I apologize this poem is on fire

feel free to use it

to warm your hands or soul

or hurl it at the oligarchs

be sure to tend to it

give it what it needs

to survive—a miracle

like any song

or common heart

dumb & perfect

a poem without words

or a drum

taut by the world’s labor

beaten down

by all that falls

and the earth humming

a blues as the streets cave-in

every economy sick as shit

walking the dog in a war

weeping in a bank lobby

at least it’s CEO season

time to unsettle the settlers

“the little rages of an unsung life”

banal municipalities

smoking blunts in the belfry

do we live

in a city—target practice—

or the set of a disaster movie

and a prison is a prison is a prison goddamn!

the poem would like to catch its breath

and thank the following holy secular shoulder-angels:

attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, coffee, weed lozenges,

unresolved teen angst, Alejandra Pizarnik, Anne Boyer,

Diane di Prima, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Roque Dalton,

friendship, flowers, tenacious thirst, unending rage,

this unrenderable mineral of hope held in the chest,

common moonlight, limitless kisses and dreams

of escape, student-loan debt, class warfare

and without citizenship or a job, healthcare, or ability

to cast a vote shadow

our souls

chewed-up baseballs

spit out from a racist’s lawnmower

I mean lawmaker

where our body “of speech”

fails us too

sure the birds are armed

with songs

but metaphors have lost us wars before

this time a blitzkrieg of is—

how dare they make beauty or even the sun

feel obscene

in ongoing genocide(s) as people die & disappear

in the (hundred) thousands (add zeros here)

since we know how much you love

numbers and hate names

3 deer graze at an abandoned gas station

“she received her PhD in performance bleeding”

imagine a cave painting of this?

yes, sunlight IS the shit

making a homemade explosive

called “dream-life-time”

a collective of means

rolled into a human spliff

toke toke pass

living and talking against the idea

anyone has to die—

is loss a commons

the last commons

a breath as a PDF

and if you are at work, why

or leave, or at least

steal something

I’m convinced there’s a black market

of just touch

a revolutionary breeze in the blood

whenever you whisper [name redacted]

resilience and care is our religion

placebo Jesus penicillin

useless as a poem

that knows where it’s going

so specific it surpasses the thing

so general it’s mistaken as poetry

“wages for tenderness and nothing else”

severance for the empathetic

dreams like rocks appearing at a protest

precarious as the last of a people

keeping their language alive

this lethal gift of phenomenology

I wouldn’t say I have something

to say / I’d say I have something

to sing

against drones and phones

anything impeding our impossible love

how to be human

would be useful

to know / ya know—

hence the poetry

“history”-less, but with unemployed friends

ready to fuck-shit-up

I’d say is a politics

a poetics of the proletariat

keep hold the scant notes of hope

punctuating the otherwise uninterrupted

white noise of suffering

like a defenseless lung

complicity strike

apocalypse strike

somnambulance strike

I sigh and call it a prayer

counting down to the extinction

of the only animal

that emails and builds prisons

if by riot you mean revelry & joy

from flared acts of justice

fuck yes

there are always two worlds

—audiences fleeing indeed—

leaving the soul on its knees

the feminine and the sublime

cultivating the intimate

from respective screams screens

call it loitering

fine me

I call it noticing / necessary / poetry

wounded and tender

outside the means of production

like a song

before it’s been branded or sold

begging not to be put down

but to be loved

realized or not

this unfettered pleasure

of wanting

a dream of peace

(a blue lemon)

a piece of dream

the music of the planet bleeding out

the moon sitting virtual shiva

trying to play piano / with hands of ash

and a lukewarm relationship with language

redeemed in a gleaming vision—

the teeth of the police

in the street

ecstatic dice games

cooperate clapback

ventilator blues

the need for

a class-shattering hammer

YOU get a hospital bed

& YOU get a hospital bed—

and YOU are already dead

and YOU are already dead and ...

history is just the start of this joke

we stagger through our lives

tagged like government wolves

full of holes

a living map of scars

cartographers of loss

slicing the throat of flowers

and calling it a bouquet, practice, praxis

“we talking about praxis, man”

the poem and the world

in some thrumming harmony

becoming one, un-unfucked

one’s soul sole

possessions in a shopping cart

plantation weddings on Instagram

366,000 Likes

__, 000,000 Dead

what the fuck does Facebook know

about care

old heads on the stoop

laying down the blueprint

for revolution

brick by bloody brick

if we pay attention—

it’ll take us all

pulling the strings from every direction

to unstitch each empire

what would a good world look like

just

an ether of unimagined music

I’d like to lie down in

or at least satellite

wrapped up in a correspondence

of wild birds—

books pills and mixtapes pile up

flowers on a famous poet’s grave

the bots shall inherit the Earth

poured blood on military missiles

stole a cop car and inhaled a bit of earth

and all I got was this lousy court-appointed

pro-bono civil liberties lawyer

who happens to be my dad

you can’t divorce a country, can you?

I like a good fist-fight of poems

stories subsume other stories

we watched in tighty-whities

our double-wide burn to the ground

finger-painting in the ashes

a childhood of reduced lunch

and a miniature city of ADHD

and anti-anxiety medication

under my tongue

yellow & gold teeth

doing their job

so stand back

consumer report: sick 6 sick

chronic cough & profit margins

a new restaurant opening in LA

obeying the market

“I’ve heard the avocado toast is to die for”

molotov cocktails and butterflies

but call it a poem

what does it ask of you?

any revolution is truth

coming to break

your face

or caress it

do not write god

was my first rule

which went south fast

the un-sound floor plan of our love

fuck walls

and ceilings and floors for that matter

no need for them anymore

I learned in Durham

loitering at the store

is a transcendence of sorts

stealing candy and comic books

and consider it grace

I always misread that di Prima poem

as “imaginary war is the only war”

a wish in which I’d be down to manifest

pronouns in the widening gyre

a future where binaries go to die

and there is nothing to fear

when the fear is already here

so let’s get to not work

oh and the second rule

I’m mired in

is how to get more dream

if I rise

it’s only ‘cause I’m buried

in this tender obliged hole

of debt and doubt

working on my memoir

the inherited art of drowning

prostate cancer and Parkinson’s

see ya later health insurance

every condition is pre-existing

so let’s create some new ones

I name every wave

prepping for the shipwreck

of souls and selves

after police and prisons

after bombs and bullets

after links and electricity

after algorithms

meaning and language

at the end of music

at the end of desire

more desire

and then

after that

at the end

of the end

a melody











*The title “wages for tenderness and nothing else” is a line by Anne Boyer who is one of the
inspirations of the poem.

Sampson Starkweather  

is the author of A Week in Late Capitalism / Ancient Capitalistic Proverbs, Song of Attention Deficit Disorder, PAIN: The Board Game and The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, and many chapbooks from dangerous and/or defunct small presses. He is a founding editor of the small independent editor-run poetry press Birds, LLC.