i.
I am an American moment. remember me! I believe in my birthright, my forty acres, and a mule,
my refrigerator, my mindfulness. remember me! we walked into the supermarket cornucopia at
sixth and sixty-sixth looking for cheap booze and bought the Chinese bootleg of Buddhism,
ushering in the era of empty mindfulness for red-wine drinking soccer moms and post-hawk
coyote hipsters, their one hundred and twenty chirping characters selling our souls to the dark
cloaked proprietor all to be heard over the noise, the echoing din of voices in chorus chanting
remember me! remember me! remember me! and the cosmic spheres vibrated in tune with the
eternal elephant drum beating on the back of our headrests chanting remember me! and we lost it
all, our art, our souls, our providence, all to be seen, to hear our voices, hear our song, to read my
f- Instagram post. this is our birthright, this is our elegy. remember us! remember us!
remember us! remember our howl into the dark never-ending covid night with parties spreading
more than the bliss and ecstasy of ecstasy and collegiate sweat and a million humdrum
nightmares of the night while the buddha meditates on parking decks and empty football fields
dissolving into the clouds screaming remember us! remember us! and the only facebook we see
are the petrified coffins of unlit apartments staring at the vibrating streets filled with those
without fear carrying bottles and pills and plagues and dreams and dreams and dreams of
remember us! remember us! and we have everything but true books BECAUSE WE CANNOT
READ, YOU ARE NOT READING, and our refrigerators break after five years and we buy
another cheaper refrigerator that breaks after two years and we think “i won the game” but you
are losing, you insolent brick, because you didn’t remember, you didn’t care, your refrigerator
isn’t worth anything anymore it’s just a place to store beer and rotting cabbage and the remnants
of the American dream which is no longer a dream but now the refuse of a post-liberal post-race
post-modern apocalyptic wasteland poet — TS Eliot would be proud — we won! remember us!
read me hear my voice me forget me remember me! remember us! I am that I am that I am. I am
you. remember us!

ii.
Where did you go?
Could you see from behind the piercing white phone light that we are burning
the gleam from that box our prison, our death, our savior as
turbaned men scurry deserts hilltops & wadis
(the Israelis are shelling the fertilizer bomb builders again) as
white men kneel and black men gasp as
women’s bodies are bought and sold by the state, souls tumbling into the chaos
inferno raging around the powerful mediocre who
in their mediocrity have become great.
Where are the mystics?
Where are the soul-seekers?
Where is Khalil Gibran, Blake, the metaphysicals?
Why are you stuck?
Evergreen, everclear, unclear — are you queer — thats OK
keep blistering egoic and watch while
pointy headed politicians in the new soviet union & united states & gods everywhere
turn checkbooks inwards to combat new world diabetics,
clogging arteries, evergreen.
Why? no translation, dull domestication.
Why? as the ants battle unseen wars across the celestial firmament, under college couches, a
blossoming tableau of erotic lust and common brutality.
Why? cloaked in afghans of rage, break the deterministic circuits of incumbent workers.
Why? is our new Colossus dead?