“Sentries at the door: Brocopalypse” by Vera Long
Sartorius!
In the grey whale’s eye
Big as grapefruit/ pink hazel in the sun
We poison our better angels
Grace Slick
Rewrote her hymn
With no pills at all
Wild sobriety
Brought down the castle
And that Meinkampf look
That bit my pretty red heart in two
You met your heroes-
In oven doors
And heroine{s}
~They were you
The spirit molecule
Has been here / all along
In the hollows of your skin
Howling at the moon
You’ll know her by her lady gaze
And she’s known you all along
Gathering children in the strawberry fields of rye
~We poison our better angels
While they sing our souls to die
Diving into scar-ry skin
When we knew we were one
All along the party lines
Linocuts in linoleum
Heart pulsing,
Do you dare?
To speak your mind
For love
Naked and brave
Indigeneity
laughing into the void
Between your heart and mind
Tactile nubile with
beautiful famous furrows in your brow
That broke my pretty white heart into
~exultant negredo~
Brown Orpheus ….at dusk
Clad in rags of red
right off the rack
We poisoned our better angels
With Cooper hawks and sagebrush
Loving on the floor
Crawling to the night
Fingers grow like lichen
Fracking pathways
Tendrils through your brain
[turquoise] in your deepest earth
Copper pennies and puka shells
All gone from here
Where you pause for another few
Centuries
Starving in the dark
Underwater
One and all ~ the answer
was in a call
center in India
Your Indians took
A.I.M.
At the fear in your soul
America{s} Beautiful
When your world was ten feet tall
When your wall was ten feet tall
and sunflowers
still turned to the
light
Maíz and chocolate and chiles
And blood spilt
To the ground
You reattached my sacred hands
And my breasts
Still feel touch ..screening
That they have their own minds
One and all
Your Crispr past
Gave you a new hair-do
Written on the Facebook wall
You climbed for me
Bringing black pearls and wine
From the corner store
Mother’s arms spread half the world
and cushion you as you fall
~back to earth~
smell the mulch
the leaves make you a crown
green tendrils
defy your logic
and in your brilliance
We all fall down
Written to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” …repeating in my head..remembering Sylvia Plath as well as Leonard Cohen's 'Suzanne', Biggie Smalls, J.D. Salinger, Dolores Huerta, my doctors, Leonard Peltier, whales in general, 'Solaris' by Stanislav Lem...really all the art in the world