A Poem About Me

The other day I called my best friend Lisa, sobbing. I had just read the latest about the sea lions. If you read my article Civilization Out Of Cascadia Now! you’ll know the story, but in short, “they” plan to kill 60 (endangered) sea lions immediately to “save the salmon.” I hate this insane culture more and more every day. Sometimes it feels painful just to wake in the morning, only to have to continue to participate in devouring the planet. Sometimes, I just need to pour out tears and punch the walls and scream at the top of my lungs… then I usually call my friends. Lisa wrote this poem about me after we had our 1 millionth conversation that day, about the fucked-up-ness of civilization and how we wish to see its swift decline. I thought I would share it here.

The song at the end

For Peter Bauer

I know why you can’t sleep

When the evening enters unasked,

Brandishing its articles of loneliness.

What lies beneath the route of wakefulness

When the currents of lit distraction shift

And the bed that remains stacks with

Graves and graves…

We live

In the civilized world.

In libraries of logic.

Of slick dissection.

In the steady hands of science.

Cadavers in the pages, spine snapped the tomes,

Words are scalpels the shelves overflow with.

Hungry-handed pederasts

Haunt the isles, greased in reason,

Babbling abstraction.

Oh my god have we paged through horror

And sealed our faces off from misery.

Fearing the baton the spray the screws

White vans out front of the house,

Strange men on the porch.

We cannot let them see, friend—

So close now to the end and under

The cold eye of reason—

That we have skin and are feeling.

They’ll do it to us, if they did it to them.

We read the registries, memorized the names

Of the burned, the raped, the dismembered.

Facts to pollute the mind; girls cage-kept

Like so many throated and clipped canaries

Under the romance of kerosene lamp.

Years before their first spring arrives

To loose the fist of eggs in the abdomen.

To scatter and seed their futures in blood.

Facts to send the soul skittering into darkness

Reduced, cowardly, thin on a black grief,

Shadow hiding in shadow; bodies salted with bullets.

Bodies fucked and chained in basements.

Shattered bottles raining on stumps,

A thousand irreconcilable mirrors.

And the edge of the forest as black as soldiers.

Blades of all kinds. Dozer and saw

Lockstep, advancing on

The last freedom. Last big trees.

Salmon rising from the heavenly white

Tumult to wall, fat with egg, ending

Hung from a branch at the base of the dam

Grey and moth-eaten as a discarded dress.

Fact: Anna Nicole’s son wasn’t murdered,

Star reveals shocking weight gain,

Actress falls on catwalk.

There is no hole in which to sink my skull

Nor lit box in which to bury my eyes.

No food or dick or drug or drink

To lull my hysteria so long as you are in the world.

Your anger stamps out cities!

It is the storm ahead and the blaze below!

It does not apologize or comfort.

Your heart is a fist, a mother

Tearing her hair and moaning to earth.

It withstands the tyrannies of purists,

Hippies, hipsters, the bewildering

Lust of wannabes and sycophants.

It dreams of a world where life can happen.

Down a gravel road

Bordered by cedar

In a trailer at the end.

Sword fern and Styrofoam,

Red-tails circling, motor oil

Smearing rainbows at your feet,

Mercury and sea level rising

Inside your eyes so you will see;

That the largest, most heroic parts of you

Cannot hope to keep

Any living thing you love alive

I know.

I know why you can’t sleep.

Hunkered in the doorframe

Listening deep the dark

A stranger’s footsteps.

The unceasing canon of your heart.

—

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