Now Korach rose up before Moses together with 250 Israelites—
For the chief musician, on common instrument:
A song of rebellion.
Praise rising up. Praise unlawful assembly. Praise the road of excess
and the palace of wisdom. Praise glass houses & the hand
that cradles the stone.
Praise Galileo. Praise acceleration.
Praise the medium and the message.
Praise en masse and the pull of a straight line.
Praise outside agitators
and inside jobs. Praise Red Emma. Praise Joan of Arc.
Praise wayward daughters and praise, praise their wayward sons.
Praise the power of indulgence. Praise Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.
Praise the nail and the printing press. Praise free verse.
Praise the First Amendment.
Praise illicit beauty, yellow sunflowers and red wheelbarrows.
Praise the poets of Guantanamo.
Praise the noisy midnight streets.
Praise the crazy birds at dawn and praise their woven nests.
Praise Isaac Newton. Praise the apple.
Praise Letters from Prison. Praise the bound notebook and what
is found within. Praise Legal Aid attorneys. Praise kitchen-table
conspiracies. Praise our hunger and the days we are the bread.
Praise farmers’ markets. Praise heirloom tomatoes,
Al Gore and quantum physics. Praise Schrödinger and praise his cat.
Praise talking snakes. Praise run-on sentences.
Praise the best minds of any generation. Praise other people’s poems,
especially the fickle and freckled. Praise Norma Jean. Praise standing
on the table. Praise John Brown and all that trouble in river city.
Praise Walt Whitman & Jimi Hendrix. Praise the body’s
wild intelligence. Praise the giraffe and the porcupine.
Praise getting satisfaction. Praise cross-dressing. Praise untouchables,
undesirables, partisans and riffraff. Praise slackers.
Praise those who talk back. Praise sympathy for the devil.
Praise mothers of the disappeared. Praise mothers of the found.
Praise Planned Parenthood and the siren song.
Praise singers and psalm-makers, Freud and Sinatra.
Praise Gertrude Stein and all thirteen ways of looking at that blackbird.
Praise nude beaches. Praise the terrible twos. Praise hitting
your head against the wall. Praise giving peace a chance.
Praise Selma, Alabama. Praise the Abraham Lincoln Brigades.
Praise Sacco and Vanzetti. Praise Jobs
& Curie. Praise Einstein and his bad posture.
Praise Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Praise crossing party lines.
Praise playing footsy under the table. Praise street puppets and LSD
and stealing this poem. Praise backyard whiskey.
Praise Priscilla the Monkey Girl. Praise her admirers.
Praise Earhart and those who remember what they are told
to forget. Praise agnostics.
Praise what we are not supposed to praise. Praise the electrical storm
and the still small voice. Praise all the proverbs of hell.
Praise this feeling of trying to write about the truth.
Praise those who see it coming. Praise those who do it
anyway. Praise what swallows us whole.
Praise what happens next.
From we who desire: Poems and Torah Riffs
