Sharing a joint with another ex-con,
            legitimate genius this guy
                        was. Versed in
            biographies of Whitey Bulger,
                        Dark Alliance by Gary Webb
            & Sandinista! I suppose one does
                        get a chance to catch up on
            reading in the pen,—
Dude got 25 years
            for distribution of Columbian cocaine—
                        flown into Texas on El Salvadorian
            air force planes
                        assisted by the CIA to fund
            contra fighters in Nicaragua.
Hell, guess ya might as well
            steal an education from
                        those who rule
            us! Or else
                        go on to accept one’s place
            in the grander
                        scheme of things.

Taken otherwise to passing on
            this parallel history
                        like an oral samizdat,
Having a chat on the riverfront
            across from Muhammad Ali
                        Center in Louisville—
            packing the unwanted
                        soup kitchen banana
            most generously bequeathed
                        to me
            by an out of work hoodlum—
He mumbles something about Backpage.com
            acting sketchy
                        as military grade aircraft
            fly over head,
& he swears as to the existence of an Illuminati—
            leaning against the base of a monument
                        to a formerly enslaved person—gee,
I do wonder,
            when did we abolish human trafficking
                        again? Why is
            the freest country on earth
                        supposedly,
            home to the world’s largest
                        prison population? Oh—
Yeah, they may’ve just now
            taken Backpage down, but then again—
                        where’s the investigation
            into the accomplices of Jeffery Epstein?
Tell me
            why do legions of the downtrodden
                        become so convinced
            there’s a hidden hand
                        in all coincidence?

Like runnin’ into ol’ wanderin’ Jake
            from Georgia,
                        say, and we drink Rolling Rock
            down by the railroad tracks
                        in Eugene—
            he’s just a teen, and dopesick on
                        the legacy of
            philanthropic Arthur Sackler,
But we ramble on
            shotgunning the aluminum cans like
                        veterans of a domestic Opium War
            inflicted by the rich onto the poor
Because—no—
            it doesn’t take a Wernher von Braun to see,
                        or countless government funded
            research projects suggesting that,
Maybe just maybe
            the War on Drugs was never really meant to be won. . .
                        perhaps exacerbating the problem—
            for profit—
                        was always part of the solution?
Or—as Tupac Shakur
            noted. The war on drugs is
                        a war on you and me!
            Still there’re those thinkin’ if
                        you talk about the ruling classes
            you peddle theories
                        of conspiracy,—but just ‘cause
You’re paranoid don’t mean
                        a tree ain’t fall in the woods—
It don’t mean
            there’s no such thing
                        as signification;
Only the demiurge,
            filling a void where God is dead.

Hitchhiking karma,
Their puppy chewing on
            the hotel room floor
                        at 5 in the morning—
Check out before it’s too late.
Barreling forth from Denver
            with diehard
                        Disney-heads
            belting tune after tune
                        from “I Wan’na Be like You”
            to “Under the Sea,”
                        blazing nonstop
            dispensary kush,
                        she with her eyes on the road;
            he turns to me and goes. ‘So, there’re these
                        beings called the Anunnaki. . .’
Uh, stranger things
            have happened, I guess—or
Maybe out of tens of billions of
            potentially inhabitable planets
                        in the Milky Way galaxy alone,
We’re merely some isolated phenomenon
            in an otherwise meaningless cosmos? Clearly—
                        as this matter itself appears to dissolve
            into extradimensions
                        like the watery void of Abzu;
Where the bizarrely irreducible
            quality of Imagination
                        may in fact be
            a prime mover of the universe—
Consciousness—riding
            as if thread into
                        the scaly waves
            of a Great Winged Serpent
                        of the highway,
            screeching passed St. Louis—on
                        into Indianapolis
Where they drop me off,
            top spun like the Orphic egg—
                        & I get a bus to Cincinnati,
            & think about
                        poems—

End up right
            back where I started,
                        like Zeno’s arrow.
Asking the same old, almost tautological
            questions like, who
                        killed Danny Casolaro?
Still the same old,
            same old peripatetic
                        trekking worryingly
            through the crack-ruins of a ghetto—
                        proves nothing—except
            everything in my own,
                        empirically verifiable
            little world; where
Even with a capital T,
            there’s massive disconnect between the way
                        things really went down
            and the official story—
Especially when
            at this very moment,
                        right as we speak,
A journalist is being tortured.
            Deprived of his mind
                        23 hours a day
            in the solitary hell
                        of a prison cell in the U.K.,
            but stands accused
                        of no crime
            none
Other than his adamant belief
                        in the rights
            of all of us
To know—
            just to know, what our governments
                        have actually been up to—

2019