Scroll for a soundless experience.
1
That terrible sky
The smell of grease
The sight of people too ugly to look at
The crickets grinding their legs
Logic and Law prevail but the
Leopard is put down
Taxonomy
Taste
Rending the veil
130th and Park Avenue, New York
A woman standing in a doorway
A man standing and holding a baton
A large baton
Or club
The thing I notice before the club
This beautiful dog
A pit bull and a lovely one
Cowering on a rope
The man hit him hard
The yelp was loud.
Another hit was coming
What could we do?
Call the police
Animal Control
Humane Society
Put the dog down
Save it from cruelty
By death
Too dangerous to live
2
Life is fragile
Handle with care
He who kneels before God
Can stand before anyone
Jesus is coming
Don’t miss it for the world
3
A Zionist vision of peace
Proposed by a settler in Ariel
On the West Bank
What Wi-Fi availability tells you
King David
No access
You ask can you have access
They ask
Are you a guest?
Not
You have to pay for it
At the American Colony
Granted to anyone who enters
And on the streets of East Jerusalem
Not in the West
Unless you pay for it
Gone are the hills
Gone is the green
No trees
Nothing
Soon the country will be tarmac
They build to tower over
To make money out of earth
To invest
To make everything over in
The image of Mammon
The wall
The highway
The cement divider
The roads
Cranes hang over buildings
The scar on the landscape
All things green no
More hills of Judea
What happened in the Galilee?
Kiryat Shimona?
Where were the Bedouins wandering
In these mountains over the sea?
A minaret on the horizon
4
Help me to get out of here
The howling
The barking, the wailing
Of dogs
Abandoned
I see the horses in Central Park
No one wants to ride them
Horses in the sun. They are
Saddled. The reins are not yet taut.
I see men hosing their horses down
5
What will live on?
Scavengers
The really little animals
Squirrels moles possum
But anything big enough a
Certain majesty and strength
They’re getting killed
Elephants are gone
Grizzly bears shot
And the whales
Tears remain
But we’ve got the ‘fluffys’ of the world
The tea-cup dogs held in your lap
Everything, everything
A precious icon of the human
6
It was Margot Fonteyn
She was at Sadler’s Wells
And she lifted her leg in
An immaculateness
That reached to the sky
And I thought to myself
This is where I want to be forever
Swan Lake
I was thrilled and I thought how for me love, the absolute could only be found in the arms of someone I adored and everything I felt when I heard the music every lover was my prince and I as stupid as it sounds was the dying swan and I died again and again until I moved to Nashville.
7
Remember the dogs that give you everything that you want
If you are poor hated as trash, they come to you and make you proud
If you are rich and you want to do good and save dogs from those you think are trash
They look in your eyes they come to you and you can be good.
The pit bulls are being killed
Choose one breed, one alleged breed
And wipe them out
Strict liability
To have a pit bull is like having a tiger
Like transporting chemicals
No matter what precautions you take
You are strictly liable
There is no possibility of caring for a pit bull.
Those are the dogs that are everything that any dog could ever be
The most beautiful dogs
They look at you and you are stricken with grace
They have a mind that betrays itself in every move of their limbs.
8
I am tired
So tired of your
Idiocy and your stupidities
(God, all I was doing was asking. All I was doing was asking a question)
The crush of nature. A surfeit of sounds. Noises of birds. The scraping of tortoises, the crying of dogs, the terrain of the lost, where a peculiar chaos reigns.