Natural Politics

I have no agonies about gay marriage

or equal pay for equal work

or tax revenues or laws

going this way and that way

zigzagging with the times

I don't cry over police brutality

or surveillance machinery

looking into my deepest being

where reside millions

of cute cats acting like cats

to lift me up, a standing

ovation of the doomed

I don't obsess about corporate

scandals or violence how

much it costs to build

a new plane new tank new super-

sonic death-arrow since tens

of thousands of subsonics

await deployment

and I don't care at all

what politicians have to say

since they say what pays

and know less about my life

than the barber or waitress 
who always smiles 
when she pours the coffee

their only advantage, 
a pristine cowardice

I don't really care for things

like that since I lost 
the point unless 
this confronting that

in a ring where the fix is in

makes you feel alive

makes you feel

like you’re winning something

just by losing, victory

in the loss of it all

I don’t want any of that
since I can do nothing
but what I can do to me

prefering to sit it out 
quietly out back 
amid the hazelnut

and fruit trees

and wait wait wait

for the family of deer 
to arrive they come 
four, five at a time

to nose in the surplus

sweet desserts lazily 
pawing in the deep grass
beneath an old tree they know 

there’s no hunt in me

Involuntary Suicide Poem

even though experts say

my son or his will burn up
and melt like a candle

and the oceans will rise 
so much it will set us off
one against the other

in a violent scramble
for survival, and though 
they say it’s nearly impossible

to avoid it, quite impossible
to reverse the trend, to go 
back to our clueless selves 

of senses and loves, way back 
when we were children
of earth and sky; 

even though life feels already 

long gone, I have to write

this poem so my son 

has reason to forgive me