“How long would authority and private property exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers and hangmen?” —Emma Goldman
Poems
Nouveaux Orleans, Old Story
I.
They’d been there 10,000 years:
Caddo, Natchez, Atakapa, Chitimachan, Muskogean, Tunican and more
fishing on fertile flood plains.
Sapphire-skied summer day three months long;
Sunflower, squash, beans and maize.
Time began one colorless day in 1519,
dragged in by the hungry blue-eyed wolves:
Borders
BORDERS
Longing for the country of my birth,
almost didn’t hear the brook
quietly making its way
over the rocks.
At This Very Moment
At this very moment
as anti-Marxists
and anti-anarchists
and anti-revolutionary liberals
debate what’s the matter with the places
they’ve never been to,
Who Owes Whom?
And what if we interrupted
the phosphorescent faces
that calmly assess our fate?
I Am Northamerican
Once I knew who I was;
I was myself moving through the world
like thoughts stirring within a body.
México, you were my body then:
your sun and moon,
my eyes;