I will hopefully be performing this one tomorrow night. I'd prefer dramatic accompaniment, but know not many actors courageous enough.I’ve got your bombs right here, Philadelphia heroes.
I’ve got your truths right here, friends of the sky.
I’ve got your bombs-a-breathin’, a stoking the fire.
I’ve got your words and your camps and your bawling slums.
Wild fires rustic on the dirty tracks.
You know the ones I mean. They’re everywhere.
Walk along a road and you’ll enter the web.
Also, so many buildings can be ballooned away here.
I would make my government’s balloons be gentle.
Their colors would be red. The color of caress
and sensua and la-dee-da, earthquake spa.
But what we possess, our creation, destruction—
what we possess occupies, and what occupies,
is judged down the line, Philadelphia.
And with the buildings you bear,
do you know just how much wreckage there is here,
great vessel of Schuylkill and Delaware?
It’s okay, we all think it’s beautiful inside.
And sometimes the trash does look new.
But that is not enough for those wise ones,
those heel-tappers hanging on their porch,
their ties broken phalluses around fleshy necks.
They don’t see beauty in their rest, but loss and terror.
They hear bombs panging away, bee bees on pans.
They pang the trash heaps. They provide the outlet.
We are amassed in unconsciousness like
sleeping boys and girls and girls and boys are soon
woken to the stories of noise and choice.
Philadelphia, don’t dare the trot of the weak!
It’s time to roll over—time to scratch your belly
and grunt like an array of enraged youth.
It’s time to take nod your head to the wildlife!
There are bears here, for instance, dancing in the rain.
Can you note them, pick them out in the crowds?
These bears on the street corners are dancing,
rubbing their paws together, old ones and young!
Or are they lemurs?
Do they hang silently, their heads bobbing
with hunger, with inner stomach pangs, pans?
Maybe it’s just me. The visions are clots.
How crazy it is to dream of the lemur
bloodbaths kicking like ready-births.
The pools of life’s essence dancing likes vines
held by cheering barbarians, clubs slick with flesh.
The eyes of each creature rippling.
There are shouts in those eyes. Screams.
But there is no one to see it or hear it.
Everyone is asleep, dangling their legs around.
Comatose bringing heart to atrophy;
an erotica fixation in sleep shambling us.
It is the aftermath of an afterparty.
It is a politic for all the craned necks.
Down the aisle an angry angel holds
a flaming sword quite pissed off,
wrapping barbed wire around his garden.
All he smells is urine and rotting produce.
Philadelphia, forget him and his sustainability.
Turn on your computers instead. Compute a little.
Everyone is naked when computing.
Naked except for the loin cloths. Blue and burly.
Have you washed your cloths recently?
The stains are atrocious. No one can bear them.
They are unbecoming, irresolute.
The picked participle picking participle peppers.
The world casts its rhythmic doodads and begs.
All we can do is eat the chicken salad and watch.
All we can do is eat the tuna salad and watch.
All we can do is eat the crab salad and watch.
And watch ourselves watching the whitefish salad.
Scruff on down a little Swiss cheese, mouse cheeks.
Eat your claw of cream and sugar. Mouth your canolies.
Pick up that slice and dangle it for a while.
Pizza is the pathway away from the wreckage.
No one will stop you from munching it all down.
The great munch was called forth long ago.
Not by a man or a woman or a sleeping lemur.
Not by a great pie of dough in the sky drone.
This ain’t no starving artist jumble image.
The feast was arranged by that groggy bear set.
They first that harvested that fruit, that salmon.
They perpetually pissed off in the woods.
Philadelphia, the world easily gets out of hand.
We are not bears and do not know them
or their feasts of light, sound, dance, anger.
We humans with our faces. We humans with
our jaws of life and death and talk.
What do forest creatures have to do here,
with this place, this town, this emptiness?
We talk such rot sometimes.
We throw sneakers onto powerlines
and no one is brave enough to retrieve them.
We break windows when we don’t care
to look through them and see inside.
We wreck our ovens with our Nazis.
Some people will never be able to bake again.
No more brownies. Silence to that magic.
We wreck our hope with truth, change.
Our ideas stored in a bank like an arsenal,
dollar missiles waiting to hit new strips.
We wreck our streets with our feet-filled boots,
shoes, slippers—I saw those Australians you wore.
Stomping about with such status, such ecstasy.
We take police and destroy our children.
Goodbye train rider, clip of bullet mistaken
for tazer used but not mistakenly on a Grant sum.
We take our walls and fill them with wreckage.
I can save so much money by reading
advertisements instead of books.
We take our streets and fill them with trash,
the wind like a brush to our palettes,
cars still driving by with outstretched fingers
We do and do and though what.
Let’s just get sucked away in the phone world, please.
That really is the only answer to our faults.
Let’s just bow down a little more. Kiss the cheeks
of our own knuckles, which bend down to pick
a key, to type a phrase, to get ready to escape.
The hatch is open, launch the pod to new frontiers.
The digital will be there for second helpings, if you are ready.
Dear Philadelphia. There is a letter arriving
but you will never get it but that doesn’t matter.
The letter was never finished. Cold light
across a page, fizzling quick with emergency ending.
My eyes too worn to notice it there on the porch.
The bulldog eating the homework inside the house.
You are the homework eating the student.
We are the suit coat of the admin crew cut.
Philadelphia, a poor ending in a cheap hotel:
this is what we all always wanted, underneath,
loincloths leading to hearts of gold, worlds of sex.
This week the world is graced with sexting.
There are naked pictures sent to full mailboxes.
Text me for more information.
