PRACTOPIA*

I brought the buckets

filled with motley grapes.

I brought the albums

shimmering in crates.

Satanism means controlling fire.

Seed and egg survive upon this pyre.

They bomb us and they tear our forms apart:

we gave ourselves already to this art.

Our children know the way that fire feels.

They know the wound collapses time

before that fire heals.

This weal on Earth, we called that civilization.

But in its death we found another nation.

It is a spirit binding us to life.

The strife we feel we don't fear

like a knife.  The harmony we've earned

is hard and real.  Beneath the mask

so borderless and peeled.

The talkers talked but we

made love all night.  We're fucking

to renew our second sight.

Our babies grow and learn

to part the mist.  Their eyes

are angels forming into fists.

*  The title is derived from a talk given by anarchist activist Lorenzo Kom'Boa Ervin entitled 'Those Things that Result in Victories'.  The basic idea is that while utopia is not possible, better life practice is: that revolution and unity in freedom can revive the human spirit towards greatness, if not perfection.  The audacity to link my work with his was inspired by the great Greg Devlin, my mentor and dear friend, who died in 2014 but lives on in his poetry and in all those he inspired.

THE OLIGARCH KILLER

First I'll staple your hands to your desk:

I brought a carpenter's toolbox.

Then I'll fuck your face with a baseball bat,

using nice, long steady strokes.

My hands are already dirty

from all the work you don't do.

Then I'll whack at your elbows

until those arms come apart,

skin sliding like a pair of socks

from thin muscle and bone.

I've already removed the fish

from your very impressive fishtank:

this is a fishnapping.  They are swimming

in a bucket in my truck.  You'll have no

such luck: you're getting dunked, son,

headfirst with all the little that's left of you.

Murder can be sweet, murder can be delicious,

murder can be clean like doing the dishes.

I replace my stapler and leave whistling.

Your feces turn the fishtank brown

from green as we enter the present.

No vacancy remains: you were never a resident.

Deep breath goes through the earth

I won't resist the plunge

of these deep purple ravines

water is seeking my vacant heart

through the channels of an older rain

I call on all the spirits of devotion

who walked a fine ledge

carving all the ruins of the air

into fleshly being

building bones inside their souls

setting them upright in magnetic swamps

and lighting their astral hair on fire.

The grins grow from the charcoal

linking to the glint of black water

and the sent light of dead stars

falling through the bars of heated darkness

growing roots into an engorged sky.

Arrival with black eyes

and gummy veins.

A dark apartment

outside history.

Asbestos breath.  The sinks run

with the blood these trials shed.

A line of stones leads

to a deeper door.

I'm going there

to find my sacred whore.

Jerusalem has changed.

The beast they've caged

can only be deranged.

I pace around my room.

This place they scraped,

it used to be a womb.

I've scraped it too.  I have no right

to ask to be renewed.  But I do.

I found a solid seat

within the clouds.

Stiff angels watched

some demons dancing down.

From above?  This changes

everything to some state

we can never know.

I turn the cockpit

toward the sky and blow.

The ferment of the stars

then comes apart.

I must have kept them

clustered in my heart.

Trucks with carts of blades

rolling over deep grass hills.

Kites of woven grass

flying high from strings

of lilac colored thread.

A golden hawk flies through

a clean square tunnel,

toward me from the light

in the depths of the other side.