Opposite men, American – I know
Neither from an old poem in the room,
The uncut pillar – a giant black bass
Swims beneath the hotel marble and porcelain,
Blackbirds imitate hollow sounds of salt
On some future sidewalk-dry December –
Winter river, its melancholy cold,
The early Delaware’s backwards flowing, and the smell
Of blackberries coming – insanity!
The cradle was made of elder, by fire,
And today, a colonial lady’s
Humming long ago has carried to the present.
Washington! Washington! Military
Mind, its Palisades and cannons, hears her
As Christmas planes roar above the rooftops,
The war machine of seasons promises that summer
Guns will be levied o’er the ocean-walls’
Water, these barreling steel colossi
Given birth by a whole nation’s women –
They, the civic sex, named the National Virgins
With fifty stars beyond them in the day.
Capitol! The leader and the cabal
Imagined, seen by our billboard faces
Saying words we didn’t, great industry behind us –
Media and optics, America –
These, a foreign king of arts, aesthetics,
Beheading a traitor, a wistful place
Called Radio with wooden piers – blood in the sea,
Your blood, not yours, but yours to come under
The pretense of medicine – this is you,
The virtual deindividual,
All police on the blockchain self-enforcing themselves.