Paul Nelson

71. Goodbye 2016

                            I may have to be the one
                      puts the bullet in
               the back of the head of the year
         2016. Notice I write in November,
    night before Thanksgiving, as if the year’s

   murder now will stop future carnage future
   white trumps on dope fingering 
                   (this time)
                                       only the nuclear trigger.

              How 2016 the year
                   the clan re-branded
                         the year David Bowie found the bardo
              room colored electric blue the day

                     white supremacists were singing Hallelujah
       was the day Leonard Cohen chose
               to die. The year David Antin looked
                        at what was ahead and stopped talking.
   Leon Russell fell off the tight wire.

                                       Me here looking at the obits
                    trying not to turn into my Father who’d
          read ‘em and laugh he outlived ‘em. Bobby Hutcherson
   whose Gotcha overdubs I’d play on WXFM, whose 
           Ice Cream Man too. Toots Thielemans playing the
                               Sesame Street theme. 

                                              You break a Cubs curse
                                                      but I’m a Sox fan.
                                   You pull a Buckwheat Zydeco
               out with the Father of Permaculture Bill
                                                           Mollison whod’ve
                         farmed suburban lawns while having
              an Arnold Palmer engineered in Hackensack
            by Rudy Van Gelder.

                                                Gene Wilder knew the common clay of the New West was made up of racist fools
          like the ones now running USAmerica.

   & I wonder where does all the cancer come from?

                   And Prince and Gordie Howe
                   and the last athlete who’d
                           take a stand like “Ain’t No VC ever
                                   called me..” (you know)

                                                       how if you want to
                   register Muslims
                      why dontcha start with one Muhammad Ali
           as we get a year older 

                               find out if we’re too tired
           to re-fight the fights we thought we won decades ago
              because the little deaths
                  are part of the one big death
                           of the cultural imagination. 

                 I just want to sip bourbon
                           with Bernie Sanders
                                and watch a glacier melt.

                                                        4:27pm - N.23.16
RIP: Gato Barbieri, Phil Georgeff, Fidel Castro, Tom Hayden, Dan Angerame