A headless man was running
down the street
He was carrying his head
in his hands
A woman ran after him
She had his heart
in her hands
The bombs kept falling
sowing hate
And they kept running
down the streets
Not the same two people
but thousands of others & brothers
All running
from the bombs that kept falling
sowing pure hate

And for every bomb that dropped
up sprang a thousand Bin Ladens
a thousand new terrorists

Like dragon’s teeth sown
From which soldiers sprang up
Each waving a different flag

As the smart bombs sowing hate
Kept falling and falling and falling



VIVA!

(Earlier versions of this were read at the Cafe Bombay, Mexico City, December, 2002)

Viva Italia libera
in the teeth of today’s fascism
Viva Garibaldi
Viva Sacco and Vanzetti
Viva pasta al pesto
Viva amore pan’ e vino
Viva Mexico insurgente
Viva Zapata & Pancho Villa
Viva Frida Kahlo & Siqueiros & Rivera
Viva Cuba libre
Viven los Sandinistas & los Zapatistas
Viva Chile libre & Salvador Allende
& Victor Jara & Nicanor Parra & Pablo Neruda
Viva America libre without George the Second
and his plutocracy
Viva Gandhi & Buddha & Martin Luther King
Viva Abe Lincoln
Viva Walt Whitman
Viva Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Viva Mother Jones and Dorothy Day & Emma Goldman
Viva Emily Dickinson & Edna St.Vincent Millay
Viva Joe Dimaggio & Marilyn Monroe & Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn
Viva all the San Francisco poets & painters
& Diane di Prima & Anne Waldman
& Jack Kerouac & Gregorio Corso & Allen Ginsberg
Viva Dylan Thomas & Bob Dylan & Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger
Viva Studs Lonigan & Viva Studs Terkel
Viva civil rights & the American Civil Liberties Union
Viva hotdogs & beer at ballgames
Viva City Lights in San Francisco
Viva City Lights Italia
Viva our free life on earth
in the teeth of today’s wars!

Brainwashed Poet

He dropped his pencil
And picked up a bomb
And the pencil writing backward
Came to a point
And exploded as if it were loaded
With something worse than verse
And he was the first poet
To have his pencil shots
Ring through the night
And such a success was he
That they named him
National Poet of the Plutocracy
Destroying our democracy

White Horse

Put the wine back in the bottle
Before the crystal glass is broken
The party is over
Goodbye
A new party has taken over
A new breed of men
as Henry Miller said
long time ago
A breed of barbarians
who didn’t come through the gates
but grew up inside
They’ve made the White House
into a White Horse
their Trojan Horse
full of civilian soldiers
with weapons of crass destruction
which is a new name for their brains
or what might be diagnosed as
their pathological personalities
These masterminds
of the twenty-first century
and their Project for the New Century

And I heard the Learned Astronomer
tell the tale of the stars
in which the constellations conspired
to kill us all
out of pure hubris
and Territorial Imperative
since we were opposing
their total domination of the universe
And they hired these earthlings
In a White Horse
to do it for them!