Homeland Security
The police must be raiding
houses, their sirens on full
blare, searchlights waving
like crazy magic wands made
out of lasers, though imprecise
at fixing locations, finding what
is hiding out there in the dark
For a moment the light is
terrific, enough to read by,
if you were so inclined, had
the time, were not otherwise
occupied
by all this chaos
by all this confusion
No one questions what is
going on, no one asks who has
the authority or what for
Why bother?
Asking will not change what
has already begun, what is going on
They must know what
they are doing, these policemen
and women
Knocking on doors in the night
Yelling, “Open up, open up!
It’s the police!”
We have no doubts about what
they are doing
We always open up
We have no choice
Futility Music
That’s what they
call it:
the interrogators,
assassins
spooks
Heavy metal to us:
Twisted Sister
Metallica
Kiss
Angry music:
Limp Biskit
Slip Knot
Rage Against the Machine
“Interro-tunes”
say those in the trade,
approved by your
Defense Department
“Mood music for
jolting your jihad”
Unholy, infidel
noise, horror sounds
the ultimate
cultural clash:
pure torture:
“We’re Not Going to Take It”
“Shoot to Thrill”
“The Sandman”
Drowning Pool
“Let the bodies hit the floor”
“Glow in the Darks”
This new interrogation
technique;
beating the prisoner
with phosphorescent
sticks,
you know, the kind
they guide airplanes
down runways with
at night,
beating them until
the sticks break,
coats the prisoners
with the stuff that’s
inside,
makes them easier
to keep track of
when they glow
in the dark
Pictures of What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s
Novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, mixed media
on paper
Under the sign of an hourglass,
men in loose fitting Hawaiian shirts
look up to where the sun should be
and see an absence of light,
see a strange colored chemical haze,
what the clouds have become and
no one can explain how this came about;
not even the scientists in tie-dyed lab
coats who caused this abstract transformation;
nor the rear-guard SS troopers in their
atrocity exhibit offices, walls covered by
portraits of tyrannical rulers throughout
the ages, their rulers and ours; not the lackeys
or the bootlickers kneeling down in ruined
streets to kiss the shoes of false Popes,
Grand Inquisitors wearing heavy, plush
robes to conceal their executioner gear;
not satan’s soldiers on wheels; not pale
musclemen, minutemen, plunderers of the dead;
not the burgermeisters nor their whores:
the taxi dancers, cabaret queens, make up
artists, made up as tainted gypsies, hot to
the touch; not the anarchists with their
apolitical tracts but the atonal music they
listened to as the rockets came over the spent
horizon, some exploding in mid-air recreating
the memory of the missing stars, others not
ignited and no one knew why.
Gravity’s Rainbow: Paper Collage with Pills,
Hemp Leaves, Acrylic and Resin on Wood
after Fred Tomaselli
Gravity’s Rainbow as extreme Art,
a hybrid form combining found objects,
over-the-counter Medicinals, antacid wafers,
dissolvable capsules, antihistamines, low
dosage aspirins, the enteric and the regular,
all strung as helix amid drooping plastics,
necklaces and furbelows, the ornamental
and the functional, an almost tapestry,
tableau of modern life, of lost and found
Art, affixed on a field of black, the universal
and the particular, random designing, scars,
the wounded back drop, the sky.
When you first
see them, the men,
seated, waiting in
the desert, you wonder,
why have they gathered
here? What are they
doing? Are they so
devout, nothing can
keep them from praying?
Not the approaching
storm, the darkening
whirl of dust and dirt,
a tidal wave of earth.
No, you realize, prayer
is not what has brought
them here but war;
that lone man standing
some yards away is
a soldier, an armed
guard and that jeep
nearby is not moving
but idling, more men
inside, waiting for what
happens next. Waiting
for the hovering craft,
the first of many, about
to land despite sight line
zero, this ghost ship in
a wasteland, here to ferry
the doomed, the prisoners,
home.
Franz Marc’s Battling Forms (1914)
A piece of Klee,
geometric, tarnished
as the skin of martyrs
uprooted from their
graves;
the hell they were
interred in no longer
consecrated ground
but something profaned,
damaged by earthquakes,
artillery barraging;
their rude crosses bent,
dismantling, even eternity
markers impermanent as
the town’s people who
died here breathing mustard
gases;
their collective exhalations
a poisonous cloud, a pale
horse, pale rider nightmare
wrenched from Chagall’s
worst dream;
all of Munch’s lost tubercular
children gathered behind
locked church doors balanced
on the edge of a precipice;
or like a Kandinsky composition
in red, a folk dream inside a blood
red chamber, the one the artist
never finished, the one no one
could ever finish.