Washington Merry-Go-Round
The picturesque shield of press freedom
overwrought with hair-knots
heads shrunken in their tresses
teeth & lips shining, the Cold War dead
could not protect Drew Pearson’s balls
bloodied, sea-tossed
literally a left-hanging ache, high-minded
Drew, protector
of our flimsy Western occupation
of a savage world aggrieved
by right-wing headline hunters
the throwback Gunner a WI Gothic hick
at the Gate (Pearson disapproves too
of Jim Forrestal, miserable provincial:
failed to see the Shining City
on the Hill off the Volga, bright
as a Mobil Station sign. Truth
is the pitfall of Social Justice — Let’s
ready ourselves for instant emergencies
Let’s say of Forrestal (soon to jump
from hotel window) he fled his home
abandoning his wife to an intruder
It’s scope redeems this war. McCarthy’s
a Jew hating Nazi thug &
perhaps a home intruder as well, he-he-he-he
Within our civic streets the irony
It was Dick Nixon at the Sulgrave Club
who check Gunner from choking Pearson’s balls
back down through
the needle’s eye.
On Occasion of the China Trade Deal
— for Kent Johnson
John Keats, Mysore
wasn’t a faiytale
& Tipu’s tiger, a favorite
of the genre painters
(crank-organ shrieks)
that wasn’t a pliant, exotic toy
but an uncivilly-bred beast
roused against the Company
life-sized & mauling
mouth scum-shiny with
some official’s blood
a reminder that once
roused we weed our
jungle garden of hatred
for spring.
Scrape Clean Your Shoes Before Entering
Elated by a child’s thighbone
the less familiar flesh survived
the snow apples
thudding the ground at Truckee
the pitted half-remains
of Jacob Donner’s party
were not becalmed 8 years later
by a California ranch shack &
the publication of Walden.
Footnote to Littlepage
Whose whitecaps the Sierra Club
believed to be wilderness
the savage light within
le Walter Scott des sauvages
the enflamed pulse impoverished
where it beat in the Pathfinder’s
requiem for Hank Snow &
the Red Man
‘I’m movin’ on
in rough waters
said the Pathfinder
J. Fenimore Cooper
at the Hotel California
confused by the plumbing
& the waiters
the obiter dicta
lost on foreign waiters
& he waded out beyond the tops
of leatherstockings
roughening the waters of the bay
into the unforeseen vacuity
‘I’m movin’ on
the platitude
of this immensity at drift
the continent
of small bulbs
lit for the theologians
of Progress
the savage light within
riotous woods
gone but burgeoning
the immense burgeoning
continent gone
for a seed
a homeless seed.
Recall we are Upheld by Dead Combatants
Blessedly free of the trendy
drift towards hazardous reconcilation
of the reticent with the stupid
in our political life, the Doge
of the Tularosa, Albert B. Fall the artful
anticipator of bonehead policies &
quick to temper, apprehended
daily entering the senate chamber
with a pistol in his belt
rose to contest border policy
when Mexican bandits carried
into the mountains Mother Elias
of the Barefooted Carmelites
it was Fall’s contention that the border rules
governing the molestation of Anglos
were defined by the topology
of simple burial &
slashing attack. He reminded the chamber
of the plausible dim light
of the new moon in the desert
At the time this was considered
anti-Mexican sentiment. Fall
wished not to decry the depredations
he wanted to avenge them &
volunteered himself to lead the troops,
a gesture considered racial malice &
disquietly undebated in a decade
Teddy Roosevelt could be encountered
on Scrambles northwest of the White House
along Rock Creek
Eastern senators extolled
the peace while a voluptuary
of riotous plundering, thought
by a liberal clique of boobies
in the debate a patriot, Senor Villa
descended on the tents & adobes
of the 13th Cavalry, Columbus, New Mexico
March 9, 1916 the prickly pear
in massed bloom about his horsemen,
their 4AM raking fire, horses & burros
dead in the brush before John Lucas
ammo belt in hand rallied
the machine-gunners full-tilt &
when his Ben-A jammed he killed
7 sons-of-bitches with his pistol
then sat among the dead to pull
his boots on. While Fall waited &
the senate extolled the peace & Woodrow Wilson
hesitated & citizens around Laredo
practiced shooting on the local hairless dogs.
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