Civil Society
I. Summer 2017
A black pick-up with a veteran's plates. Marine. Purple Heart. On his window an oval decal: "I Heart PAWGs."
Turn right. Summer is a traffic cone caved-in on the margin. As I pull up, masked workers in a halo of trash blow leaves across the lot. Between eclipses, in the Path of Totality, a Senator’s cancer fills the screen. I’m here to teach the language.
“The guy’s an outright fucking fraud. A miserable bull-shitting ass-clown,” etc. The feed never stops. The Dragon’s Mouth swallows the Sun and Moon, and the leaves trick shadows in the corners of our eyes. On the final exam, a man marks true as false. His essay is about climate. Hers: torture. Sex trafficking. Abolish police.
(After taxes, the adjunct rate is four hundred dollars per class per month.)
Meanwhile, a medieval Islamic mystic is America’s best-selling poet. Consume his wisdom in an airport, in an Uber, in a mall. You are the universe in ecstatic motion, etc. Meanwhile, Steve Bannon reads Vico. (Ricorso, barzakh, interregnum.) The president stares into the sun.
(Coeur de Lion. Bright field of energy. A clock pumping in the chest.) “I mean, just fucking look at this! You can’t believe any of his bullshit!” etc. I read six pages on the surveillance state, five on confederate monuments. Nothing connects. Then everything does.
(Dysphoria. Hypoxia. Ataxic gait.) “Imagination and the heart as one,” etc.
The Moon giving birth. The dying Sun.
II. Spring/Summer 2020
Unemployed, I study empire as it consumes itself. Ring of Fire, Thunder Moon. FLOYD spray-painted on the city’s wrecked spine. “The whole block looked like Baghdad,” etc. Drone views, teargas. The naked grin of camouflaged white militia men.
Elsewhere, having seen too much of ventilated lungs, a young nurse goes home to end her life. A cop worth more than a healer. Death worth more than life. Sin Eaters flare out like vaporous tendrils in penumbral light. North Node, South Node— the ancient Dragon’s Tail and Mouth.
Elsewhere, my friend loses her mind with grief. A billion animals dead in the Australian fires. I buy a gun. I watch my cat get put to sleep. “I dream of communism, another music, anything.”
In the eclipse, darkness puts our minds on like a plastic bag. Then lockdown, curfew. Debtors watch the death count morph into an ad. (Bill Clinton on stage, giving a speech about the value of literature to our democracy.).
This body of remainders, of remains. These signals coursing through, untuned. A strange antenna, an old tattoo. The greenness of the heart, the moon.
These images trapped in our eyes.
III. Winter/Spring 2020-21
Each day seventeen veterans take their own life. Each day four thousand Americans die coughing. They are calling Cuba a terrorist state. Plus Houthis and Iran.
“The oldest playbook these assholes have. And it works!”
(Stillfever neuropathic eye-scissor / “I” am telling “this.”) Last Wednesday retired military participated in. Last Wednesday off duty police officers participated in. “You’re very special. And you’ve been mistreated. We love you.”
Let me tell you a story about a people. (The CIA consultants have signed off on the screenplay.) Let me tell you a story about a class of people. (An American poet waxing nostalgic for Stephen Foster.)
“I shook the executive’s hand and accepted the plaque.”
(Ashmorning goldbluing the circuit, the clayartery.) A syntax shared by planets, plastics, markets, leptons, aphids, whales, etc. An Army PSYOPS officer leading fascists to the capitol. An armored vehicle in the street. Bottled water for the killer.
Totality is glimpsed in the texture, in the way things twist or slip. “We were watching when it happened and he screamed and wouldn’t stop.” A leaked account. A Green Zone in the capital. A brick of heroin on a military plane, in the torso of a soldier’s corpse.
Brandon Bernard is murdered by the State. Another woman disappears at Fort Hood. It wa
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for
ever. A book about.
A war. “About.”
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forever.
R.M. Haines
R.M. Haines is a member of the Poets Union. His first book, A Dark Address, is available on Gumroad. His second book, Interrogation Days, is forthcoming from woe eroa. More info can be found at his website.