i. Name Not One Man

Let’s sync our watches to
     the atomic clock while
     the government watches
     us—fame is the poet’s
     malady, not some form
     of melancholy, no

     match for its high, that knife
     whose edge lives to splinter
     what gives to death splendour—
     wisdom’s brightest fist what,
     through a poem, hits home
     without shame: by-products

     of corrupt lives the most
     inextinguishable
     light of which insists on
     burning into closed minds,
     as it punches aside
     curtains of beef hard-line

     impoliticians bite,
     and open so wide, as
     they hide in plain sight truth
     so crudely rendered, that
     their artificially-
     sweetened wet waking-dream

     of porn-bred and corn-fed
     American beauties
     sleep with its impolite
     offer, initially
     in public then private,
     fucking not each other

     but themselves, moaning, ‘Yes!’
     and sweet indecencies
     while DC’s proposing
     what some might call “terror,”
     since a mirror makes such
     an unfaithful lover.

                    ii. No Devil Lived On

Feasting with those Eastern
     thinkers on whose ideas
     we have all so long been
     chewing, freedom not for
     choosing but the chosen,
     speech what keeps us moving:

     legs like pens as they run,
     blood like ink as it comes
     forward, whistles and lids
     blown as we uncover
     with literature what
     tyrants try and erase

     from public record as
     having said, those lies that
     happen to slip into
     our hands—inconvenient
     little confessions sent
     as if from heaven on

     muses’ lips that only
     poets and prophets can
     interpret—and so we
     set to work, as I do
     now, setting down in words
     every unholy

     effort worked by them and
     marketed by ad-men
     and campaign managers
     like they’re miracles, some
     sort of evidence scum
     such as theirs filthying

     Washington makes changes
     empirical, progress
     palpable, their peoples’
     sudden disappearance
     magical, but with words
     war’s inevitable.