Category Archives: Poetry

Fugitive Thoughts

From the back of an envelope…

The distant treeline beyond the yard
Stirs yearnings to intense
My thoughts often escape me
And take a blind run for the fence

Sometimes the tower shoots them
Sometimes the dogs attack
They’re always butchered bloody
By the time I get them back

Sometimes they’re dead and dangling
Sometimes they get away
Just to find no place to go
But that’s the price they pay.

You too may see this window view
Or face the gallow’s pole
So if you harbor my fugitive thoughts
Don’t ever tell a soul.

I Shall Not Die

I shall not die
A thousand deaths of compromise
Giving up names in exchange
For food or a blanket.
I will bite my own arm
To smother my screams
And rob you of satisfaction
When you disassemble me.

I shall not die
Shamefully, my chin to my chest
Kneeling before the humiliating hole
I dug for myself
Waiting upon the pistol shot.
I will always refuse the blindfold.

I shall not die
Abandoned and alone
Obliterated from the memories
Of those I love,
My fate never questioned.
Someone will always stand in the rain
Outside your office window,
My name on a cardboard sign.

No matter how many times you cut my throat
Or hang me from my own bedsheet
Or bludgeon me with your nightstick
Of fire your bullets into my brain,
Whether you encircle me in a South African Bantustan
Or a Coca-Cola factory in Bolivia,
An alley behind the stonewall
Or a prison in the heart of it all,
I shall not die.

A million times-
I shall not die.

You will only get my corpse.

–Sean Swain

The Wretched of the Earth

I was born in freedom’s graveyard
‘Neath a tombstone where my name scarred
The edifice, stone-cold and bone-hard
Wrapped was I in burning flag.
An empty stomach, angry, held tight
An empty hand to clutch the long night
Another head fixed ‘twixt the gunsight
Just one more toe to tag.

Raised by ashes in dirt and dust
Cutting teeth then flesh on rust
They come to teach me what is just–
The oppressors’ fists to kiss me.
And when I taste their awful wrath
Kicked down that darkly-chosen path
I’ll see it boils down to math–
How many I take with me.

***

I Know Why the Aliens Don’t Land Here

If there really are aliens,
I know why they don’t land here
And say, “Hello,”
And develop a cultural-exchange program.
They have zoomed around in saucers
And watched us from afar,
Studying our habits,
Observing how we live.
They’ve seen us clear-cut and toxify and exterminate.
They zoom around in saucers now,
Filled with unruly alien children
And pointing at us from afar,
At how we clear-cut and toxify and exterminate.
If there really are aliens,
I know why they don’t land here:
We are their “Scared Straight Program.”

***

In My Dreams the Trees Can Run

In my dreams the trees can run:
They flee before the chainsaws come,
No more standing brave and rigid,
Holding their breath in stoic silences
While Killers of Life cut them off at the knees
And convert them to resources.
In my dreams the trees can run:
They hide like Jews in basements and cellars
while Killers of Life march the streets
With beady eyes scouring windows for
brief flashes of green
They hide a short time huddled together
until the world is safe,
And the Era of the Killers is over.
In my dreams the trees can run:
And the Killers of Life cut each other to pieces.

***

Once Upon Returning Home

Once upon returning home
I found a trailer park where forests had stood,
Cans of humans, shiny and regimented,
Built over corpses of fallen birch and oak,
Dark and vital earth landscaped into lawns
with chain-link fences and plastic sunflowers,
The stench of greasy fast-food bags in car trunks
and lawn-mower gasoline,
Re-runs with laugh tracks seeping out windows
where frogs and crickets once prophesied.
Up ahead in the street, under the glow of halogens,
Crooked fingers of wild grass wiggled
through a crack in the pavement,
Mounting a slow, relentless counter-attack,
And in one gentle caress
filled with a childhood of memory
I whispered to these struggling survivors:
“They can’t get us all.”

***

A Handful of Leaves

A prayer for the children of the next Neolithic,
That we leave to them
A field of lilies where a WalMart once stood,
Salmon upstream from the ruins of a dam,
Kudzu vines embracing skeletons of skyscrapers,
Cracked and overgrown ribbons of nameless super-highways.
A prayer for the children of the next Neolithic,
That you may
Lay entwined in fields of lilies,
Sustain yourselves on sister salmon,
Climb the vines of kudzu to shelter,
Salt meat on the remains of the highway,
And use this poem for kindling at sundown
So you can spare a handful of leaves
Where the gods write poetry of their own.

***