Sunday, January 29, 2012

Your Own Permanent Revolution


Radical Revolution: Step Eleven


Make a pig a cow.

Turn water into stories and orchids.

Bring the children to the mountain

and make them sing.


Believe what cannot be built.

Forever is longer than you have.

Count your feelings to the moon.

Leave the last hummingbird in the thistle.


Deport the calendars of the empty rich.

All the moss will be your bed.

America will turn into snow

and you will not be able to see your street


from your window.

Eat something you have saved.

Save something you can eat.

Make sure the seeds are as protected


as the gold. Break the banks

with bread. Imagine all the lines and blueprints

disorganized and lost to their centers

and their expected order.


Tell someone you are lost too;

do it over and over until, like last night,

the shining crescent cups

a billion flights: you are here and you


are there. Believe you can believe

and kick the pirates out

until they have nothing but their hearts

on the plate of hunger and of love.


Make a forest a clean winnowing harvest

as it is, doing nothing to disturb

the minutes of its wind and the turn

of its breath to the moon. Ah


the moon again.

Take a minute, in the snow,

to locate that light. The revolution

has never been gone.


You are standing on it.

It turns in you, under a wheel of dreams

through the tumble in the rivers of vacuums,

galaxies and the first nebula


of the primary star.

Your mother is there

and your twin. Carry the signs

of revolution as if it never stops


because it never does.