The Choice

Offered a choice between reason and delirium,
The people whole-heartedly chose delirium,

Whole-heartedly and so easily it was hardly
A choice, though there were those who chose,

Who said, "I don't think so", or more simply,
"No", and watched with horror, disbelief, or

Tense laughter, and then reacted with paralysis
Or stabbed sadness or articulate, clarion

Alarm as a neighbor or filthy stranger
Grew huge seashells for ears, a tongue

And a phallus, so all they could hear
Or say or make was roar or rape,

In either case a metaphor for the ocean
They want you to listen to or feel, this

Which was the passage of their own blood
In their arteries or veins or sponge

Tissue, brains, whatever, and even those
Who thought, or more accurately subdued thought's

Mere welter with words, were slaughtered
By hundreds of thousands and entered

Mass graves with their arms raised or hands
On their heads in utter hopelessness,

In an appeal or panic of despair, or in
Response to a deranged murderer's banal

Command, and this isn't history, this
Is an abstraction, this is a test,

The Choice 2

And in the event of a real emergency
You would be offered a choice between

Reason and delirium and if everyone
Somehow chose reason life would end.

Chairman Mao Swimming

It was a hot summer. Human turds
Floated in the Pearl River below Guangzhou.

Mao directed his special vessel
Into the middle of it, climbed down

The rope ladder, splashed and drifted on his back
A half dozen miles in white boxer

Bathing shorts, leather sandals left aboard ship,
Belly like a tan dirigible, a dome:

"Why are you so afraid of dirt?" he told
His bodyguards and doctors. "Can fish survive

In distilled water?" It's a peasant story,
Like Khrushchev mispronouncing fat

At the Kennedys' dinner table: "Faht",
He said, declining lobster thermidor,

"I'm afraid it would make me faht",
Discerning error in Jackie's paralysis

Of anger and nauseau, then aggravating things
By apology, blub-blub-blub noises

With the lips to imitate gas escaping
The gluteus maximus, pretending

To heave his stomach with open hands
And show the difference between words

He pronounced identically: faht and faht.
A farmer governs animals by knowledge

Of their weaknesses, love of food,
Fear of the stick or wolf, the tenderness

Chairman Mao Swimming 2

Of the bull's nose where he wears the ring,
The fevers of a rooster for hens;

Which is why his wings needn't get clipped,
The affection of the boar for mud

And his own manure, along with a pail or two
Of garbage, which keeps it from tearing through

A flimsy barbed wire. Even Mao was lured
From the furies and whirlpools

Of the Yangtze in his homeland, Hunan,
By the promise of lunch: "Okay", he said,

"Let's eat", after two hours doing
A dead-man's float. Mao swam in each

Of the three great rivers of China,
The Pearl, the Xiang, and the Yangtze,

Which he resolved to dam and transform
Its gorges, savored by poets and painters

For centuries, into a huge resevoir, because
For peasants life is a struggle against power,

And the management of horror. Mao wrote:
"We will make a stone wall against the upper river

to the west and hold back steamy clouds
and rain of Wu peaks. Over tall chasms

will be a calm lake, and if the goddess
of these mountains is not dead,

she will marvel at the changed world",
And he called it a poem.

[ Manuscript ]

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