I am fine, thanks for asking!

Austin is in love with me, and i'm in love with austin.
dig it?
(daniel johnston painted the above mural sometime in the 90's. it's about 12 blocks from where I live!)

New Poetry Tuesday!

This is by Antler, a poet from Milwaukee. It comes from a collection called Poems for the Nation: A Collection of Contemporary Political Poems, edited by Allen Ginsberg.

follow orders

Drag the rainbow into the interrogation room. Use thumbscrews on clouds if necessary. Arrest the wind for being shiftless. Take a lake to headquarters for loitering. Sentence aspens to 30 years hard labor for having leaves that quiver. Turn rainforests into deserts. Put deserts behind bars because poets see a world in a grain of sand. Accuse sanddunes of being drifters. Accuse snowdrifts of being drifters. Tell the birds to shut up and listen to your song. Cross-examine snowflakes till they break into tears. Accuse a leech of being a leech. Accuse a sponge of being a sponge. Accuse a yawn of being a yawn. Search milkweed-pods as suspicious characters. Hog-tie will-o-the-wisps, take them into custody. Tar-and-feather every inch of living soil that refuses to be covered with asphalt. Put Lake Michigan on the witness stand to testify against Lake Superior. Arraign the rain, indict the kite and prosecute the bandicoot. Charge lightning and thunder for practicing without a license. Charge the view from the skyscraper with making people look like ants. Warn autumn colors to stop rioting. Throw the rich odor of thawing earth in a dungeon. Frisk the shimmer of light on moonlit water. Search crotches of virgin timber for concealing drugs Straitjacket elephants for jacking off with their nose Make a bear paw the Bible to take oath. Ban the banana because it reminds you of something. Flog alpenglow with a rubber hose under a hundred-watt lightbulb. Slaughterhouse moonbeams. Summon the lemon, subpoena the peanut, impeach the peach, arraignthe terrain. Order the space between the stars and the space between molecules to change place. Order turtles to get license plates. Order sunflowers to pay their electric bills or the sun be disconnected. Order rats to join the rat race. Order orifice and artifice to be reversed. Order ripples of water, ripples of light, ripples of heat, ripples of shade to do your bidding. Order poems to close down and move to Mexico where they can get words to work for one-fifth what they're paid here. Millepedes must obey or be drawn-and-thousanded. Decapitate ecstatic tomfoolery. Give the finger to the wind for being fresh with you. Gesticulate before the bristlecone pine how you made more money than anyone. Brag to the Pleiades you played the stock market better than anyone. Tell your Death you're going to hold your breath till it grants your wish. Sentence leaf-shadows to the electric chair for seducing millions of youths. Torture the Ocean till it talks, and none of this surf-sound mumbo-jumbo. Reduce to toothpicks the oldest biggest trees Tame wildflowers and coat them with plastic and mount them on wire stems. Buy the water, buy the earth, buy the sky. Sell the water, sell the earth, sell the sky. Beat up the night 'cause it's black. Spit at the sun 'cause it's yellow. Massacre the dawn it's red. Chart how many ants you can kill. Ambush waterfalls with machetes, mutilate them beyond recognition. Assassinate the last condor in your spare time. Assign hit-men to rub out hummingbirds while paring your nails. Assign hit-men to rub out dolphins while paring your nails. Step into your mile-long limousine snort a thousand dollars and tell the chauffeur "Next Universe, please"

From Know For Sure (same author, found here)

All we know for sure is

all places that exist

were once one place.

All we know for certain is

all the beings that exist

or will exist

or have existed

we re originally all together

in an infinitesimal dot.

Support modern poetry, eh?