1. Zuccotti

Following the dispossessed to Zuccotti

I never looked up at what blocked the sun

from warming the rebel camp,

The shadow of a country

that lost its spine,

Consumed by smoke and zealotry.

The commotion of perfect union

is a querulous debate

devoted to starving the locals.

But we know the way to the trenches,

the underground maze of the city’s heart.

Rats one day, rebels the next

Against a free market engine

Eating its own

Using our knives and forks,

Our tables and chairs

Evicting us en masse to the street

Where every victory grows.

2. Doesn’t She Know

Richie Sambora

got busted last night

For driving drunk with

his daughter in the car

And all the newsbabe

Can fixate on

Is why he didn’t

Straighten his hair

for the mug shot.

Doesn’t she know

It’s an album cover

Where pariah dogs

Prowl the waning light

of empire?

That since

Watson and Crick

discovered

the structure

of DNA

Nothing has changed:

Private armies march gated streets.

Doesn’t she know

The roof is falling.

That to free ourselves

We must live savage.

3. Red Knots

The rufa red knots, North America’s most common subspecies

flies the equivalent of the moon and back in its lifetime.

Now it faces extinction as we over-harvest

horseshoe crabs for the terminally corpulent.

Tell me again how we’re not to blame

for everything dying on this planet.

Please, it wasn’t clear the first time.

4. The Gray and The Aching

At first

All the gray hairs

failed hippies

troubled me.

The young folk were absent,

or at least, not here.

Then I saw hope

in the gray and the aching -

Coming awake

after sleeping so long

And believing that freedom

was the mere choice of channels.

Then I saw hope

and the young moving forward.