Nothing anyone says touches the situation.
                Strangers who most love their countries
                Face each other over tables.

                Everyone agrees that senseless killing
                Is senseless. Not everyone agrees
                That sensible killing is senseless.

                Lord, let this world choke
                on its ragged masses,

                let it gag on its damned,
                its guilty and its guiltless--no,

                no innocent souls, guide them all
                hand in hand, not to heaven

                When power is placed in the service of vicious reaction, a language must be called into being which does its best to appropriate such obscenity of power and throw its excesses back in its face. Criticism of such language is simply squeamish or christianly--language being expected to turn the other cheek, not stick out its tongue; offer a handshake of reconciliation, not stick up a finger in an obscene, defiant gesture...

--Wole Soyinka, 1986 Nobel Laureate in Literature
       

                We must kill!
                They must die!

                They must die!
                We must kill!

            Some broad American flower is growing
            on the prairie, opening in intervals,
            a heart. Walking from the train tracks
            the flat-faced drunks on Hennepin don't care.

            Well, you know it's true
            I go in the morning to the twenty-acre wood
            lodged between meaner homes.
            One day I'll examine one day getting by, getting shorter.

                By the laws of Gitche Gumee
                stood my lover, Backside Pouting,
                shouts my help-meet, backside flouting,
                It's not moral, doing nothing.
                Get out of here, get me some money,
                screw. Pumping heavy metal's mean,
                Jack-off, forego sculpting abs obscene.

            She slept over, tossed
            Her Wonder-Bra
            On the bedpost.

            I put a pink packet
            Of fake sweetener
            In a cup, her B cup.

            Except ye know ye must go,
            accept ye know not where
            St. Muldoon, Apochrypha XX:20

            The French, they have a password for it:
            faire pipi, cabine, pissoir.
            While the Queen of the Hudson just
            prints a million signifiers:
            REST ROOMS RESERVED FOR CUSTOMERS.

        At poetry workshop, my instructor came clean:
        "poetry is washed up. I wasted 20 life-years

        recycling publishing crap - in chapbooks, thin volumes.
        Who knew."

        "Sanitation engineers, "we piped up. "Wrong,
        as usual," she said. "Garbagemen."

        She was 8 chapters into an expose of her obsessed love,
        life with a $million constructionist