Any man who stands
near a place the U.S. bombs
is
straight off
Enemy Combatant :
One might call this
standing while war.
Still I
have yet to speak
of this in any
classroom, yet to speak
of nature recently freshened
to Brand: Wilderness™
as new world currency;
I’ve yet
to point
to the system
of criminal justice
as so many schemas
evolving
in tandem;
yet to point
to higher
ed as host
to new mall cities,
not to mention
the
privatization
of all that used to be
part
of the Commons :
schools, public works
parks,
fire
departments
: soon enough
the postal and ambulance service,
Medicare / Medicaid.
The making public
of the
formerly private : the orderly
outsource of chi
to handheld devices,
the offshore of memory
to the
machine—
the shower, last
bastion of solitude.
They don’t have ears
and yet spiders
will shake
their
strings, reframing
vibrations other
arachnids feel
when leaves
they’re standing
on quiver.
Whatever :
Thoughts glide in
on rhythmic pulses,
nothing like
linear-sequence flows
we’ve been taught
to instill drill in
construct
and there’s something
mugged about all
the states’ answers—somehow
violence-airbrushed,
thesis statements sticking
to their guns.
To take
in scenes
like stands
of weeping birch trees
asks for a wholeness-synthesis-
simultaneity, so here
I’ll smuggle in
a smithied image:
pinnate leaves—
ridged like vaginal walls
to
fetch the attention
of winds. Still listening?
I’m a little down
about every system
of
ranking, down on
the quantification
of no end of thing ~~
quick
name the quotient
of a cubed human squeeze ~~
down
about
the billionaires’ balls-out-incursion
into food/earth. Water/air.
Furrowed vaginas. Against that
junta of generals
hunched in power’s tower
graphing the next class war/
world war what-have-you.
And while I’m on a roll,
might I
gently suggest
the conscious
uncoupling
of market from self? Of big-league
fake from the real?
This is to say that if
over all
I seem at a hard bloodboil
against most scenes like state
-by-state financial cleansing, or floored
by the foreground status
of the mock-up
self—the world-scale
rape of hallowed, heaving truth;
the statutory frack
of commonplace terms
like entitlement,
political correctness
liberal bias;
states’ rights law and order
sexual preference;
Shariah Law illegal alien
and food
stamps ~~ as if welfare
meant actual
transfer
of wealth to minorities. It’s mostly
due
to the ways reigning narcissists
vivisect language
to more or less moon you.
This sort of act’s
moral errancy actually lifts them,
how the Fed early
this
month huddled in
to hoick up its rates.
Which brings us
to the housing crisis,
the files of rank
poverties
birthed by nation-state’s neglect,
the Reichwing crew busy
blading their hands in a bid
to remake Magnate Nation more openly
vampire-wan. I think
I was saying that if I seem
not entirely myself
you’ll have to forgive.
I’m pretty sure
my sole choice now
is to become an expat
of the exterior.
Step into
here.
Diane Raptosh’s fourth book of poetry American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press) was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award and was a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016), the highest literary honor in the state. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Canada. A highly active ambassador for poetry, she has given poetry workshops everywhere from riverbanks to maximum security prisons. She teaches creative writing and runs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at The College of Idaho. Her most recent collection of poems Human Directional was released by Etruscan Press in Fall 2016.