A Political Poem

Politics express the country’s collective
psychic disorders. Cable news simply broadcasts
the dreams of unusually powerful senators,
certainly not what the Greeks imagined
when they elected the first openly gay mayor
of Athens, before Socrates began bothering everyone
& people crept back in the closet. No one
remembers anymore. The records burned up
when the original library caught fire, in Alexandria,
at which point we lost all our knowledge
about the approaching centuries. So we make it all up,

again. Across the several dimensions, a mythic gravity
stays constant. I read this in a magazine
two days after staying up all night watching the war
not happen on commercial-free coverage on CNN.
We all were afraid to turn away, not least
the Iraqis searching the tube for clues
or omens, you might call them, falling out of the sky
& into the dawn of the future. Boom.

It is always the desert where these things occur.
The western fantasy acted out, unconsensually,
on a soundstage in the far east. Farther east
than the valley, where Gregory Peck
takes charge in a town held back by lack of water,
where settlers outside Jerusalem hack down olive trees,
plow roots into salted ground, land & destiny
stolen from somebody’s grandfather. No one remembers
his name either, though it is written on the deed
locked up in the vault of a court
that no longer exists. After the return flight home,

a line of flag-draped coffins parades down Main Street
in the Magic Kingdom, to a marching rhythm
beat out on the scalps of the Washington Redskins.
We use these myths to sell Chevrolet trucks
at halftime of Super Bowl 357. Ready, aim, fire
all the immigrant workers who make freedom,
in a very large factory, more free
than it would’ve been otherwise. I bought mine
at a garage sale, half-price. I wear it pinned to my chest,
my freedom, while I sit on the couch. I pore over

photographs of tortured prisoners, scrutinize
the anatomies of dreams deferred. They all look
the same: body parts disassembled,
dissembled from the mouths of the president’s men.
Arms & legs puked through bright shiny teeth.
Fingernails collected, put in a book like stamps,
to be used as tools in a primitive fight
against a shadow attacker at high noon.
In the dead of the night, she conjures

this pleasure again, licking your impotent skin
with fingertips. Hair on your arm a mess of tentacles
sexing the air, pressed against the edge
of whatever separates this heat from the world
it wants to eat alive, consume
the blue blue sky. His blue blue eyes,
a whip-sharp piercing bondage blue, taste
like light on the surface of water, a lake
or ocean heaving in the moon’s orgiastic pull.
Its circular orbit balanced, somewhere, by giant
bowling balls so we all stay suspended
in this disbelief in the life we’ve imagined, exactly

how a hummingbird exerts such perfect control,
spins its own gravity, a certain, sure-
footed grip on the air stood still, its wings
a globe in motion, a world
worlding itself whole.