I’m not a political poet. Not for the most part, anyway. I certainly never wanted to be one, and I had been writing for a number of years before this finally happened:

I don’t want to say too much for fear of being misconstrued

or maybe

for fear of being understood all too clearly so here’s your warning â€“

flowers sometimes bloom quite literally,

unfurling in the dewfall to kiss

mother sky good morrow. And sometimes wolves change their sheep

clothes for pinstripes. Then these truths we hold to be self-evident fade to black,

seven ancient words

lost in the splash and white noise â€“

bites, topspin, code. Make no mistake: style has triumphed over substance;

our shamans hire out as consultants;

God is coming to pay-per-view; and a thousand points of light

are less than nothing

in a million miles of darkness. Surely some gentle beast, its hour come round at last, stirs,

casts its drowsy eyes

across the land. Surely it wonders â€“

what is this terrible myth

My Word has become?

Certainly political verse has a long and noble tradition, and some of my own heroes were pretty darned political in both their writing and their professional lives. This poem makes direct reference to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” and Yeats’ earlier writing provided the mythic foundations for the Irish rebellion against England. Later on he became a legislator, even. Eliot’s writing had its socio-political tones, and if I track back through the parts of the canon I always liked the most I come across people like Arnold, Byron – even the Metaphysicians and cavalier poets who sashayed off to a righteous ass-whipping at the hands of Cromwell’s Roundheads.

To Lucasta, Going to the Warres TELL me not (Sweet) I am unkinde,

That from the Nunnerie

Of thy chaste breast, and quiet minde,

To Warre and Armes I flie. True; a new Mistresse now I chase,

The first Foe in the Field;

And with a stronger Faith imbrace

A Sword, a Horse, a Shield. Yet this Inconstancy is such,

As you too shall adore;

I could not love thee (Deare) so much,

Lov’d I not Honour more.

Still, I felt no call to political commentary. But over time I think it became more and more inevitable. I wanted, perhaps, to be left alone to write about love and loss and spirituality and a variety of more apocalyptic themes, but the political world wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe this is how it was for my heroes. Maybe Yeats never wanted to write about politics – certainly “Easter 1916” isn’t something he’d have ever hoped for.

We live in a period where it’s almost impossible to write without at least political implication. Sure, most of life is political in some respects, but is it possible for the writer with a soul to keep down the foul, necessary beast that is the public expression of outrage?

Maybe. Maybe it’s just me. But I’ll leave you with a taste of the sort of thing that keeps insisting on being written.

Covenant Our legions are marching on the

City of Rain, our bleeding

bare feet, bone against concrete,

tearing ruts in the Kingâ€™s highway. We remember the lash and the

hole. We remember Babylon

Ballroom, silver trays of cheese and

meats and candy-twist liqueur, the

splay of light tinkling

wine-filled crystal, but later,

hunched over our books and

tearing at stale bread, we

recite the lessons we

will teach you soon: there is no difference between palace and prison,

champagne and hemlock,

chandelier and gallows. When gunfire rips at the hinges of dawn,

we will decorate lampposts with your

heads and feed your tongues to corbies. When pyres of burnished mahogany

roil the skies of Hell,

we will kill you last,

saving you and savoring as you

boil in the dying screams of your

children. Pinned to the wall like butterflies,

you will hang in the grand gallery

twitching for centuries among the

handbills of kleptocracy: your economies of fraud,

grifters in the boardroom, jowls

dripping with grease, your genocides of neglect,

sucking the bones of your

feasting tables clean

while abandoned children and stray dogs

fight for scraps

in your alleys

in your roach-ripe tenements

in fields scalding with immigrant despair

in the flesh-caked machines of your factories

in your third worlds

on your oil-soaked beaches

in extinctions that once were forests

aflame with birdsong in the shadow of church bells

tolling beneath your mansions. This Do in the Name of Commerce,

but we are your shareholders now, flooding down the

Valley of Chrome, like

rose petals and ticker tape and gun oil.

I hope you’ll share some of your thoughts and favorite political poems with us.