"Alaska's Flag"*

Mad helicopter gunship
a hair's breath above timberline
thundering over tundra
dead flat out ahead,
inside,
a drunken pale faced war dance
of serial wolf hunters, arctic whoops
and weapons, singing:

the gold of the early sourdough dreams
the precious gold of the hills and streams

below,
a mythic creature bounds
across the forget-me-nots
into the hills of deep snow,
the midnight sun illuminates
everything;
no longer territorial governor spends a life-
time separating in her mind
wilderness
from soul,
while down below
the epic chase of lobo the tragedian.
Her tattoo reads
"death from above"

the forty-ninth state.


*Alaska's state song

Trinity Site Dream Bomb for Joe D'Alessandro

To get there drive down I-25
past Albuquerque, stop at Mas Tequila to
watch the Juarez pole dancers, pick up
the hitchhiking ghosts of Gregory Corso & Johnny Cash,
take a left at San Antonio,
trigger's edge of desert time, to the
desolate virtuosity of the
Jornada del Muerto
with its flat occult sunsets &
morbid sense of irony.

At ground zero
where the spring wind strips you of everything
but your virginity,
bomb has lost its bellicose boom,
has bottomed out as boogie man,
Doctor Bomb
who took a Hippocratic oath to kill,
has become alchemist of blissful peace.
No longer dances afoul of nature
behind the mushroom eyelids of the dead,
no longer enters eternity like a
defrocked priest,
bomb used to be the devil's passionflower
at dusk,
in cantankerous desolation, dust
devil's moaned Corso's name as he de-
bunked bomb on his famous broadside,
when bombs in America sprouted like daffodils &
dogs barked at unearthed midnight bombs.

All that's left is dream bomb & its shrieking
shattered sunset bloom of deep sleep smoke,
we are its mirror.

We've been to the edge & the edge is us,
dropping these sweet pages from the womb
of bomb
on unsuspecting
green earth.


*this poem was included in S.A.Griffin's traveling
"Poetry Bomb Tour Of Words", summer, 2010.
Many thanks.