Diaspora: Breakfast with Mahmoud Darwish
Loose of their chains, who should fear the unfettered?
Baffler Archives: Poems
Columns
December 3, 2002
Beloveds, today the UN commission searched all of the square feet of Hussein’s office in a show of power.
When I speak of feet I speak of attacks conceived in Afghanistan, planned in Germany, funded through Dubai, executed in America, using Saudis.
I speak of the frozen ...
December 2, 2002
As it happens every night beloveds, while we turned in the night sleeping uneasily the world went on without us.
While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine.
While we turned sleeping uneasily a warehouse of ...
Park American Dream
At the park of unexploded ordnance and by-products
of enriching uranium: The everglades do all they
can, do your best to recall your ticket and what
brought you out of your home. Was it the child
or a local celeb? The big pin on his shirt
& Bonzo? A miniature greenback with ...
Wal-Mart Epigram #2
Phil and I went to one of the marts
and bought a rug like we’re supposed to
only thing is it’s purple,
we’re not married, the rug is the wrong size
and my name is Bernadette
Wal-Mart Epigram #1
If I told you once
I told you a thousand times
we’re not buying it!
put it back!
Idle Music is the Devil’s Band
This is how I learned to stop hating
the smug and arrogant, complicit folk
inside the rampant
suburban ubiquitous vehicles.
This is how I taught myself
that my hatred of their crass
lifestyles of mobile and sanitized
sport and corporate offices burned
more energy than ...
After Rejection
Everyone in my photo collection
Looks as if they’re saying
“Don’t point that thing at me”
So I screen all calls from friends
But answer when salesmen and creditors call
To indulge my many hang-ups
I write polite letters to Tommy Hilfiger
Imploring him to make more baggy ...
Junk
Why is the midnight rain
So much more soothing
Than a dripping sink?
Though downward stains
Of rust are how we think
To cling to life sometimes
Oxidized by pleasure
We’re metallic to the bone
Easily bent, or stretched thin
As wire, conducting heat by breath alone
The torture ...
Columbo in San Cristóbal
People he told the truth
to didn’t trust him
brained by a frying pan
& “just woke up there”
Without a tale to tell to death
or nail to hang his hat on—
thus we honor Amerigo
Merry-go-round to the right
of the roadside shrine
to the saint of dead bugs
Later, sitting ...
Mount Capon Comes to Bozo
A water wagon rides into town
nobody from the waist down some
body’s moved to the Mirage Club
captivity underscores the strangeness
of this life we’ll believe like chickadees
almost any seed and tanked up on Pike’s
Magnolia Shriveler hung like a horse
of a different color ...
Autographeme
A thought on the lip of little sand island, an easy messenger who forgot where to go. I came to laugh in a dirty garden, a thwarted pauselessness considering pearls. I was fluent in salamander. Everything wrote itself onto skin with a tangled blowing. Identity washed its ...