Anne Waldman

Ancestors Step Forward with Your Activist Terror

“You graze the real world.”

—Jean Cocteau, “Letter to the Americans”

I remember my troubadour mate Allen and I went to the Albigensian land to see

Who was better warrior, a better alien of patriarchal  time

Not barbarian but with a strong pulse and could move inside all the fabrics with ease

                       Nettle, armor, skin

Slender body, I could move quickly

He was all about our world we must invent it and save daily

        Not dally with ghost enemy

Watching the ghost of a new time 

With ghostly humor

But form was always emptiness 

And I wanted to meet all the demons in my head

And wooing our Europa- what were we? And where?

Of land & blood?

Small tantric bubble of sorrows & gaff and puffs of smoke

Matters to intimate, odd traffic with robber death

Anti-matter, the next continent to rob

What crest?

Awake,  in agency agency! 

That was a motto awake in the school of future

Emptiness of specter, the formula of that twist

Conglomeration of tendency reality 

 Smoking mirrors, a grab, a gab

Our ayatanas intact

The loud path of dharma

In dangerous times 

Long, hard, useless? 

Which didn’t bargain on,  many world systems come, go

Kept saying if ever to meet demons in my head, rid of them thru dream

A new begin distraction and again and begin again 

distraction

of wilderness mirrors

Reflections in void of sound and song 

& then industrial, make something start its own engine

At the epicenter  of  traffic with robber Death

For that was our motto,  fight debt 

Maybe better:

“emptiness of the specter”

So  willing  & wrote it down

The journey, the cloud come

The kali yuga in your mouth

And my muscles on for the rise

When clouds would come

How much  poison in a cloud?

We were competing to be king or queen of our rafts and of our little boats and craft

Vers -  tuning toward god

 Adverse, the  turn

 False idol in the stream, fisher of men

 What exits, ready yet? what that we be, we that be of poetry goes last

Or anarchist rule of poem, poverty of our time

No heart for crusade  

For it held fast in dungeons so said the sooty dream

And in garment pockets fragile missives hewn like gems

Rock-hard, diamond locked, paralyzed for centuries

Oldest dakini language, ancient rune,

Cunieform of ancestors 

Or coal was proper and dangerous

Fill your pockets with tariffs

And I had my voice and he his

He kept saying if he could, and only, don’t grow old 

A kind of crystal ceremony of poet- dance

Generations…

What we might break with gangsters and enchantment to tame others

He said, “A kind of solemnity in the break of bread, of dawn. Of life?”

“The epicenters of the effects of new climate we built centuries?”

“False aspiration and the pockets of our vison, utopian mind, small sliver

 of wisdom?”

No, A golden or modernist bronze age.

And my companion, this beard-guy in dream was surrounded

because he/they/it in mix was on amongst his

Reign and quarreled with authorities (I call Deciders in many visionary texts) over speech,

He overspoke, writing to our president as he lay dying, a new idea for mankind 

I overspoke my lot in life , woe mankind

 But my mate was afflicted, wracked the roil of extraction instruments, 

          being scoped and

Called to attention

A drone, female of her species

Drones for jaguars, for tigers too, and all the deafened others

Praise, (pray & rise ) songs of the dead librettist

And histories of mad poets

& their cry for ink and voice

Key to the asylum that is in the window

In the lineages 

And with tresses on my head

I spoke a lovers’ song

Stay awake (my desire) and call the poets out

 Stay awake my friend my ally and guide and call the hour out

Hour of reckoning and shame and of our mission, dawn 

again, and we were in Toulouse and cried the scabbards out of hiddenness 

        placed them in a room

Where you turn in your guns

& we had stone too and all the medieval instruments

Iron iron iron, stone of stone, sediment, arrows sharp and deadly 

Of words to argue their choice of weaponry 

He grew faint, fainting, my ailing mate,

saw him hungry and stalled and in his seat the Kong days travelling

and Berkeley & Vancouver 

long nights restless, and with mares to ride

The mead hour 

The dreams of this being a dark time, talk the night 

I always say this, in discourse we held grace 

And more deliberate since it took a longer time to get that way

Than you had, old grandpa

Back to the bedside, USA

The monks chanting your demise, a better day! 

Dreams of conquering with your head?

Magellan “gems to be found” “growing spices”

I swore with the weathered quipu

7 seas and seven senses and seven sins

Hieroglyphs taught both evil and love

And quantities of chattel 

damned and possessed

And neglected the future wrath to come over ownership

Our scared capital go down with all the toxins

Shortcoming not to see it coming

Wrath of Oil

 The wraiths of wrath, poor holy knight,  riders of oil 

Where are you now? Mistress Greed’s amulet?

 Modest and like poultry hung?

 Prince of Orange likes you and all the right people

 Maybe Ma Dompna desires humility who knew how

 She makes cudgel on this & much in love earned in Romania

That was my former life, she mused

Great land and income in the land of Salonika

My vida dream to be troubaritz or a lady of one of women

Strong and savage is my hand on the poem and on my

Blessing from you, pere poetry 

I rein it in to fight the enemies 

We must be strong in emptiness,

Gasping into life, milky and firm 

The skies darken,

The bruised  sky does not love you

The fire doesn’t 

The oil sands of Alberta will not notice your suffering  

You made this world into being, and its continent crazy

Blame the border lands? The barbarians?

More carbon in atmosphere

Today, a fueled planet stalls

     More than sum total of

All living matter on earth. 

Never wake from your 

Tragic dream

(You taught me but I told you how, still watching from the tower)