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Freedom Kiss Me
Freedom kiss me, baby
stick that patriotic tongue
down my throat
tell me again how
war is peace and
murder
is liberation,
blindfold me with that yellow ribbon
and tie me up with a flag
whip me into submission
and teach
me to be a good dog
Freedom kiss me, baby
while the television plays our song:
"Be afraid ... Buy stuff ... Buy more stuff ... Sleeeeep."
Just
give me the freedom to choose the channel.
Come on, baby, let’s show them Saddam-lovers we mean business
Let’s pour all our French wine into the gutter
and
watch it run red like the blood of
innocent Iraqi children–
I mean, of the evil-doers–down the sewer
into
the river to the sea and right back to that giant Communist
cesspool of cowardice and capitulation.
I mean, there’s
the color red right there in the French flag!
Well, there’s white and blue too, but let’s not split hairs here:
Yer
either with us (lockstep, goosestep, and a flag on your SUV)
or yer with the terrorists (Osama bin Forgotten,
Osama
bin Given-the-best-recruitment-campaign-imaginable,
or Osama bin Sittin-in-a-luxury-suite-of-a-Miami-Hotel-waiting-for-the-announcement-of-his-
capture-two-weeks-before-the-election)
not to forget those other terrorists:
that’s right
public
school
teachers
Freedom kiss me baby
and let’s not stop with fries and toast:
Let’s go to New York and tear down
the
biggest French thing we have,
toss her torch-first into the Bay
and watch her sink, besides,
"Liberty" sounds like
a French word
if you ask me.
So smother me with them freedom kisses, baby,
cuz I’ve been gettin too much oxygen lately,
and it’s been
going to my brain,
and making me think.
Domestic Feral (Columba Livia)
Her trident feet
know the pavement
like I know these four walls
We both feed at the mercy of others
We both pace like prisoners or pendulums
We both see our reflections in
glass buildings
and dream of cliffs
There was a time when she was not
a pigeon
and I was not a citizen, a consumer, a sapiens,
a wearer or
shoes and hats
And then
in the searing silence of the Badlands
I see them
darting in and out of red and yellow shadows–
primordial,
pre- and post-historic:
Rock Doves, in and of themselves,
free and fearless,
and I, for a moment,
can imagine
myself
barefoot to the earth and
bareheaded to the sun,
unthinking, fearless and free
Moments pass.
The American Dream:
Litany for the School of Assassins
I want to tell you about dollars and dictators,
bankers and blood;
men forged into death machines, and
puppets
holding the strings of puppets holding
the strings of puppets holding guns
but all I can think of
is the old flowerman,
door to door on the streets of Tapachula
selling orchids,
a banana
leaf held between his thumbs,
crevassed like topographic maps,
an improvised reed to rasp
Mexican folk songs for
the children
Or los niZos
of the Guatemalan Highlands
their Mayan eyes an
eternal smile
their voices like flights of tropic birds–
one girl, when she saw we had no money to buy,
stayed
to share her bag of peanuts
and watch the sun edging behind
the volcanoes of Atitlan
Or the schoolchildren of Chiquiuitles,
"place of the basketweavers"the meaning of its
ancient name,
sharing pan
dulce with us while the Army searched their homes
for Zapatistas
Yes, I saw tanks loaded with American shells,
child-soldiers with trembling machine guns,
horrible deformities caused
by Dow and Monsanto death chemicals
sprayed on the coffee plantations,
barbed wire and armed guards at the Chiquita
port–
But these are not the images
that fill my hands like sea water ...
These are not the images
that fill my hands like seawater ...
It’s the boys in the park at Copán
drawing trees and moons on the sidewalk
with
a broken chalk statuette of a Mayan king
It’s the cab driver in San Salvador
who sang to us at 4:00 am
while we tried to remember where our hotel was
It’s the village children we played soccer with
on Sundays, avoiding grazing cows
and the mounds of fire ants
It’s the Indian girl cooing to her chicken,
protecting it from the crushing crowd
of a stifling bus ride down
from the mountains
Yet these are the songs
silenced by the assassins bred
in the factory of greed
It is they who pay for our American
Dream,
and they pay with their blood.
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