Pushing the Wrong Buttons

I’ve been reading much too much prose,

too many blogs. I’ve been arguing

too much politics, while the core of Lucipo

is hooking up in Asheville, readying them-

selves to perform. Sure I want to read. I want it

.

like I long for the snow that now always

veers itself north, dumping on the Great Lakes

and New York, in awkward aside to

the theory of warming—coming or political—

depending on how you interpret Al Gore.

.

Mardi Gras precedes Lent, year after year.

And I have been hoping that hope and hard work

would pay off, hoping that someone would listen,

but there are Republicans among us, ever-ready,

to tell us how dangerous I am.

.

I’m a poet. And Utopia is where

I don’t have to travel to read in a bar. Sure,

I want to read, but perhaps in a garden like the one

I should have planted, before theories of Muslims

grew underfoot like crab grass, giving rise to

.

the butthole-police who inhabit our American airports,

and shortly—I hear—are coming to thrash out the grass

of a railroad, near you. But in spite what they say,

I am neither communist nor alien. I am a poet and have

no conspiracy to hide from the day. Thinking it over,

.

maybe I’ve been pushing the wrong buttons.