Intimations of the Next World

17.

"The United States will be destroyed,
land and people, by atomic bombs
and radiation." Hopi prophecy
(Cited by Frank Waters in THE BOOK OF THE HOPI)

52 people
massacred in Monterrey
in a firebombing;
Al Qaeda mercenaries
sack and pillage Tripoli

in liberty's name,
while Sarkozy hops a plane
to Beijing to beg
for bailouts of the French banks
and Cheney drops his boxers

to moon the U.S.
citizenry. Oh what fun
it is to ride in
a roller coaster to hell,
while more earthquakes jolt Japan

and the Japanese
sell everything to buy gold.
(In Cuba in the
1920s fishermen
found gold watches and gold rings,

even gold fillings
from Machado's opponents
the the bellies of
sharks.) In Venezuela gold
in all of its forms has been

nationalized or
repatriated, while 2
million people
follow Chávez in Twitter,
and in Chile Piñera

drops below 30
percent approval and 1
million people
protest in the streets, dreaming
of Salvador Allende.

Near Flagstaff, AZ,
the kachinas have voted
to pack their bags and
head from the proposed ski slopes
to their original stars.

Intimations of the Next World

16.

"It's just the same old song,
But with a different meaning
Since you've been gone...."
(The Four Tops)

3 Pakistanis
dead in a racist killing
in Birmingham put
England on the map again,
its imperialist dreams

reduced to threats of
unleashing the army for
another bloodbath
a la Belfast--old news here
in Mexico where 50

thousand citizens
are collateral damage
and gringo agents
focus their artillery
from their new base in our north.

In Chile students
have been fighting in the streets
for 4 months against
neopinochetism,
demanding education

gratis instead of
the right to go into debt,
while stock markets crash
like demolition derbies
and NATO ups its bombing

of civilians
in Libya, where the fake
opposition paid
by NATO begin to shoot
each other, and China asks

for a more stable
currency than the dollar,
while another quake
rattles down the ruins of
Fukushima. On the Rez

near the toxic site
of Hanford, folks prepare for
an AA powwow,
while the ghost of Strontium
90 whistles in the sagebrush.

Intimitations of the Next World

15.

"Nature is vulnerable, but it is also tough,
and it will inevitably be up last at bat."
Gary Snyder

Here in Mexico
a poet demands a truth
commission: this war
on drugs the gringos outsourced
has now killed 50 thousand

(there is no need for
sterilization campaigns
in the villages
of Guerrero). Meanwhile, in
Chile, the sloppy study

that finds Allende's
death to be a suicide
has not laid to rest
his exhumed body, nor the
terror of dictatorship.

Thirty years ago
Torrijo's helicopter
exploded over
Panama's canal, gving
birth to the tradition of

eliminating
inconvenient voices
from the Sudan to
Minnesota with a bang,
leaving only a whmper of

unsolved mysteries.
Peru's new president calls
for an end to bribes
and corruption, while barrels
of plutocratic pork slam

into each other
on the U.S. congress floor,
making class warfare
a demolition derby
for all of us to enjoy.

China's "communists"
scoff at the gringos' fiscal
mayhem, whle at home
one more coal mine swallows its
coolie canaries, belches.

Intimations of the Next World

14.

"If they move, kill 'em!"
Pike Bishop (William Holden) in "The Wild Bunch"

A Norwegian self-
appointed messiah guns
down 93 of
his fellow whites to protest
their government's policy

of inclusiveness,
sure he is saving the world
from Islamism.
Who sold him the gun, pointed
him towards The Enemy,

gave him the concept
of Manifest Destiny?
I think it was you:
you, with your old wrathful god
crounched on your shoulder like a

cancerous jackal;
you, whom he ordered to bring
death in the names of
civilization, freedom,
the technology of time,

have brought history
to the pit of extinction,
and sold the future
for the price of a wristwatch.
Ice melting in the Arctic

releases toxins
that stop the fish in their flow;
Inuits have more
than 100 names for snow,
while we need only one for

nuclear winter,
and collateral damage
rolls off our tongues like
marbles. By naming things we
believe we have controlled them--

or by killing them.
At daybreak, Coyote is
winding up his hunt
through Chaco Canyon, taking
the words right out of our mouths.

Intimations of the Next World

13.

"The land! Don't you feel it?
Doesn't it make you want to
go out and lift dead Indians
from their graves, to steal from them--
as if it must be clinging even to
their corpses--some authenticity."
William Carlos Williams

IDF bullies
point their automatic guns
at Gaza's people,
expanding their sights to the Greeks
who bear gifts of sabotage

to the tiny fleet
of ships loaded with aid, and
arrest every
person on the only one
that was able to embark.

U.S. government
with chain saws massacres old
growth of citizens,
exposes fresh budget line
items for growing new bombs,

threatens Pakistan
to stop sending them shovels
to bury their dead
from the silent drone attacks;
Hillary's Hitler mustache,

applied carefully
before a mirror, doesn't
begin to tremble
as she declares eternal
solidarity with Greece

while raising a sword
to cut off the flow of cash
from the sacred banks
whose bellies are fat with drug
dough and taxpayers' greenbacks.

On Whidbey Island,
far removed from the action,
a road construction
crew sinks its mechanical
teeth into the earth's hide and

exposes the bones
of the first people Raven
released from the clam;
the rain stops for an instant,
permits their sighs to be heard.

Intimations of the Next World

12.

"The souls of things dead and bygone
Haunt the appearances of living things."
Fernando Pessoa

Summer brings terror:
the Egyptian "Thermidor"
and bombs exploding
in a school in Tripoli.
While Chávez reveals he has

cancer, the Pumés
mount a ceremony for
his recovery
and Hillary prays for his
accelerated demise.

More than 100
years ago Mark Twain described
the daily visits
of his doctor, who never
could cure a boil on his thigh,

but charged a fortune
and bored him nearly to death;
Twain, a firm critic
of his government's actions,
if he were alive today

would not last too long:
crimes against humanity
are officially
now impune, but dissent is
undoubtedly criminal.

McCain claims fires in
Arizona were set by
undocumented
workers; in Los Alamos,
New Mexico, flames surround

stockpiled nuclear
bombs and improperly stored
radioactive
waste, while winds drop pine needle
cinders in Española.

In Santa Clara
Pueblo, native artists
form luminous pots
from ashes of fires so old
they hold prehistoric souls.

Intimations of the Next World

11.

"Al porvenir ya lo hundimos
En el abismo que se abre todos los días."

"We sank the future
In the abyss which opens every day."

Jose Emilio Pacheco, "El altar de los muertos"


In Bahrain a young
woman poet pits her life
against the U.S.-
backed Al Khalifa tyrants,
while Saudi women rebel

by driving their cars
across the causeway to shop,
and in Tripoli
Gadafi says that NATO
will lose their war against him.

Italian voters
say NO to impuity
for Berlusconi,
the Greek government threatens
to sink in the wine dark sea,

while the Mapuches
in Chile keep a hunger
strike for sentences
that were handed them under
laws (sic) of Pinochet.

In the U.S. a
congressman resigns after
he posted photos
of himself in underpants
in Internet, hoping to

score virtual sex,
and Chavez recovers from
a pelvic abcess
in Havana, while the head
of the ATF expects

to get the axe for
sending guns to Mexico's
drug cartels. Jimmy
Carter demands that the war
on drugs the gringos outsourced

to Mexico be
ended 40 years after
Nixon decided
that drug use was a country,
and not just a state of mind.

Intimations of the Next World

10.

Everybody's
talking about a dead man;
he had been dead for
almost 10 years, but was killed
again in Pakistan last

Sunday: Osama.
With a 38 minute
television short
that no one is permitted
to watch, Obama kicks off

his re-election
campaign, hoping that no one
would be watching the
funeral of Gadhafi's
young son, his 3 grandchildren.

Whose body was tossed
in the ocean? Who else was
killed in the cinder-
block house in the valley? It
appears that nobody cares.

A poet leads a
march to stop the violence
from Cuernavaca
to Mexico City's main
plaza, while Marcos marches

to San Cristobal
with indigenous people
from the mountains of
Chiapas: ¡No más sangre!
Ya estamos hasta la

madre de sangre.
The US government once
more hits the warpath
against Geronimo, puts
his name on their spectacle

to kill a dead man.
In Mescalero country,
his grandson demands
they return his skull-stolen
from his grave by Prescott Bush

Intimations of the Next World

9.

In memory of Gonzalo Rojas (1917-2011)

"de sus ruinas siguen apareciendo
recién nacidos intactos...
llorando
en maya, adivinos." ("Nieve de Provo")

Machines sink pincers
in the earth to liberate
more than 100
cadavers in Durango,
while the president escapes

to the Vatican
to have his photo taken
with the new saint-in-
progress, who denied the crimes
of Marcial Maciel

who robbed hundreds of
Mexican boys of their youth,
and pious widows
of their money, and NATO
drops a missile on a house

in Tripoli and
robs Gadhafi of his son
and 3 grandchildren.
The fountains of Mexico's
plazas are filled with the blood

of its young people,
while indigenous women
are walking for water from
the US cardinal points--
bound for Lake Superior,

and the world's workers
march in its major cities
to the main plazas
demanding a living wage
while facing up to unmasked

capitalism,
tear gas and police beatings
in Santiago
and Bogota; only in
Caracas does Chavez join

the marching workers.
On a beach in Canada
Raven pries open
a large clamshell, and sets free
the people of the next world.

Intimations of the Next World

8.

Predator drones drop
their bombs of scheduled chaos
over Tripoli,
searching for Ghadafi's tent
from a U.S. control room,

as Pakistan ousts
the gringos from their air base
for the final straw
of two dozen women and
children killed by drone attacks,

while in Mexico
for the first time a woman
is crucified in
a passion play, and Jesus,
if he ever existed

is now an outraged
muslim in his Arab Spring
raging at the scribes
and pharisees of foreign
and domestic policies

inking their pens in
the earth's arteries, sucking
fuel from her fossils.
In the jungles of Peru
landless peasants churn coca

leaves into nose drops
for Wall Street and Madison
Avenue hotshots
who launder the drug money
into manufactured needs,

while Acapulco
hotel owners moan that the
decapitations
in the war on drugs have sent
profits into the toilet,

and in Chiapas
Tzeltales are slapped in jail
for trying to stop
tourists from fouling the falls
and pools of Agua Azul.

Intimations of the Next World

7.

We've had 2 weeks of
100 degree days in
central Mexico,
150 bodies in
mass graves in Tamaulipas

and many more to
uncover in the narco
war, and the Senate's
250 million
dollar building is flooded,

along with the poor
folks' houses in Valle de
Chalco. Cables say
the gringos financed t.v.
stations to cover riots

in Syria by
their salaried protesters,
and secret memos
show the UK and US
divided up Irak's oil

before invading
and destroying the country.
Bahrain's shiite death
tolls rises like mercury
in a thermometer while

sailors from the Fifth
Fleet line up at McDonald's
and tornadoes tear
the US midwest loose from
its hinges, heading for Oz.

Chávez mediates
the return of Zelaya
to Honduras while
Fujimori's daughter runs
for president of Peru,

Japan buckles from
more earthquakes, and Amazon
natives just say no
to the multinational
sins of ecotourism.

Intimations of the Next World

6.

"¡No más sangre!"
(Mexico's people)

Libyan rebels
are demanding billions
and artillery,
and flatly refuse a cease-
fire, while France and the UK

demand to outsource
the war to mercenaries;
France is exhausted
from being the "point man", but
has energy to kidnap

the recalcitrant
Ivory Coast president
and impose a coup,
while near Fukushima waves
shiver in radiation

and in Korea
they close the schools because of
radioactive
rainstorms. Here the president
of Mexico insists that

the narco cartels
are responsible for crime-
prevention, poets
have become the acknowledged
legislators of reason--

calling for country-
wide marches against bloodshed--
and there are only
two functioning toilets in
the brand new Senate building.

Washington D.C.'s
mayor is arrested for
protesting against
the chain saw massacre of
social services, while close

to Cochabamba
an Aymara boy places
3 coca leaves in
his cheek and begins to chew
his path back to the mountain.

Intimations of the Next World

5.

"Estamos hasta la madre"
(Mexican people against the war on drugs)

On Wednesday they were
marching throughout Mexico--
40,000 in
Cuernavaca alone--to
stop the bloody war on drugs

the gringos outsourced
and now say was an "error";
Ecuador boots out
the gringa ambassador,
one million Colombians

protest in the streets
against the FTA scam.
A morning earthquake
wakes Veracruz, and minutes
later rattles the ruins

of northeast Japan,
conservatives chase after
medicare oldsters
with butcher knives, and hearses
line up like ants to carry

away the corpses
to their overpriced coffins.
Would it matter if
all the governments shut down--
when Belgium hasn't even

had one for a year,
and in Mexico we've had
over 4 years of
rule by 2 television
stations and the drug cartels,

when Haiti elects
a song and dance man
to choreograph
the pas de deux of earthquake
rubble and cholera deaths?

Obama kicks off
his billion dollar campaign
anyway, banking
on Libyan rebels who
cannot blow up a phone booth.

In Maine, one by one,
Passamaquoddy lawsuits
saw through the system,
adding, acre by acre,
to the primeval forest.

Intimations of the Next World

4.

"¡Ya párenle, hijos de la chingada!"
Javier Sicilia

Fukushima is
a 100 year job to
control and clean up;
then they say the "facts" were wrong,
that there is now no danger.

Radioactive
rain splatters Boston Common
while Obama goes
on t.v. in his stiff suit
and his media halo

to award himself
the NATO Warmaker Prize.
In Cuernavaca
a poet whose son was killed
by: The army, the police

or the narco gangs
gives government one week to
produce the killer
or pack its bags, and even
the Vatican denounces

wholesale slaughter of
Libyan civilian hens
by the NATO fox
deployed to guard the henhouse.
In Cochabamba Chavez'

plane fails to take off
for Cartegena while he
urges unity
against the gringo empire,
and Hillary orders press

silence on Bahrain,
where the death count is rising.
CIA agents
prowl the streets of Damascus,
Mercury turns retrograde,

Obama claims to
save Arabs by killing them,
and at Neah Bay
the Makah watch clouds bringing
nuclear spring from Japan.

Intimations of the Next World

3.

"The invasion:
the mother of all errors."
(Iraqi leader)
Many Libyan tribes march
peacefully from Tripoli

to Benghazi, while
NATO bombers deliver
death to the people.
The water of Tokyo
cannot be drunk by children--

its radiation
level is too dangerous;
waves coming to shore
carry radioactive
iodine one thousand times

higher than normal.
The Mexican president
orders six new plants
of nuclear power and
the suppression of reports

of violence by
all media, as the death
count from his drug war
approaches forty thousand.
In Ottawa, Harper falls--

hoping to regain
power on the backs of hawks
leading the NATO
invasion of Libya--
where four thousand gringo troops

raise one boot over
the shore, on the road to oil--
while in Odanak,
Quebec, the Abenaki
ruminate the disaster

they have digested
since Wolfe defeated Montcalm
and the English scalped
in exchange for beaver pelts:
just one of many errors.

Intimations of the Next World

2.

Armored vehicles
cross the bridge from Saudi to
Bahrain to prop up
the Al-Khalifas, guard the
US fleet moored off Juffair.

In Miyagi, more
than half million survivors
build fires from fallen
branches and roofs of houses,
trying to keep from freezing.

They are surrounded
by corpses of neighbors, mounds
of pestilent mud,
without food or drink, waiting--
while the snow covers their fires--

like flies in amber,
for the frigid relief of
radioactive spinach.
Drones penetrate Mexico.
The gringo ambassador

is packing his bags,
but leaving armed agents and
DEA handlers
carousing on three floors in
avenida Reforma.

Carlos complied with
his orders, says Hillary,
and now Mexico's
president must complete his--
or it's 1848

with the stars and stripes
flying in the Zócalo--
or if you prefer,
Sunday in Gadafi's tent
ventilated courtesy

of our Tomahawk
cruise missiles and thirst for oil.
Near Yucca Mountain
two silent Shoshone, smoke
saluting the equinox.

Intimations of the Next World

1.

A wind in central
Mexico kites the roof off
our neighbor's cowshed,
and an earthquake devastates
the northeast coast of Japan.

A wave rises high
off the beach in Mazatlan;
monarch butterflies
in Michoacan prepare
for their flight to Canada.

Radiation spikes
one thousand times above norms
in Fukushima,
and 45 thousand folks
explode out of the city.

Tanks scuttle across
the north African desert,
while tractors rumble
into Madison, heading
for the capitol building.

US goverment
agents run automatic
weapons across the
border into Mexico,
and a gringo agent is

shot and killed by one
in San Luís Potosí,
while Fidel Castro
denounces the empire's plan
to invade Libya for

its petroleum,
and Berlusconi threatens
to chop off the hands
of judges who want to slap
him in jail for procuring.

In the Pacific,
the Blue Star kachina surfs
a tsunami crest,
dancing, bringing the mother
of all rains to Hopiland.

"Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"

(Thank you to Sandy Denny for the song.)

For the spirit of Kathy Robel Braganza (July 18, 1944-October 21, 2010)

In Freshman English
a strawberry blond wearing
a tailored plaid suit--
suit for serious student,
red and green plaid for not so.

We were pals in class--
outside of class she lived at
home, I in the dorm--
and while she studied, I drank
beer with my Indian friends,

scotch with the seniors,
scoffed at bookworms like her, as
I supposed she was.
Later, she pandered to Pope
while I hung fast to Dryden;

she swore I was nuts
after I nailed my version
of Mac Flecknoe to
our professor's office door.
Satire can be personal,

scatalogical,
designed to piss someone off,
I told her--clearly,
I was not a serious
student like she tried to be.

For a right-handed
person, Kathy had a left-
handed acting style:
said she would invite me home
for dinner sometime if she

thought I would accept.
That's when I met her parents
and saw it was tough
to be the last one at home
of a long rope of siblings:

the hand-me-downs are
out of style when you get them,
your parents are tired
of pushing kids to become
adults, and your romances

have no audience
except if you get married.
You were the first of
our group to march down the aisle,
and I was too hungover

at your reception
to pour the pineapple punch.
Four lovely children
later, you went to work for
our Freshman English teacher,

and I fished you out
to become the truck driver
for a new co-op--
a short-lived government child
that produced one suicide

before closing down.
In a few years we were no
longer all that close:
I moved to New Mexico,
and 10 years later moved down

to old Mexico.
Before I left for a gig
in the Middle East
we talked in your living room
about why I loved teaching

and why you didn't.
Your peonies and roses
were like my students:
we nudged them into blossom.
Your flowers are still with us.

COOKING UP A STORM?

Raven and I watched the film, Julie & Julia, a couple days ago. A few shots of classic French dishes, a few seconds only on the archetypal food street of Paris, the rue Mouffetard. Loved it while I was watching it, but then it melted away like watermelon sorbet.

"I thought it was going to inspire you to cook up a storm", Raven gives me a baleful glare. "All that you made me was a hamburger with A-1 sauce on part of a baguette!"

Yeah, well, sometimes inspiration takes a little time. And there were sliced tomatoes, redleaf lettuce and purple onions on that burger, too.

"Phooey--now you are institutionalizing lowbrow eating."

Rave, may I point out that you don't even have a brow. And isn't your breed of bird known as the Omnivorous Outsider?

"Some of us may be omnivorous. I'm not."

I see, some omnivoros are more equal than others.

"Something like that. You are forcing me to eat the last piece of pan de dulce, you know."

Who was it who said "Let them eat cake?"

"Marie Antoinette, although some say the phrase was apocryphal. Apocryphal or apocalyptic--they sliced her asymetrically."

Rave, it's rude to talk with your mouth full.

THE JINX IS IN!

Well, Rave, looks like a really put the jinx on the green mice when I made that huge lasagna with the 3 sauces like the Mexican flag.

"Yep, they just lost to Uruguay. But I am relieved by that." Raven reaches for the last bits of warmed-over lasagna on his plate.

Why?

"Because there was a lot of talk that the fix was in for the game. With both Uruguay and Mexico at 4 points, a fix to tie the game would have classified both teams. And since the game was not a tie, the fix was not in after all. This makes me feel a lot better as there is so much corruption in the World Cups."

That's because there is so much MONEY in the World Cups.

"You betcha. I don't suppose there is any more lasagna...?"

Nope, Rave. The 90 minutes of lasagna are over.