The Spirits of the Law

       You'll get four weeks for squatters in your attic, or for yielding to a hitchhiker's thumb. A month for spitting in the gutter if your spit fails to land on a bum. You're fined if you give them the time of day. Cuffed if you give them the watch on your wrist, and if you're caught sharing your wallet, your name goes on the list. We'll put footfalls at your back, pitbulls on your heels, thugs along your alleys, slash your wheels: one, two, three, four! They're the losers; they have failed. Our sewers and our jails are filling up with those that would not lift a finger. Don't you dare shelter those who could not be bothered.

       We'll stuff epitaphs in your mailbox, burn epithets on your lawn. You can unplug the radio, the TV, the phone, but our voices go on and on. We're your neighbors, your landlord, the boss of your boss, we manage your stocks. Our kids work in shifts with aluminum bats, pacing your block, chasing your cat. It'll end with a midnight cocktail on your living room rug, thrown through the window--from Molotov with love. There is no shelter for those who help the helpless. Plainclothes soldiers of whisper-militias in bed with the working-class mob. The soapbox leads to cityhall, to the schoolboards, to death squads. Our agenda won't stop lengthening. Our creed: you bleeding hearts will bleed. Yes, our methods may not be written law (but the spirit is all there, isn't it?)

       So, no relief for scum, no second chance. We're through with sympathy--it changes nothing. Here on out, the old umbrella is closed. No more programs, crutches, no one left with guts enough to spare a half-cent. Victims we shall one day cease to be. No more bread and soup, no sleepers in the park. We're spirits lynching in the dark, non-events without a headline to read. Firehose and hounds blast through the streets. The billyclubs pound like a heartbeat. Crimes between the lines of written law.

       Passing bills and punching podiums and closing in on exaltation. It's always just a lynch or two away.


Can't Catch Jacques

        When Jacques was printing pamphlets, he was nowhere to be found. A bookshelf sealed behind him; he labored underground. His wife stalled the detectives with a wet-bar and a wink and hurried into anecdotes each time they tried to think. With every step they took towards the library, she'd stand erect and misdirect and force a smile. They ran their fingers along the book spines, five manicured nails away from catching him red-handed, with the press still rolling and the ink still drying and the incriminating literature cooling in stacks—while beneath the floorboards, in his dark room, like drowned victims on a clothesline: photographs hung out to dry.
        He plastered wheat paste fliers faster than they could be ripped off. His murals sprang up overnight, dripping with scandal. They paced the streets on metal cleats to strip away his posters, but no amount of strict policing ever caught the vandal. The roadblocks clamped down. Unmarked cars prowled through the town. The sun, in its zeal, turned tarmac into tar. They staked out the airports; he couldn't have gone too far. And still, his wife sat on the phone. She always seemed to be alone. It seemed her husband had just stepped out. An agent thanked her for her trouble; he promised her they'd meet again.
        A strange van was stationed across the street: blue paint, tainted windows—almost too discreet. Rotors beat the air; searchlights scoured the ground. Cops made bets on when he would be found. The odds went up. Above there winked a star that was not a star, an orbital Cyclops surveying from afar. Pious neighbors peeked through the blinds, made bets on who would be the one to find the one who left his stains, the one who could not be caught. They trapped him in a blind alley, formed a human wall. Net guns blossomed, stun guns flashed—nothing but an open manhole. They cornered him in a cul-de-sac, lobed tear gas grenades. But when the pepper clouds dispersed, they found a paper, smeared ink screaming:
        "Just wait 'til the highways are lined with catherine wheels. Broken bones braided in the spokes of grisly pinwheels. Agony and shame woven on the windmill vanes, still screaming as you stay inside your lane."
        Soon the hunters' patience had thinned to alcohol. They stood in his flower beds, splashed fuel on the walls, pumped in the carbon monoxide.
        Struck a match. Called it suicide.
        The moral of this story is: Build your house in a fire, your house will burn. And your pretty wife, too

The Mandate

Missy keeps a pistol in her purse, mace up her sleeve. She’s cautious ‘cause the kingdom’s under siege. Tiptoes around the manholes. These city sewers never sleep, teaming with lazies and crazies. Our nation is like a lid floating on a labyrinth of the wretched. Missy feels safe inside the gates. She runs all the way to her estate.

And hawkish Abel’s voice fills up the Civic dome. His speech is an allusion to the fall of Rome. He says, “Only our fleets and squadrons can outreach our laws.” His meaty fist cues a cascade of applause.

And Jimmy gives up half his day assembling armored buggies. The welding burns his vision green. Magnesium sunspots blind him until he screams, but he’s making quotas on the machining line. The stockpile climbs: Ten tanks per hour.

We’ll build a Good Place from all this trash. We’ll burn it all like grass, then till the ash. Yes, all we want is the last Good Place that buries every dreg and leaves no trace.

A metaphor the pundits extol: “If you want a diamond, you must put heat and pressure on the coal.” Any child will tell you half the world’s gone to hell. Sinking and spilling like a tanker. Bleeding black riches into the sea. A clockwise whirlpool tugs at our heels. We have got to cut ourselves free and come out on top of this Atlantis scenario.

The gap between the rich and the worthless yawns ever wider like a jaw despite our staunchest, most dire policies—stranglehold measures and cut-throat laws.

When sewage seeps into groundwater, no bulwark, nor moat, nor trench, nor Great Wall seen from space can filter the illness and the stench. Our pillars soar high, the bone-white architecture of power, but the earth itself files marble foundations into rock flour. Remember the lesson of Madrid: A strong house has four columns, but the fifth is invisible, and that’s the one that brings the house down. Remember the lesson of Madrid: The rebels form four columns, but the fifth is invisible, and our strength is still divisible.

We’re the first new snow in winter, virgin white and crisply defined, armed with an ideology as neat as a snowflake, rigid and fine—a hexagonal wheel of ornate spears, as prickly as it is handsome. We explode with flags. The world will break on us like waves on coastal crags.

Our sovereignty is severity. It keeps us proud and cynical. We brood like a bird on history, looking down from our thorny pinnacle. The foreigners wallow in folly; they have forfeited their rights, and they will be serfs whose fat draws up the wicks of our Cities of Endless Light.

Like Nemesis, our scorn—our icy blood suddenly sublimates to a storm, eyeless and irate. Conquest is a dirty job, but someone’s got to have the mandate. (Aren't we the Lionheads?)

We’ll build a Good Place from all this waste. It’s on the tips of our tongues like a taste because we’re so close to the last Good Place that buries all the dregs and leave no trace.

We’ll build a Good Place from all this mess. Bulldoze the world to bricks with no regrets. Yes, we deserve it, the last Good Place. We’ll trample like a flood and leave no trace.

We will inherit what we have wrenched from out of the mire, what’s scoured by fire. And then we’ll look at what we saved, and see that it is good.

Blueprints for a Tortoise

“How they will despair . . .” (pneumatic whimpers oozed out of his motorized chair) “At the state of our art.” The General then stood, kept us aligned in his peripheral. As we pondered his remark, the conference room went dark! The table was a screen full of television snow. It underlit the Cabinet in celluloid glow. The General’s baritone put everyone at ease as he began to narrate the classified film playing on our knees: “The skyward fist, the knuckle white, the bullhorn’s bark and the bulldog’s bite—these are the signs of the coming fight. Can you feel it? Boys lining up at the barber shop. Boot camp has never been so hot. Girl names etched on their rifle stocks. Fingers itching. They’ve got to win this war for mom and pop. See them pacing, straight as masts, uniforms blacker than the shadows that they cast. Embroidered with insignias of pride. Saluting arms, the nervous oars that turn the ripping tide."

The leaves of the mimosa close like cramping hands. The petals of the midnight rose clench like a stricken heart. The garden that we cultivate—a stark and stunning brierpatch of poison flowers and thorny thatch where unforgiving buds hatch.

"So, enter the Tortoise, the creature you see here. A science-fiction gollum built by our engineers. An impervious perpetual commotion machine--a hangar-sized Frankenstein with no chink in its armor and no gaps in its seams."

The General allowed himself a smirk. "Very soon, the world will know the wonder of our work." The shapes of his eyes could vainly tell: Letter O's and the quickened doom that they spell.

The Smash

Hunkered down and white-eyed in the State's fantastic bunker: the Cabinet, ice cubes rattling in their whiskey. Battle-map shifts like a Rubix. They watch it twist, follow the color-coded icons. They breathe when some persist, gasp when some are gone. Witness the war map erase--think about their grandkids. Throned on his monolith, smoking a carcinogen: the General. Backlit with halogen like a dark shape in the snow (he blows out smoke the shape of soft-lead rounds that mushroom when they maim.) His features do not change. "Have another drink," he urges, "get it while it bites. Just imagine what the cost will be for liquor when this fight is over!" No one says a word. Just the clinking of his chest, a mobile made of 50 medals putting all his men to rest. "You've got me to thank. You're shielded from the weather sitting in a leather chair with a built-in ash tray. You're in a chartreuse tux, and nothing can scuff it up because you are the Lionheads, oh you are the Lionheads!

No foes, no match. That's life after the smash."

Sewers, the barracks of homeless droves, empty out in staggering rows. They wield makeshift maces: rotten oranges shot with cloves. They topple cars, torch the blocks. Their stone-age mortars rain rocks on the walls. Store front windows come crashing down like hard waterfalls.

"Gentlemen, don't you doubt a thing." In competition with the sirens, his voice is getting rough; He pulls his men up by the scruff. "I just knew this day would come. It saw the scum where we were blind--I'm sure, in time, our tank will rid us of all the traitors! It may be slow in swamps, its tracks may slip on wet grass, and in the desert it may stop when its engine's too hot, but I assure you, from now on: We win the wars whether we like it or not."

Question marks pinch every nerve in the room. The Rubix map is bland, just a green bleep inching, merciless, across the land towards a handful of Lionhead icons.
(But--
aren't we the Lionheads?)

("No foes, no match. That's life after the smash.")

Restless

1
"Don't let me catch you out on the frozen, five-lane highway, skipping over dotted lines, singing rhymes, coming to a curious halt where the cold dunes eat the asphalt. Don't ever let me see you teetertotter on the gutless automobiles. Don't roll tires down the craters. Stay away from open fields, even if they sparkle--seen one bullet casing, you've seen them all. You're getting tall. You scraped your knee. You're filthy, and you squint right through your hair. It makes me smile. Run along but don't you dare leave my sight, and don't be loud. Always watch the permacloud for rain. Come back soon. Remember, we're the only ruins of concrete with hanging laundry. It will wave you home to dinner--wave at you through the haze."

2
"Very well: I'll tell you, if that will make you sleep.

You'd think it was a moving hill. Its beak can drill into cellars. Slugs are lodged in its girth. Camoflauged in earth-tone and four hundred years of dirt. Yes, it's older than you. Miles of barbwire snagged beneath its skirt. Barnacles and moss, monkeys on its back, treads to cross the mud. Laser turrets glowing red--eyes behind its head. The batteries last a decade, then it hibernates. Shrugs until it's just an armored ball of thorns. Sleeps and is reborn. Its restless; it listens for restless little kids, rolling with a sound like a purr in a growl. Maybe it stayed north, got caught in the drifts, froze all its gears. Maybe it was wedged inside a valley for a year. Or maybe it's in China now, nuzzling the bricks for hints, sniffing the ocean floor for footprints. I bet it wonders where the party went. And everyone's forgotten who sent it. As long as it's off their continent, honestly--no one really cares at all. And that's all.

But you've stopped hearing. You've drifted to your secret place, believing, still, that I keep the world safe. Dreams of hopscotch on the geriatric blacktop and a cartoon in your head of a snapping turtle basking on the ground. Sleep sound. Sleep sound."

(No foes, no match. That's life after the smash)

33rd: Her Blue Sky Theory

She trots ahead
Ignores the vacant cities
Dismisses everything
She tends to laugh, which baffles me
She won't shut up
I don't dare speak loud enough to echo
But she loves to hear the buildings reply "Hello"

I haunt her like a murdered father
A hagard man hanging on her elbow,
keeping a vigil while she softly snores
The forest of leaning chimney stacks
and razed cement foundations
is her crib as she sleeps on the earthen floor

I loot the ghost towns,
salvaging cans and kindling,
but she's too distracted to eat
from all those dreams
The education she receives
when she is fast asleep

She claims that once the sky was blue
or something just as silly
"Blue as milk from stubborn Bess,
blue like the drooling war-drones
The duds that swerved and flipped
and never hit a thing
Those few dumb drones--they lie in craters,
frothing coolant that's vivid blue."

She insists, convinced the sky was blue
and I just let her carry on:
"Everywhere the ground can't touch,
in pools between the gentle clouds,
but not like these--the clouds were white,
and you could drink them when it rained."

The world is her playground,
borderless and treacherous
She's up with a start in the uneasy dark
and forgets about breakfast
Blue or not, the sky perches above,
an unseen dome behind the clouds
A roof that rains on the weary
and the unstarvable urchin

Oblivious to the cold, she snaps out of sleep
crawls to where I lie in a heap
Her obnoxious echos rouse me from troubled rest
and we continue to the west

Canary Balm

       I know your lungs hurt. Breathe through your shirt--it's not so bad that way. Count a thousand steps in your head, then we'll rest. We'll eat whatever's left of our blue blooded birds. You watched as I caught them in my apron. Yellow feathered omens dead in flight. Their carcasses were warm against your senseless nose. Ninety second balms to fight the frost bite. Don't look at Mother. Focus on your feet; lift them high over the snow--it's a soldier's march. Our hair is starched, and our extremities are turning black. Legs feeling lighter than air. In fact, it's as if they're no longer there. We're just phantoms on the endless frozen sheets with the short-lived heat of canary corpses and that blipping in my head.

       We must get to Antarctica. We must get to Antarctica. We must get to the place with the blue, blue sky. The blip comes from Antarctica. The word trips on my tongue, and you're tripping in the snow, but there's still a thousand steps to go. We must get to Antarctica. We must get to Antarctica. We must get to the place with the blue, blue sky. I'm pulled towards Antarctica. I pull you by the hand, drag you tripping through the snow, but there's still a thousand steps to go.

35th: Mammoths and Men

        I had to stop. I simply couldn’t walk, so I braced myself on structural beams that jutted up like stalks. Oh, Ingrid made a show out of my being slow. She backtracked in her footprints and twirled, weightless, on a toe. I couldn’t keep up with her tireless pace, but then, my chin she took to turn my face that I would look: The ground beside us shivered, unsettling the snow. Steam escaped the swells of crumbling ice--this amused her. A buried mass wrestled free, its beastly odor striking me, as wet clumps fell away, revealing patches of matted fur. Dwarfed in the brilliant fields of DisOrient, half snow-blind and still shell-shocked, I watched a prehistoric monster exercise its lungs and thaw. I saw the girl grimacing as she bent all her thoughts to raise a mammal from the Pleistocene. It was quite a scene. Its prow-like tusks, its eye-watering musk. The mammoth breached out like a whale against the endless dusk. Like an ancient sunken ship bobbing up through a rift in a graveyard of icebergs--a relic in the mist. She scampered up the creature’s unraveling trunk. I grabbed a dirty tuft of warm, red wool; up I pulled.
        The white nights, the wind-chill, the tundra was interminable. I woke up on the back of a lurching animal. She drove us through blizzards--no echo location, no magnetic poles, not one peek at the North Star to guide her. At last, we reached a place: a dangling nest on the cliff of time.
        Here was a city made of tin cans and stacked tires in the lee of a bridge collapsed that cradled all with broken slabs and cables. What was left of the wind stalked on the roofs with whispering hooves; it stole the shingles one by one and complained on the gables. The denizens hunted hobbled hyenas with toothpicks and tacks, dowsed for hibernating rodents using flimsy wishbones. They never brought anything home. A fisherman lost his grip, one torn fin in his fist. His tears melted a leak in the dinghy carved from Styrofoam. And the lockjaw bear-traps never snared a thing. Cunning moths stole the bait, juggled them on hairy wings. An asthmatic child managed to get his ankle caught. He fed the whole town for a week; his mother could hardly swallow. A mouthful cornered inside her cheek. The mayor was a soothsayer in a balaclava. Bright pink boils on his knuckles dripping like lava. He hailed us from the stoop of his buckling lean-to home, spouting puns and proverbs through a permanent megaphone. He gave us a tour of their tumbleweed garden, praying to the shoots, but they wouldn’t grow green. Livid aphids stripped the plants, ravened the unlikely seeds. The townsfolk waited ‘til they left to suck the tattered leafage clean.
        A farmer clutched his useless hoe--he’d eaten his nose to spite his hunger. Cartilaginous craters where his ears once had been. Racked with lifelong weeping throes that seemed to originate outside himself: the man heard his sobs only distantly so he asked if we could ever be consoled. Ingrid was preoccupied; she squatted in the flea-bitten cabbage, down where the roots were fitful and ravaged. With her face pressed to the ground she seemed to hear a far-off sound, a subtle purr that failed to even tickle the callus of a sole.
        She said, "Do you know where blessings go? They’re in the ground below. Through miles of rock are waters drained and wasting poisons slowly strained."
        Sideways skyscrapers housed the feral dogs. Five dozen floors began to howl a hungry canon that rang and resounded inside our frozen valley, our vista resignation, ruin, and rubble. A knot in my throat that threatened to choke; Tongue and tonsils fat with infection. I stared at Ingrid, surpassed by her mystique as the staggered whines of predators crescendoed with anxious inflection. So, here it was: the dead center of a world effaced by winter. There seemed no use in walking farther through drifts of snow as hard as diamond.
        But--just then, the ground bucked, plates of ice buckled like scissors in shark-teeth shapes. A glacier with volcanic speed, we all fell down as spasms tore the city into two halves like the loaves we all imagined, and sideways-up I watched as Ingrid stumbled to the chasm--she teetered on a platform with the mindlessness of mannequins, on the edge and gazing in--she plunged into the waiting fathoms. Eaten by the earth.
        My tears froze over. Glass eyes stared at the sky. The last small flame winked out in me; I lay there with a strange relief. But I sat up at the sound of water, watched a dozen geysers grow like ivory towers. They bloomed high above, unfurled in the wind. They rained on us with feather heat. Where I knelt the ground began to melt. A pool of slush collected around me as I felt the old, old aches loosen and break and slide down to join the hot, widening lake.
        We waded, bathed, made bowls of our tingling hands. Warmth shed on our backs like something breathing. We blinked at each other, not yet daring to try to catch this spark of hope.