Pilgrim

The farmer is a good man, so is his wife,
and the son who stays redeems us all,
as the choir finishes its Christmas song,
and yesterday's poems grind up with tar
and gravel to repave the same road
Keruoac and Cassaday burned down
in an old Merc on a night neither knew
late in life, or ever wrote to glory,
in an age our saints either farmed stoic
culture into corn, wheat and soybeans,
or escaped it in the rocket age, homegrown
horsepower way past bright Detroit births,
assembly lines for average, average,
average, while our heroes lived
beneath endless nights--some raised
on mornings, others on police sirens.
Now, I take charge, and announce all
is on the line, merchant life to sorcery,
dollars weighing everyone to waiting
graves, like rocks packed in the pockets
of a recent mafia hit. Delirium is doorway,
my dreamy friend. Go, go, go to free,
as it lays past movies, TV, digital screens,
and all the restaurants, big cars, catastrophic
homes. You want the news? It slides
inside your skin bag of essentially water,
and it shouldn't be memory, but it seems
like it is. You knew it all along, afraid
of any truth that makes no sense...
Revolt! The poor and the rich want
the same thing. Every word I type
is in this universe, inescapable,
but I think I may mountain lion out
of the streetlights, the empty porches,
the distance we so believed in
between here and stars, wives
and husbands, fiction and facts.
If we could word up the Ganges now,
is there holiness here? Or none.
Pilgrims walk these lines barefoot,
knowing there is nothing to steal.
They lead to the thin balloon wall
of our universe, and we believe
language shoves us through it.
Drum your fingers on the membrane,
taut as all of which we were so certain,
and announce the new! Ongongaroo!