On Bombings and Apologies

“I’m sorry,” said the captain
After killing your wife
Upon maiming your children
And wrecking your life.

“I’m sorry,” he said,
“The missile, it missed,”
Then took a step back
when he saw your clenched fist.

“That damn missile went left
when it should have gone right
–It’s so hard to see straight
in the middle of the night.”

“Dear friend, know America
did not want you dead…
“That missile was meant
for your neighbors instead.”

On Being Human

Right now
Somewhere
South of here
Someone is breaking the law:
Sneaking out into the desert
–trespassing private property
cutting through government wire
ingeniously avoiding ICE agents
and National Guard units
who stand spitting tobacco juice and
cradling sub-machine guns —
travelling unnoticed
without proper papers
for miles and miles
delivering jugs of water
to discreet locations
where the North-bound
–“border crossers”–
–“ illegal aliens”–
may find them
crack them open
and drink their fill,
and thereby not become
so dehydrated
so overheated
as to die
in the dust
(nor so desperate
as to lose faith
in humanity
altogether).

Beside the bottles
these bearers of water plant
small red flags in the sand,
knee-high markers that can only be seen
By those who are thirsty
and know where to look.

If you would ask these water-bearers to stop
If you would make them stop
If you would give aid to those who would stop them
If you are the kind of person who would force these guardians
to disown their adopted cousins
and let them die,
clasping cacti thorns in the skeleton desert
Then I say it’s you
Who must be stopped.

Perhaps it is you who should be cast out
Into the desert.
Perhaps it is you who are the Alien
In our human midst.

What human being can feel safe

With the likes of you around?

“One Promise, Kept”

Yes, America, we can still offer you up
a death
after all these years:
A glorious kill
For all your patience and persistence,
suffering and sacrifice,
(for half your taxes, ten million airport pat-downs, a stadium full of hometown boys
Cut to shreds, and all those human stains on your nice clean boots):
Yes, we can still make good
on a promise,
Still bring home to you that sweet spectacle of
revenge.
(Not your son, it’s true.) But at least
this digitized dream:
a Special Forces play-by-play,
a broadcast autopsy
To warm your red, white, blue toes by.
“In America anything is possible,
If we set our minds to it.”

Are you not impressed?
Does the site of these sublime wounds not bleed joy
Right into your skipping heart?
Does your tongue not swell with spit
and does your throat not long to gargle
on that distant mountain blood
like popped champagne?
Patriot pulses quicken, eagle spirits rise
Tugged by the dusty beards
Of skeletons
rattling across mountain tops.
Have faith, America,
Yes. We. Can.
Still. Kill. Man (andwomanandboyandgirl)
and keep promises, too, yes:
Maybe not those concerning education, or work,
Equality, or healthcare
Or life that means something…
But we can still deliver on corpses
And that’s not nothing,
is it?

So when you’re feeling low
(low enough even to rise)
Know this: that
We are there to buffer and to buoy you up
With bodies blown apart.
These bombs can blast the paint off the canvas
and give us a fresh start,
In the name of God,
In the shadow of new tomb-towers
blocking out the sun
And all that is sacred
Of America and
doesn’t everybody love a good show
and a party too?
Amen
to that.

Temporary and permanent branded spaces.

What is Needed
Campside (based on true events)

1.
In Haiti
there is money to build
walls
not to house
the poor
but to block them
from view;
to lay brick
high and thick,
not to protect
the homeless
from the elements,
but to protect
the rich man’s twenty-acre
estate
from the sewage that flows
downhill
from the camp
when it rains.

And so now
when it rains
A human stew
Bubbles backs from the base of the wall
into the camp—
deep enough to drown in
A gathering cesspool
for mosquitos
to breed
and cholera
to bloom.

2.
The construction project
Gives at least
a few men
—from another camp across town—
work:
hard, back-breaking work
for a few weeks
At almost three times the minimum wage
Of a dollar a day.

The wall at least
gives
the mosquitos
a home.These fiends thrive,
Lay their eggs in the stagnant water
Feeding by night
on what flesh they can puncture.

Each little blood-sucker’s life
is short.
They live for only a few weeks
Before they drop somewhere
Dead
In some unmarked speck grave—that is
if they aren’t caught first
Between the finger and the thumb–
They burst like tiny rotten berries.

Yes, any single
mosquito can be easily dealt with.
Once you know where exactly its buzz
Comes from.
Splat.
But in their uncountable numbers,
an invisible, everywhere swarm
They appear utterly
unvanquishable.
You go mad at night
just swatting the sound of them .
Praying through razed blisters
for someone
to drain this godforsaken swamp
of a world.

3.
Across the street, Food for the Poor (that’s their name)
Tells a delegation from the camp (they’re next door neighbors)
that they cannot help them;
That this is a not a distribution center;
That FFP’s funds go elsewhere
And that, besides, they wouldn’t want to start trouble by
giving food (or mosquito netting)
to people
Just like that,
Without, you know, going through all the proper channels.
Without armed guards present
to keep order
and paid clerks on hand
to track everything on official charts and checklists:
how many grains of how much rice went to whom and to where and what color it was, and who said please and who thank you (and who did not).
I mean, if distributing food to the poor was as easy as, you know, just
Givingfoodtopoorpeoplewhosaytheyarehungry
andwhohavetheribsandcollarbonestoproveit
then, well,
You wouldn’t even need professional organizations like
Food for the Poor
in the first place,
would you?

4.
A world away
Far beyond even the locked gates of Charity
Elsewhere
Where “History” is made
A UN official
gets promoted
to stand behind a podium and
speak of “A risk of a pandemic” and
“A surge in infant mortality.”
Earnest euphemism
Rolls off that juicy pink tongue;
(The fluent official gargles water
Before coming on stage
with another bottle of Aquafina at the podium
Just in case
the throat suddenly dries up;
It can get hot up there,
Under all those bright lights,
With all the world watching.)

5.
Meanwhile
In the dark
cholera stretches it limbs across prison floors
From steel barred windows to crack-webbed walls
Where profane protests against the state
are smeared in feces
and blood.Some walls still won’t fall.
As others go up.

And more are planned.

*

Tons upon tons of construction materials
Sit piled at camp-side:
Metal beams like the stacked legs of starved giants,
Head-high mounds of sand and crushed granite, rubble
Fresh-shoveled and trucked
from the wreckage of Port-au-Prince.
(There’s a fortune being made in the sale of rubble.)

Monster machines sit idle. Watched over by armed guards.
And a handful of hired workers stand and smoke, idle too,
waiting to break ground, at the boss’s order.
Their muscles itch for work.There are building materials here
for a hundred homes, at least.

Only,
Not.

The squatters are to be
Evicted
from their road-side camp
By the rightful land owner
With the official stamp.

He wants to build a factory
He needs to build a factory
—there is money for a factory—
obligations to meet
words to keep
(The owners, too, imprisoned, by what they must build
Though their jail-cells are air-conditioned,
And fur coats keep off the chill.)

There’s a signed contract with a foreign company
to produce: baseballs
to be exported and sold to Sporting Goods stores
who will sell them at a mark-up
to the parents of little American boys and girls
who have fields to play in
and who can afford to lose things
in streams and under fences
and buy new ones.

6.
Campside
Hundreds of people contemplate
Scraping up the will
to struggle together, to keep their grip
on a cracked plot of ground that they never asked for
In the first place;
That was forced upon them:
A sun-baked tarp town
where they have been confined for more than a year now,
without schools or sanitation,
While the rulers make plans
That do not include them
Except as sources of
excrement
To be sealed off
Or else
cheap labor
to be mixed
with the bricks
that wall people in
and people out.*
The bulldozers rumble
The manager shouts
“If there’s no trouble, if you all move out,
Some of you may get the chance to sew baseballs.
You like baseballs, don’t you?”
The new boss promises two dollars a day.

A few will be hired—the rest flushed
away.

7.
Will the refuse of this system pick this city
of sheets and boiling shade
Of ghosts and newborns and grandparents
and toys
But no safe place to play and
Of grime and sand
and whispered rebel songs
And blanched memory
To make their stand?

The stagnant waste water by the wall
rises.
Do they think they can?

Or will the machetes and machine guns
scatter them in the night
(As they have done before)
Leaving them in the ditch
Dreaming of clean streams,
a plot of land,
And a world
That’s been flushed
of walls
and the
rich?

8.
A rash spreads across the old woman’s legs
What can she do
But bang her two pots together at half past noon
with the others,
(a daily demonstration)
that, and be ready to place her body between her grand-child
and the bulldozer, when they come:

She’s lost her shop, and her sewing machine.
Used to sew clothes for people in the city,
To patch the garments of those who could not afford to buy new.
(She had been one of the luckier few.)

There is plenty here that needs stitching.
By hand, she does what she can do.
sews rags into a quilt,
keeps a sole
on a shoe.

(Plenty that needs tearing down, here, too.)

*
A baby lies asleep on the bed,
a mosquito net dome, laid over his head.
Those elsewhere who can afford it use mesh like this
to protect their finger sandwiches from the flies,
when they sit out with guests in summer time.*
In an alley of the cramped camp
The braids of a child
Flap in the wind
As she chases a red rubber ball downhill
Between tents
Trying catch it
Catch
it
Before it rolls into
the muck.

*
Do you want to know
What happens next?
Do you?
Or shall we just let this one go, too?
Let it go
Let it go
How much of this world are we willing to just
Let go?
How much humanity
Will we just let go
Let fall away
Like some ball
slipping through
A child’s open palm?Or a kite forever swallowed by the sky?*
Fresh watered flowers
and incense torches
line the owners’ oblivious porches,
keeping off the bugs
masking some distant stench.And a young girl has drowned in a rain-swollen trench.*
There is money in Haiti
To build with; it pours in;
the rich hire poor people with it
erect walls with it
so they don’t have to see
the sludge
That soils their green gardens.And this too:
so the sorrow-sick souls gathered now
by the edge of the camp-side mire
still gripping pots and pans
unearthing and wiping clear the braided face of the child
Can’t see them, the rich,
sitting there in their place
out in the sun, doing what they do,
Enjoying the open air:
So well-dressed,
carefree
And so few.

*

More than 1.5 million are still homeless
in Haiti.
It’s not for lack of brick or steel
nor engineers
Nor hands to build with.
Not for a lack of land.
Not for a lack of money.
Not for lack of a Master Plan.
*

What is it, I ask you,
that is lacking here?What is it,
I ask,
that is needed?

To Kill the Bees

Dressed up in camouflage
Like soldiers
We used to hunt bumblebees in the back yard.
We would chase the bees away (or try to),
From the cement basement foot of the little red house
where my parents tried to grow strawberries,
all the way across the clover patch that lined the driveway.
I guess it was only a few adult steps, really.
But to us it seemed like a wide stretch of terrain:
A battlefield occupied by the enemy.
My best-friend Andrew and I—we shared the very same birthday, us too—
We’d gather up rocks and sticks that felt like logs
—like battering rams in our child hands–
And we’d gather our giddy kid courage, tucked around the corner:
a commando team on a mission:
to kill the bees.
We’d count to Three and then we’d yell “Charge!” and aim as we ran and we’d throw our clumsy load in the general direction of the bee-spotted clover patch, sticks and stones tumbling into the air buzzing with adrenaline and we’d keep on running—breathing hard—right back behind the house and across the yard, far away and safe from any bumblebee counter-attack.
Recovering, huddled, we’d try to see if we’d done any damage.
Then we’d sneak back to the woodsy part of the yard, to gather up more sticks.  For the next attack.
I can’t confirm that we ever actually killed one.
Maybe we did.  Maybe we didn’t.
We certainly tried.
We didn’t count the corpses, at least not that I recall.
But hiding against the house, we convinced ourselves that we had at least sent those bees a message that they would not forget.
High on a weird kind of hunter’s rush.  We swapped war stories.
We were warriors.
Committed to the cause.

The bees, of course, always came back.
I think we assumed they would.
This was a war that would go on for all eternity: Indian and buffalo, though we weren’t out to
eat them.

Somehow we never got stung—
(Is it really true that bumble bees don’t sting?)
Nor did we break any toes.
The bees were tolerant of our childish, stupid game
Or maybe we were just lucky.

But ever since, I’ve had the creeping feeling that the bees
would have their revenge.                                    *

The sound of apocalypse, scientists are saying,
may not be that of a meteor crashing into earth, after all.
Not a volcano erupting in downtown LA.
Not a giant wave crashing on all the coasts at once,
not ring of hydrogen bombs exploding above our heads.
The sound of apocalypse may not be
a sound at all.
But a silence,
where the buzz of bees wings
used to
be.

For it’s not just little kid hands and little kid weapons that the bees have to worry about these days.
The biggest of the big adults are in this campaign
with their voracious corporations and the latest pesticide smog,
their hack and slash cookie cutter real estate,
and genetically modified pest-repellant corn to feed to hogs,
they  have bottom lines for battering rams
and blow-torches to illuminate their blind forward charge–
a star-spangled electromagnetic hurricane.

Three decades later, the odds shift.  We are learning that
Bees don’t always come back.
Yes, there’s still a battle on for the clover patch
and its part of a planetary, worldwide class war.
And this time, I’m on the side of the bees.

Fault Lines: Haiti, Two Years On (a collection of poems bearing witness) - published in Cultural Logic

Cover Image (BG June 3)

[Published in Counterpunch]

The black knife dangles
from the policeman’s hand—
human hand gloved, arm coated in green fluorescence
reminiscent of a protective suit,
as if the weapon were radioactive.

Held by a string, held by the gloved cop hand,
the eight inch blade dangle-stabs across a street-side yellow clump of tarp—
tarp the color of caution tape,
clump large enough to be covering a body—
a body shot down by guns perhaps?
but guns are not shown in this photo on the front page
of the Boston Globe this morning;
nor is the body of a man shot dead,
nor the shocked faces of his family.

The front page story here is not those guns
not any tarp-covered body;

the story is the big black knife.

After all this is Boston not
Baltimore or Cleveland
New York or Ferguson
This is Boston, a liberal and cop-loving city,
a terrorized town grown ticklish
for quick triggers:

We only kill the bad ones here.

“A man under round-the-clock surveillance by an antiterrorism task force was shot and killed Tuesday by a Boston officer and FBI agent when he lunged at them with a menacing military knife, according to police.”

According to police (who are to be believed).
According to police (who never have yet lied).

Flip the accordion?:

“Police shot and killed a 26-year old man with no criminal record after provoking him in an unwarranted stop, having followed and harassed him for weeks under the auspices of an unspecified ‘anti-terrorism’ investigation.”

Same facts, different frame.  (Read Greenwald)

Different claims, different page.

The older brother’s version is buried at the bottom of page A7.

According to his brother: “His last words to my father were: ‘I can’t breathe!’”

Ah, but that big black eight-inch knife
front-paged, dangling,
blotting out life.