THE PLANETARIAT ARCANE
1.
Because the Mediterranean Sea’s
become a cemetery
and borders walled or electrified
barbed wire
and the sovereignty and national
hegemonies of Europe are looking
at their own deaths-heads
in the mirrors of hypocrisy,
I measure the whole damned mess
of this globalized world of wars
and woe by this bone of contention
that I’ve pulled from the body
of days when I was a dog hungering
at a garbage can in the street,
a burro with a tower of desperate
Mexicans on my back,
a camel with nine humps for the nine
lives of Assad in Damascus and,
since this bone’s turned into
a hard baguette of the bread
that’s desired by all the starving
refugees clamoring to find a place
to call home, I whack the stupid
ass of capitalism with it.
2.
Enough with boats on the sea of death!
We must be flown, fed and flown
in airplanes provided by the nations
of the earth under the command
of the United Nations to lands absent
of secular or religious wars.
We’re all the color of oil. White oil too.
And the time has come for governments
to become givernments and every single
refugee be welcomed for who he or she is,
for he’s and she’s your brother and your sister
and there’s no way any longer to refuse
the future that’s already in the hands of
more and more of the Planetariat,
which is larger than China, Russia,
India and the United States combined.
We’re not simply traveling anymore, more, more.
We can go on computers anywhere, where, where.
Now everyone can live without hunger andor
disease, kids going to school allover, and war
be a thing of the past, because the instruments
that enslave you, the smart phones and tablets
and the like, that possess you to distraction
have already made you a Planetarian,
like that Italian woman riding her bicycle
on a street in Civitanova Marche
and at the same time reading her smart phone.
She’s everywhere and nowhere, no longer
an Italian or of Civitanova Marche. She can
be lifted off her bicycle seat by the hands
of tomorrow and plopped down in the
zippered-open roof of an airplane,
and flown as a refugee to the country she’s
always wanted to live in, and she’ll be sitting
with poor people from Syria and Zanzibar,
their children wide-eyed over the clouds.
3.
Paradoxies of the paradox, moronic oxen of
the oxymoron, diction of the contradiction
of contradictions, negation of the negation
of nothingness’ definite affirmation…
we must be the grace-notes of this new stave
of music, for the world cannot go back to
a dead fascism and at the same time can’t
live with a living one because it’s death,
and we’ve already died before we died and,
this time around, will take no No for an answer.
The corporation’s in the state of corpse-ing.
Within the prison of communication that’s
not communication, which has been managing
our slavery for a generation, the Planetariat’s
been born to collapse the walls of separation,
the borders of spite, the myopias of hatred,
so that, whether international or internetional,
it’ll be sounded like the charge of the depth
of the sea for all those tragically inundated,
the song that gives birth to memory.
(2016)