A Tomato of Great Merit Is One That Has Met Great Defeat

When the tomato was dying—

blood-letting in a mud hut,

bleeding-out in some flung

cranny of northern Iraq—

the tomato said:

I prayed Mohamed.
I prayed Jesus.
I prayed Moses.
I prayed them all.

Jesus Christ, guys, just get me right.

Before the war, the tomato survived

the indignities of modern farming

and two semesters of Catholic college,

learning how to sing In-Just-Spring

and the Canticle of the Three Children.

The last day, patrolling a filthy village,

the tomato saw the desert dust

the husks of homes and hungry kids,

scattered bricks and burned-out vics,

shattered and spattered tree trunks.

The tomato saw

the dusty beards of Muslim farmers

who traded their tools for guns.

We are firing at the past,

they sang.

We are firing at the future.

The tomato wrote these words

on a Texas-wall near Mosul:

This is no place
for cowards and liars
be damned.

The tomato's last letter

pressing the pen so hard

maybe to make sure

the words were heard.

No use waiting night.
Only two ways to get home—
stepping off the plane
or being carried.

Kill Kill Kill Kill Kill The Poor

America, I will tell you how to do it.

America, we must begin
with a geometric problem
converted to an algebraic equation,
and then, having simplified it
as far as possible, solve it
geometrically, in a manner like that
which Descartes used for quadratics.

America, we are talking issues of geometric algebra,
quadratic equations
not in the algebraic sense of the Babylonians,
but geometrically,
somewhat in the manner of the ancient Greeks.

America, there are mathematical ways
to solve any problem.

Poetry & Mysticism, Part Two

I am sitting with Machado and Lorca
at a table outside The Red Lion.
Every twenty-two minutes,
an empty streetcar clatters along the cobblestones.

Lorca says: There are nights
when my shaking tremors will not go away.
Do you know anyone else
whose body prays without him?

He tells me to give myself to poetry
and she would call me
acolyte in spite of my spelling.

Lorca is talking as he reads
a message on his iPhone.

Machado chides the final
cadences of the vain day.
He says:
You will not be what you were,
the no-movement of emerging night
like the two crows of easy money,
double nickels on the dime.

Lorca is reading
a newspaper on his iPhone.

Machado says:
I don't want to hear it,
these minor threats from evening.
I don't want to hear it, the forged
silhouettes of ragged desire.

Lorca is kissing his iPhone.

Someone somewhere is listening to "Surfer Rosa,"
but I can't tell you
who or why.

Machado is kissing Lorca's iPhone.
I am kissing Lorca's iPhone.

Lorca says:
We are the ecstatic émigrés of dream.
Let's abandon our deluded shoes
and ride the streetcar's tail
down the city's naked throat.

It's Morning Again In America

A down-sized world,
I mop the long floors of a high school
I graduated from three months ago.

I got all A's in algebra.
I loved math.

Plato said the man of war
must learn the art of numbers
or he will not know
how to array his troops.

Can Ronald Reagan calculate the end
his monologues will meet?

In the last book of the Republic,
Plato refers to a number he calls
the lord of better and worse
births.

What star saw my nativity?
What number am I?
What unembodied object of pure
intelligence factored my sum?

Ronald Reagan
is a shithead.
Ronald Reagan's a turd.

We Jam Econo

And we look for some song to give
immediacy for the way we peel
thin layers of skin from the sun.