Hard to say

OK – here it is. I’m torn about releasing this one. It doesn’t really have a title, per se, but it’s been called “Amerika”, “3 Thousand mile Love”, “God damn piece of shit”, and others. Either way, I wrote it in January, 2004 over the course of about 5 very sleepless days. Of the 6 public readings this poem has had, the introduction that was closest to the truth was, “I slit my wrists and bled out onto the page.” Of all the poems that have kept me up, this one was the worst. I don’t think I can convey just how personal this poem is to me. Everytime I read it, I well up with tears and choke on my words. When I’ve read it publicly, it always comes with a lot more pauses than I’ve written into it. It is with great reluctance, but even more promises to share it, that I post it now.
It came from an argument I got into in front of a coffee shop with … well, let’s just say that they weren’t the best debaters. It ended with them saying, “This is America – love it or leave it!”

I found myself nearly in a rage. My hands were shaking and lips quivering and I knew there was nothing I was going to do that would make them understand their insult to my lover.
I tried telling them about how I’ve cris-crossed this land up & down, east to west and back again; how I’d met beautiful people from everywhere all along my journeys. I told them about the majesty of this lover, where we are all cradled safely in her arms. I asked if they’d ever seen the Aurora Borealis in Montana or Alaska, or the sunrise over the desert in New Mexico. I asked if they’d ever slept on the side of the road, near the farm fields with the Mexicans, drinking by an outlaw campfire. No, none of this they’d done, but still, they stuck to their insult. I had no response for them after all of that.
I went home and sank into the couch in despair. I picked up my “Portable Sixties Reader” and devoured MLK Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”. That’s when it started … after the first 20 hours, pouring over the few stanzas I’d written and re-written, I realized I wasn’t writing a poem about MLK marching or children dying in church-explosions – rather, I was writing about America. And then came the rush: I desperately wanted to sleep, but the words kept coming. Nearly delirious, I struggled to get it down on paper. They kept coming out of my fingertips all mixed up. I got most of it down – some I couldn’t remember long enough to get them recorded. Finally, after about 2 or 3 days, with fitful naps at my desk, I put the pages down with all the arrows, and line outs, and re-writes on the edges and went to bed. I slept for a day or so, then got up and grabbed the poem and immediately went to work on it again. Move this, change that line, trim down, do I really need all these articles?, and the path – wait, it’s a map … see, her head on the west coast, her feet New England & Florida. Finally it came together to the point that I went to Chris & Winslow and asked their opinion.
It’s hard to get a decent opinion on an 800+ word poem – people tend to get lost in it. But they gave it the old college try and a few more edits came out of it.
I finally printed it out, with a preamble reading:
This whole poem owes its life to Kevin Smith’s “Blue Highway Queen”, David Kennedy’s “Up the River from Here a Ways”, and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”.
I.
Making Love for three thousand miles
in her hair, red
tall woods with
Mojave blonde streaks,
I inhale desert perfumes;
fresh breath from choking infidelity
where angles
stain her cheeks
rouge from blood.
From her striking Joshua Tree headscarf
I take my namesake.
I run fingers along its edges,
intricate forests of determination
give her green scarf contrast
against sandy strands.
adobe Mission bricks,
a crown of thorns
for her whipping surf.
laid 500 years ago for Christ,
I feel their old gods in
paintings of the new ones
on walls their parents died
            against.
I want to take her scars from her.
I look into her roulette eyes,
“WINNERS” flashing in red and white,
bright lights mark entrance
from clear desert complexion.
With whores walking on rays of iris
we kiss her lids,
they put me to bed.
With sins against myself,
she forgives with
kind anonymity.
i run fingers over
her Sierra brows
and swim in her dew pools.
I find the canyons of her lips:
ten miles wide, one mile deep.
i cannot echo my love
across these steep walls.
She changed me with her kiss,
a boy into a man,
weak in her awesome presence.
She gives me voice;
her sweet breath
blows across my neck,
delighting me with goose bums,
enticing words strangled by my wonder.
I languish in the arches and canyons
of her neck,
red sand and the sweet salt
she comforts outcasts
for god.
sitting in shade of Bryce,
my hands wander in lust
across her collar,
finding loneliness and righteousness
slithering across the sand.
I swallow in her breasts,
and I know that few have been here:
high reaches for mortal men.
Many have perished for her perch,
creamy white, manifest destiny
meandering up her mountainside,
resting in achievement when I
find the top, cool as ice and firm,
I lay in her rocky mountain bosom.
I blow gently along her ribs,
stopping to kiss each hilltop as I pass.
I hear the murmur of her heart
telling me stories in its beating.
her stomach, hungry for the love she once saw,
before the rapes – men in blue to murder her red,
before her buffalo massacred
across her lush prairie
and her children slaughtered
            for civility,
and her beautiful velvet skin
plowed in ridges that cut at her soul.
Kissing her wounds,
gentle with lips soft,
I offer my soul to her.
I lay my cheek upon her belly,
just above the ragged scar
red, raw, Mason-Dixon.
no doctors in emergencies:
She birthed a new baby there,
born of violence and pain.
I stroke her scar and I feel
her thousands dead
to bring her child out.
dogs biting at new born limbs
not even out all the way
before water canons hit.
I caress her womb
where great Kings have marched
to free her children in bondage
her babies didn’t die in the church that day –
they flew on wings of black velvet
to tell me of her love,
undying for me.
I slowly make my way
down her thighs
through rips of coal mines.
Her first lovers
were enamored with her legs:
i am too.
I want to massage and kiss
every inch of her,
until I am lost in her skyscraper knees,
valleys and veins –
little blood flows through
to her starving feet,
I rub the menacing swelling.
she worries about the damage
the green has done from
5th Ave. viruses.
I kiss her leg with hope.
I land at her ankles,
rolling my hands over
fertile skin bringing my mother’s father’s father
here to find his love
found, for each generation –
soft light of her bars at night,
she lets me drink in sweet salt air
where her whales were once slaughtered.
She nurtures her soul with anklets of art,
a slow healing from the greed of her past
where lovers fought for her.
I walk her fields’ stone walls,
tossed aside
and wonder about good neighbors.
I embrace her soft feet,
clothed in winter socks.
she’s loved great men before me:
on Frosty awakenings, her ice,
a warm ‘good morning’,
I rising to her beauty,
hoping to be worthy with such
husbandry of words.
II.
When I was 8, I married her at sunrise
gazing at mesa shoulders on Arizona Highways.
with my lover,
I’ve explored her spirit
finely detailed in her body:
the brush strokes of clouds.
I offer my blood for her when I turn 19.
She asks for no more blood,
she says too many have died in her name
when all she ever wanted was their love.
She mourns her lost with white tattoos
shaped by their religions
across the inside of her thigh.
She tells me
she doesn’t understand why they’ve gone.
I secretly think they’ve another lover they want.
Until death do us part,
Amerika my love.