poem by Brian Charles Clark
A Bill of Rights is secretly married to Josef Stalin. A young George Bush smacks the huge gong. Rays of light fill the night of America. Predication becomes a kid of predation: “Are you a member? of the Communist Party.” Humans are still a permeable foam, but revolutionary cells are isolated. Before the committee, silence, cool, and absence are cited for contempt. The witness is surrounded by tribes of counter-revolutionaries, piling on, filling in. Burial is resolution and escape. I love to lie in the shade, but silence can also be a complicity in the death of history. Here at the graveside a Pulitzer Prize winning poet can say, “Either purely autobiographical or purely political.” Alas, the wedding hasn’t begun to end, and has given us names which, instead of speaking of a little planet swiftly tilting, speak from a conscription into the totalizing family of Man. The witness for the revolution is not pure: her biography is political, because her politics are born.
