Bogged down in laos

A Change Of Same

If you can count to that high a number, more power to you.
I lost track before I was of age. “The more things change,
the more they stay the same.” I’d be happy with three cents
for each time. I read an article from the Vietnam Era written
by a journalist named Arthur Hoppe who lamented that he
had come to a place in the madness, a kind of bookmark,
that saved him some small space of sanity before a colossus
of opposite. He stated that he was rooting against his own
country, that he had somehow lost the carefully crafted innocence
all American children got in those bygone days of proud national
life. He wrote that he was glad our forces had been bogged down
in Laos. I thought about calling this poem, Bogged Down In Laos,
and I may yet change it from A Change Of Same. I have not yet
had coffee. There are who knows how many dead since I went to
sleep for eight hours who will never ever again have coffee.



The war is everywhere. The war is here in this quiet room where
only the ratatatat of my keyboard pierces lawns being mowed
twelve yards away, ping off clanging barrages of church bells
at noon. I’m in the trenches as sure as mustard gas is yellow.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” So I
came to this idea that we need a change of same, a different set
of things to lose count of, interchangeable, of course, but along
a different direction. The more free national health care changes,
the more it stays the same. The more affordable housing changes,
the more it stays the same. The more free and higher education
for those who want it changes, the more it stays the same. The
more humans enjoy human rights changes, well you get it.



We’re bogged down in America. The enemy are closing in.
It’s getting crowded because we insist on making room for
more enemies. The enemy looks like me. It looks like you, too.
This poem is not finding its soul. It has a leak somewhere.
There is no triple-A for poems. They’re expected to hobble on
square flat wheels for as long as they can until the last line is
mercifully administered. “The more things change, the more they
stay the same.” That won’t do. I’m bogged down in this poem.
Before the end of the first cup, I’m certain to be rooting against it.

Joseph Gallo
March 31, 2007



Full article by Arthur Hoppe can be read by clicking on his name. Photos are from a hike I took yesterday up on the Santa Rosa Plateau.

Change one thing

The World Will Not Have Us

The world will not have us be anything it cannot use.
What we wish to be, it cannot use.
What we want to be, it cannot use.

We will be what it allows us to be,
in accordance with what it desires,
in keeping with what it wishes.

We are the only way the world can know itself.



And as in all investigation into what comprises
oneself, it is fraught with deception. Some are
deliberate; some unavoidable.

The world will not have us be anything it cannot use.

It will use and reuse us as necessary to unravel its
own mystery. This mystery is what caused us to be.
This misuse has caused us to become.



The world will not have us be anything it cannot use.
This knowledge alone is both useful and useless. Discover
or change one thing in the world and it will reprove itself.

We will not have the world be anything we can not use.

Joseph Gallo
March 18, 2007

The worst thing imaginable

Spring 55

Spring pussyfoots in again. It might rain again later, or not.
Yeah, I saw a leafy congregation knotted around the dark
center of a malformed tree trunk like negroes huddled
around a blazing oil barrel on a gated street in Beverly Hills.

This is my 55th spring and it looks like 4, 11, 15, 27, 32, and
49. Seasons are like busted lotteries, all the numbers just off
by one left or two right. Today I serve dirty punch to new-turning
worms and tell them what a great job they’re doing with the
bloomgrass and all. They ignore me because worms lack ears.



They are my nation now. They are artists and poets and makers
of black music that no one can hear, no one can see because
we lack eyes. This season does not come with pre-installed hand-
rails, so if you’re feigning to be feeble, have at it. I will call lazy
lazy and you will go your whole life without suppers of wordcraft
and paintcraft, dancecraft and storycraft because you have done
the worst thing imaginable to yourself. I feel sorry for you nearly
as much as for myself. You would relegate me to pointlessness,
coil the looted core that blackened Eve’s blind eye and I am not
even the sorriest thing to have ever trespassed your orderly world.



I am spring come pussyfooted through the bolted back door leaving evidence on the white kitchen tile for which you have ample mops set aside for such unwarranted intrusions. It was never about flowers, or love’s unkindling, or the barbed larks' pitiful calliopes spent on empty meadows. Spring is too goddam allegorical for its own good. Any poet can crucify a metaphor and with one handy nail can teach the trick.



Winter tenders its violation and laughs as it turns to leave. I’ve heard this before as have you. Grace is not a state of acceptance; it’s a half-written sentence of a bitter defeat. Suck it up and let the ice saints enchant. It is their time this last sunset. Even spring knows that.

Joseph Gallo
March 20, 2007

A melody that lives but once

Delilahville

The women move like curtains in Amalfi, rouged as robust
figs, ripe as the unhurried sea. They move across sheets
of wind like cursive over fine parchment, looped and lilted
in the handless alphabets of their sheer curves. Such is
the manner of light on water, pressed but never touching.



In soft armadas, mizzened windows sail their high faces in
painted fleets as mountains prow the edge of the skirting sky.
There is dance in the village, the thousand scents of intrigue
and hunger spilling down stone cobbleways. This is a night
for golden calves and myrrh-oiled hair, vertiver skin tamboured
with the essential glisten of distant promise two worlds away.



Moor among these peerless women and lose yourself to
all that remains yet possible. Do not marry the false brides
of your own name for none here will remember it. Give
yourself a steep anonymity and cast away whatever cane
the fates may afford you. This is how history is born.



“Where are you from?” is no longer a relevant passport.
Sing instead a melody that will live but once in your mouth
and forever be lost. This is how legend is born. It lives but one
night and never speeds the day. It pulls veils across the senses,
amplifies everything that echoes from surrender and reconquer.
This is how your present is born. Live it then alive, and live.

Joseph Gallo
January 30, 2007

Small against this picture

Summer Birds

The summer birds are flinting. Spring is
two weeks away and the trees are already
talking to each other. One tree says: I am here.
Another responds: Where is here? It was
winter today; warmest day of the new year.



Buds are squeezing through the branches
and cirrus blue is soaking in lengthening
light, deeper, longer. Stars once laden with
December hoar now sashay with March sequins
in their eyes. Brazen coyotes patrol down from
the hills, the trigger of bravado in their hunt.



The mutes of winter have been removed and
threadgathering begins in earnest. The trees talk
all night. In places we can’t see, fevered nest
building moves the sun across the sky. Wind
blusters across the desertscape and everything
it traces becomes assemblage in its artcraft.



Spring wields the early brush and cold recants the
palette. I am small against this picture and, as the
air freshens with the day’s return, open my first
window to the night. These are the days of change
and I am changed by the days that change them.



A tree calls out: Listen! I am still here. Another
calls back: Let us make this season of life.

And the summer birds flint
all through the night.

Joseph Gallo
March 6, 2007