Poetry Rats

For you who makes animal noises at the Mic

And you who blurs the line between hip hop and gender

And you with canvasses as big as the caverns of psych drugs you crawl through

And you with Coyote translations wearing the remains of academic tar and feathering

And you with velvet beret whose words dance out of reality into grinning improv surrealism

And you with inspired hobo pencil asking idle gods for paper

And you with drunkenness and an untuned guitar

And you peculiar east coast statue with marbled abstract words

And you Native illuminating road kill in your cracked American verse

And you who met the fairies swam naked with them in the San Lorenzo River

And handcuffed for your devotion

And you who is Zen reading “Bomb” with no mind

And you loud-mouthed Beat who smoked out Kaufman on top of Fremont Peak

With your booming heart of jazz and rhyme

The poetry rats are yearning

For solidarity in a new alphabet

This is for the underdogs

Who skip like wounded, pent up jail-kids

Falling through the cracks of social oblivion

Find your outlaw gods

Find your slow burning heaven

Find your luck in your ink-blood

Find your supernatural paces

Find your synchronicity

By turning corners that lead out of this world

While the present turns to ashes

In our open hands

And our books are burned

Before they are written