You Who Spread Your Legs

You who spread your legs for CEO’s, presidents,
vice-presidents, speakers of the patriarchal house –
you women having sex with men
who order the poor, the gullible,
the desperate to do their dirty work
in other lands, you, you, and you
who spend your cheap days buying
diamonds to match hearts no one
can scratch, to glint like phony smiles,
your fake fucking pretty, you women,

what’s it like to do the dirty work you do,
spread legs like cheerleader splits
for the rich guys, the “set for life” guys
who lie with no remorse, those “most likely
to succeed” in raping women and all
of Mother Earth and get away with it?
You women who always refused to dance
with poets, artists, guitar players, street boys,
Indians literal and metaphorical, the going
once, the going twice, the gone mad,

how is it to betray your deepest part
to the world’s top liars? Do the warmongers
feel like bombs and rockets ripping into you?
Or do those rulers feel like Zeus as coins
making your insides 18 karat gold-immortal?
Do you come together? Is it a big explosion?
Do you ever cry for the women with the dead
babies? The buried husbands? The once lovers
passing for alive but dying inside old wounds?

You women with boob jobs, the only jobs
you’ve ever had, what’s it like to spread
your liposuctioned thighs for the greedy?
Do you lie back and think of Haliburton?
In your respectability, plastic security,
do you sometimes suspect you’re whores?
Do the gods in suits own all of you? Do they
do you the way they’ve done the rest of us?
We who only wanted tenderness, joy?
Do they fuck you up the ass, too?




Ice Storm

In the middle of the night she heard it –
low chiming outside, earth music
like crystal wine glasses falling,
delicate shatterings waving empty
across crusted snow.

Maybe she was dreaming
the bell-like breakings, except
sliver of sky shimmered
in the drunk dark, so she thought
her eyes must be open,

she must be awake
beneath fern-green quilt
a mountain grandmother made
decades ago, “geese flying south”
over naked skin,

her nakedness
and strange ice music
glimmering
like last love, while

on Earth’s other side
bombs were falling
on sand and desert city.
A woman lay there, also, listening
to glass shattering, thinking
Maybe I’m dreaming. Praying

she and her babies
breaking
into a thousand pieces
were not really awake,

weeping for her nakedness
to feel her man again
as geese flying south –

In the middle of the night she heard it.