Stonewall To Standing Rock

who by the time it arrived
had made its plan heretofore
stonewall it had not a penny
thats not true it had several pennies

can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending
instead just tell them to honor the treaty

what can poetry do it
cant not not do nothing
it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole
patrons at stonewall

there was a shooting in ohio today
the music made me feel a little anxious it was
hard thumping dance music a notch
upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life
the optimum tempo for cpr
I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but
I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone
meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me

there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least
I think it is amy winehouse
she is at a funeral black and white
there is a stuffed bird slightly obscuring my view of the tv
it looks like a kind of tall pigeon w/ mottled brown
and russet with a white ringlet necklace and black dots
is it a carrier pigeon I wonder I sent
a text to jocelyn at standing rock several texts

are you still on the road
ariana and i r gonna go out there in december
sending love to you
tried calling bt yr mailbox is full
send a sign when u can xoxo

howdy. thinking of u w love.
hope all is well. send smoke
signal telegram carrier pigeon
send love to my twospirits at the
winyan camp.

last night we prayed for her and for zephyr and l. frank &
the twospirits especially at standing rock
there’s no sign of that struggle here but they are selling tshirts
commemorating
the other and the six days of riots
led by transwomen of color they later tried to whitewash in that
terrible movie
like it was all these hot angry upright downright forthright white gays
so ready
for the revolution
and now people are treating standing rock like burning man

a drink called goslings
videos by the pigeon misaligned with the music
the smell of booze in the air made both of us recoil slightly I saw
or felt it

I’m here to make a poem I was already paid for when I had less than $2 in
my bank account (and I joked I would go right to the bar and buy every-
body drinks ) not even enough for a subway ride and I used the 58 cents I’d
gotten for busking for the first time alone in the long hallway between the
library at bryant park and the orange line trains by the ovid quote ‘gutta
cavat lapidem’ water (or a drop of water really) hollows out
a stone. lapidum a stone or rock ariana once described cd wright’s style
as ‘lapidary’
I loved this as a description of writing like the hieroglyphics are
literally lapidary and I told my grandmother about it as we
were driving from mescalero to albuquerque she knew all about the
plants and the names for all the rockforms mesas or buttes or
ziggurats and I said how do

you know all these she said by long observation and
I used to study geology in college I wanted to major in it
but they wouldn’t allow women
to major in the hard sciences then so she
began to study religion
tho she already had medicine

ricky martin on the beach
or is it someone younger sexier
the grand canyon splitting apart
is it an ad is it a video
even the sands at the beach
are bouncing with the beat
the tempo has stayed very similar this whole time a tick
up I suspect from 100bpm