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Since JFK, it’s the American way,
leadership is passe, today who follows best
will lead us down the tubes, to the tomb of mediocracy,
the palace of popularity, the place the British burned,

Before they bankrolled the South to bolster slavery.
With forgiveness in the marrow of the American bone,
we pulled the British out of their own European fire, twice!
and now we look backwards, tombwards, not homeward –

Now we spy, too.

Our spying eyes tell our lying tongues where fortune hides.
Beneath the TV poll are secret cells where St. Valentine dancers
cut rugs in the shape girls used to fancy before ‘fatso’ was banned
for not being a gun, for not having enough rednecks on board.

h.a.m.

Why do so many groups of people
get so worked up over God,
who only works one-on-one
(it’s in the nature of soul,
in one religion after another),

and who never bestows life on groups,
with the exception of births
like the Dionne Quintuplets?

h.a.m.

while the republican party reminds us
that only mental illness leads to the sort of
mass shootings best accomplished with assault weapons,

would anyone like to speculate about
the preference for assault weapons demonstrated
time and time again by the mentally ill?

h.a.m.

In the natural world,
knowledge wants to be known,
images want to be seen,
poems want to be read.

In the monetized world,
secrecy produces madness,
kids cruise online porn,
poets pursue money, instead.

h.a.m.

The poet stands
just far enough away
so patterns appear

But close enough to
hear money gurgle as
it clogs veins & arteries
wherever people collect

In numbers sufficient
to excite money –
cities, for instance.

h.a.m.

now that Blacks have accepted stewardship of poetry,
will the universe transfer the care and feeding of jazz
to the people who allowed poetry to wither and wane –
after a mere eight thousand years at the helm?

h.a.m.

as a colored person, who descends from
irish people, i wonder if Blacks intend
to keep jazz, now that they’ve they’ve been
handed the poetry franchise, by blue-eyed devils.

also, do Black poets look down their noses
at hip hop and rap, because there’s so much money
in it, no english-teacher rules, nor antecedents –
except for I Shall Be Free No. 10?

h.a.m.

Ed. note: Wether this oughtta be an epigraph is anybody’s guess: this above imagines Josh White’s Free and Equal Blues.

On the road to our meeting,
this day leaves a wake,
and much waste, since
the calendar struck one.

Although there’s money
in the manufacture of model
yesterdays and perfumes,
pictures, statues, and poems –

Take care not to confuse
the past you wish had been
with what is known only
to the presently entombed.

h.a.m.

today’s book business grinds axes,
but cares for your edification, too,
so long as it follows a path

(or strolls the lane – lanes are ‘in’ today,
not b/c of lois lane, a boyhood heartthrob,
but lane the way rachel says in primary season)

that bears enough data points for a marketing plan
to be engineered and honed by creative types
in the book business today.

h.a.m.

Having ordered a parade of his own,
Trump is transformed
from Putin’s Puppet,
to Kim’s Clone.

Now, we wonder …

Will he request bids
for a new pyramid,
or coldly evict, then
re-brand, Grant’s Tomb?

h.a.m.

By raising Barfing Brett
to a lifetime seat
on the Supreme Court,

Trump and his minions
make permanent their own
Porcelain Thrones.

h.a.m.

By the time an American
body asserts itself, sprouts
hair where bare was

And blood @ inopportune
times – blood and hair,
bound for evidence lockers, often

The American mind already
handled – ungloved – by one
loco parentis after another

Actual parents resume to make
bank, after all, baby stuff
so dear these days, dear

Grace Slick – tuneful and succinct.

h.a.m.

Then, yes, you are
your brother’s butler,

And your wardrobe
needs attention.

h.a.m.

apologies to Homer

rosy fingered dawn
who awoke with a start
to see a world upside down

upstairs wind blew the curtains

in awesome fluid patterns you’d
have to imagine millions of, they flapped
so mercilessly, like a slap to the face of job.

h.a.m.

No, no, no, silly –
not who unbuttons
and says you wanna?

But, who the fuck
converted the M / F
seen all over, when

My cohort learned how
to get off, into a charmless
bracelet of initials?

h.a.m.

when he disengages
the sun, (nature’s post-it)

and snips the golden lasso
of his imagination

from the cloth wristwatch
of his expectation.

h.a.m.

As a general rule,
the poet is, to the role,
born, not made.

While some precious few
elect not to practise their art,
for trade,

Some perfidious few choose
to instruct the young
with it, at school.

h.a.m.

Bachelor Lindsey is without
the courage of his convictions.
Having said how vile he finds Trump,

Now,

He holds Trump blameless for the costumed
tantrum of bumpkins, drawn like flies,
to the scent of Fred Trump’s heir.

h.a.m.

News item: Hasbro deletes honorific from toy name.

Mr. Potato Head is the stalking horse
sent by Market Forces to plumb the depths
of stupidity in the USA.

Mr. Potato Head is the first product sold
over the heads of parents straight into
the hands of boys and girls.

Mr. Potato Head did more for the TV business
than Captain Kangaroo or Walter Cronkite.
It proved how impoverished parents are

When pitted against the boob tube, the idiot box.
The electronic marketing machine knows that the
manipulation of childish appetites is child’s play.

Damn you, Hasbro, in the afterglow of triumph –
implanting a POTUS that looks and acts like a potato,
you strip the little spud of its pronoun of choice.

h.a.m.

The pivotal election of 1960, which slipped
from Nixon’s fingers in the deep Chicago night,

was contested over the missile gap, an imbalance
between the Soviet Union’s arsenal, and our’s.

Now, let us contest a credulity gap, the vacuum
found between typical American voters’ ears.

h.a.m.

OK Chris, ya got me, ya got me good –
Mom and Dad would be proud that you

Made me finally come clean, and blow
the game of politics into the tiny little bits

You TV stars make to look all shiny & new.
Now move over, Rev, here comes the truth.

h.a.m.

i’ll give you crazy uncle –
how ’bout uncle sam,

the crazy bastard let
the kids drink so much –
both red and blue skoolade, that

when they came to, roy cohn’s
worst sidekick was president.

h.a.m.

In the beginning is the Word,
to hang man up High,
or tie man down Low.

In the interim is Religion,
to cinch men Together,
or to rope men Apart.

In the twilight is Trump,
the least of US All,
who raised her Up.

h.a.m.

As if totally into bored games, the Universe
sends the Right agent to pivot America –

From her aerie in a disordered post-war world,
to the dungeon of British-toned despotism.

Nixon begat Trump, forget who came between,
Is the alarm that resounds the new catechism.

h.a.m.

Who are these followers of fashion,
commanders of consumption,
who would romance our acts of nutrition?

Wouldn’t they qualify as plain fools,
for all the waste they make,
in the simple manufacture of stools?

h.a.m.

Woke at daybreak –
before cereal had it’s crisp on
or milk had left it’s teats,

Reached my toes with fingertips
that used to turn dials, which my lover –
Alexa, obviates now.

These used to peddle palaver,
but, they obfuscate now:

• Nancy Catechism,
• You-shittin-me Mitch,
• Chuck Spectacles,
• Kammy & Joe, plus

poor Graham, the cracker.

h.a.m.

Whether for poor manners,
or by outright dismissal,

the acceptance of Mr. Dynamite’s loot,

without extending a hand in grateful acceptance,
is not the behaviour of a poet, but of a lout.

h.a.m.

Nixon, cocked and loaded, meets Peace
at the crossroads, where she kneels.

She knows her days are numbered –

But, thanks to people jailed in
Alabama, her spirit is lettered.

h.a.m.

Nothing so sets citizen against citizen
as Alma Mater, child of Absolute Monarchy

its first job is to winnow the wheat from the chaff
so that the issue of Lord Bastardson be seated first

and never in rooms with Dickensian hooligans, or
an Irishman, or a Catholic from Spain, or

h.a.m.

as if in irons, is the opinionated poet
@ sea with his compass demagnetized and sexton horizontal.

Society sated with celebrity yearns for the anonymity of its amateur years, when TV and radio were free, even if stations had to sign off a couple hours every night.

A time when the idea that poet is an occupation and not a free-floating vocation, a job that may deserve, or need, university style professionalization along with industrial strength private patronage from whichever sectors overflow with cash and appetites for immortality instead the ignominy they have coming to themselves, despite the

Fiction of their corporate brand names, we see right through the shallowness of your need; you remember us from the playground, you’re the one who’s mother came to the rescue, just before we were going to teach you the lesson that would have made you think twice before you take the money and look the other way.

Society want to petition for reinstatement of amateur status, it wants to re-purpose docents and curators into disc jockeys for return to the day when every town has a radio station and any high school kid, with an awesome record collection, can get a show on the air every third sunday at seven a.m. and impress any friends who remember to tune in at that hour.

h.a.m.

Thousands of hours mining poems convince me that there is no such thing as private property – neither outside, at the edge of town, nor inside, where Humpty Dumpty keeps tumbling down, or was that Jill and Jack? All there is is the first person to the copywright office, some lawyer sonofabitch.

For the quick, alert, and lucky Bob Dylan, by the late 1950s, the story of America had taken up residency in and around Greenwich Village, in the form of the music and songs of all the peoples who comprise the people of these United States. That the near equivalent, Woody Guthrie, was an hour away dying of Huntington’s disease, was the neat in Dylan’s whiskey.

Twenty or so years earlier, Alan Lomax, at the behest of the Library of Congress, headed deep into the south, with rare, mobile, recording equipment, and became the modern Pied Piper of Hamlin – Five or ten years after he had made a fuss in someplace like the Piedmont in North Carolina, the best musicians in town would be heading to New York City, looking to make a record and strike it rich.

Sad footnote is that somehow the otherwise tin-eared Lomax co-wrote way too many songs, gyping too many rustics of their fair share of their own composition. Dylan trained for his January 1961 pilgrimage to NYC by spending half the fifties upstairs in his Minnisota bedroom looking out the window and listening to music from all over the country.

(if you’ll allow me to digress: the Celtic version of Lomax is Tommy Makem, of county Armagh, Northern Ireland; incidentally, a teetotaler. He played a five night residency at a place I hungout in 1977 or so and I didn’t miss a show. He and the Clancy Brothers were as important in the parturition of Bob Dylan as W.C. Handy was.)

My first indictment for piracy was filed against Dylan for clipping House of the Rising Sun from – his damn landlord and first adult friend, much less mentor and guide! Van Ronk obliged my curiosity by coming close to my neighborhood, ironically within a week or so of the Rolling Thunder Revue rolling through, too!

There he was at the end pf the bar with his guitar and a glass of whiskey. I interupted to ask if what I read in the Scaduto biogra[hy about Rising Sun was true and he said “I don’t want to talk about that man.” I was embarrased for asking but after the show, I couldn’t help myself and asked if he’d be joining the imminent Rolling Thunder? He looked at me as if I were orange and said, “I told you, I don’t want to talk about that man.”

That was a drag, a real drag, because Dave Van Ronk was awesome and it would suck if he got screwed here. Turns out, I tend to make more of other peoples’ troubles than my own. Dave and Bob made up and one of the first things Dylan did in Chronicles, Vol. 1 was to lasvish his recently departed friend with nonpareil praise.

the sly old dog with the boy-like haircut
pulls wool over the eyes of us in our reflection –

with propaganda tricks and psychobabble treats,
ken burns embalms the public imagination.

h.a.m.