Faulty Logic
I’m from the rare generation that didn’t go to war,
but it’s still the inheritance.
Air raid sirens wail throughout the mall.
I think about you less on sunny days,
though ...
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
Kingdom / Kingdom 2
Kingdom
In the kingdom,
the open mouths
of flowers
aren’t asking.
*
When you say she’s “gone,”
you mean she’s home.
She’s sheets
Cold
cirrus fingers.
Or she’s expected soon
at the ...
The Back Country
Who stole the lake?
The frightful bandits
with their hats full of feathers,
they stole the lake.
When did they steal it?
When the sun was covered
with a cloud full of needles,
it was then they stole it.
Who shall retrieve it?
The hatless ...
Tranche I / Tranche II
Tranche I
I have lived through the end of syntax I have lived though the imperial grammars I have lived through the bursting of a bubble visible from space I have lived through the suicide of money to preserve the life of value I have lived through the fatal sacrifice of ...
Projecting Love
For Eiko & Komo
dragging her fingernails across the air as she comes
stage left, he steps from darkness into his flesh
under the minatory glare of X the flexed
tendons of his fingers, her eyes and
lips flare when he stumbles
she is aware without looking
almost they embrace ...
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse
A rough and ready cousin lived on barley and water,
and barley water, too,
and slept on a board, while the women of the city
dressed themselves as flowers. From
every ear a bauble spun, from every fez
a tassel.
Not me—I was ...
One Way
Where the first one came from,
we’ll never know, but once it landed,
it did what arrows do—it pointed.
The headlines read New Shape Discovered:
Arrow Invents the Straight and Narrow.
Children who had been content to trail
snails around the patio suddenly made
a gesture ...
The Blackest Black Forest
Just nada y nada, which means drop dead in your cleanest socks, o grand and fearless pumpkin. Whether brave or bedraggled or both, the fact that you can put anything (or anyone) into my poem doesn’t mean that you should submit an innocent biped to the vagaries of an ...
Green Gallows for the Wall Street Bankers
In the middle of the night
I woke in a big fright
Saw mobs marching down the street
To a fierce iconic beat
They sang a dirge of disgust
At the evil money lust
That has our economy made bust
The scumbags of the financial
Upper Crust
Green gallows for the Wall Street ...
Experts are Puzzled
Experts are puzzled by the legacy for the purpose of the handing down of which
we seem to exist successively and respectively. We seem to exist to correct, in
proper order, the minute derangements caused in the legacy of our existence.
We on whom it is temporarily bestowed find ...
from Odi Barbare
Boreal light-loaded incorrigible
Plutocratic anarchy breaks the archons
Little praised here more adamantine than those
Clapped into durance
Herod rants | pageants on their wooden tractions
Cannot hold him · Now he is in the ...
Strike!
Strike because the sky turns gray just before it blacks out.
Strike because when you were little your father told you too many lies.
Strike because the surf is up.
Strike because you are heartsick with the old ways and giddy with promise.
Strike because things can’t go on ...