A Good

There is a beauty to carpets,
Organization has an aesthetic.
Vodka and red wine will give you a headache
Have some vegetable juice,
Go for a swim,
Have a beer in the middle of the day.
Did you know a vast majority of people are gay
But only a minority owns up to it?
Singing karaoke is good for the soul,
Have a spirit, live.
Enjoy the simplicity of touch.
Is it wrong to wake up hungover and still decide
You’re fine with yourself?
Who decided living was wrong;
Who defined what was right?
Who’s definition is going to impeach the president,
What official hearing is going to hold capitalism accountable;
What reformism is going to halt a fascist march.
What is this June going to add to the record heatwaves
And who’s household will one day recognize, Sacramento,
That every person is a miracle?
After they exist,
This is the point.
We need to care for them.
We need to not let them be murdered by a profitable
Weapon of war, it goes without saying.
Your self-help ideologies have failed
Where radicalism would have done the trick,
If one had fundamentally changed society.
What was stopping you, what
Impeded the movements that we have to
Repeat now, as fascism marches on
With a flag. As a state or white nation,
You will always have slavery.
It’s funny that our parents
Thought we were free.
It’s funny that one can so easily buy
The things which will kill
Us, and certain emancipatory ideas are outlawed
In the sense of a pathology regarding
Socialism. You thought it was bad
For you! You believed a pathology made you free.
You believed that a fairy tale
Made inequality inevitable,
And so you bought
The things which used to be freely sought.



Private Thoughts on Property

When what you have to look forward to
Scares you,
There’s a painting on the wall;
its shades of green are similar to
Those on the Mayflower moving vessel
And the crates of pages on pages of
Printed out material is always collecting dust.

Overcast glare on a taupe branch curving up,
A dog barks
Haven’t seen the stray cat in months,
A neighborhood of individuals who basically know I exist
But in principle I don’t.

One branch wavers heavily in the wind,
Thick dry chestnut leaves bog it down.
How can change frighten the prisoner,
who is free so misery is of our own device?



The Same Poem Twice

Every small room at a hostel,
Every budget hotel room,
A memory like home.
There’s the album I always listened to before hitchhiking
that once,
That I continued to listen to around the world
Playing from a phone on the ground,
A big glass of bourbon next to me.
How some things change
And others stay the same.