I can’t help it. I’m obsessed.
I can not stop reading and watching coverage
Of the protest events at UC Davis.
I’m thinking of it again now
Because I’m impressed with Marcellus – Who knows when to disobey an order –
And I’m thinking about the military and the militarized police
In riot gear
With guns and visors
And pepper spray – on a quiet and peaceful college lawn.
Someone gave that order and someone
Should have said it was not right to obey it.
I am curious about what triggers violence as easy as watering a lawn
(five minutes before the man sprays pepper onto a line of peaceful students sitting on the ground, the video shows him chatting with them and patting them on the back)
but I am also curious about what triggers my own interest and outrage and investment.
I have seen horrible police violence before
The bleeding foreheads from the Zuccotti park raid,
The rubber bullet welts from all over the country
The veteran in critical condition from Oakland police action,
The students jabbed with batons in Berkeley,
And I was upset
Of course I was
I looked and got upset
And then looked away again.
This time, though, I can’t look away.
I wonder if it’s because I have stood
On the very same patch of earth
That those students sat on.
I know what that air smells like
I know what the atmosphere feels like
I can vividly imaigne it all and find myself
So proud of a student body that when I was part of it, I took Zero interest in.
Now, they are fighting, now they’re in a war
They make me want to join up –
Help them challenge those that gave the orders
As well as those that ought to have disobeyed them.

When I don’t know what to write
(Like when I’ve followed the “following” thread multiple times already)
I follow the line of the pen
starting from a small dot and circling around itself
wider and wider until it slips off the page
or into some other spiral.
It’s a trick Matilda taught us this summer –
A way to keep the pen moving when the mind wants to stall
When it wants to give up
Or start editing and judging
When it wants to stare out the window
Instead of filling up the page.
It has come very much in handy, this spiral trick,
Because it helps me follow my thought in writing
But also
When listening
When trying to follow a spoken line
The following of a circling line
Comes in very handy.

Wait, wait. I know I’ve just been telling you
All about this action, this wave
That would seem to sweep you from this place.
It was me who told you what it meant
Where you were meant to go.
I showed you the path, gave you the compass
But I didn’t mean for you to take it.

Is this ghost particularly polite in his actions?
Particularly kind and solicitous? When we think of courtesy now,
We think of courtesies done, little extras, perhaps, in service.
In looking at the word, I wonder about its relationships to the court –
Is courteousness a quality of being a courtier?
I don’t think of a royal court as a place
Of great kindesses and graces
Although certainly it is full of appearances of those things;
Courtesy being a show, in some sense.
What then is this courteous action the ghost is performing?
Is it somehow refined? Somehow official?
And how is it doing that while simultaneously
Waving its son to a place farther away?
Does he have a place in mind for this meeting?
Has the ghost been imagining how this conversation would go
Since he rose from the dead?
I picture Hamlet Sr., the ghost, talking to himself:
“I’ll appear up there on the battlements until they bring Jr. Then,
I”ll take him to that garden my son of a bitch brother killed me in
And I’ll sit him down and give him the goods.”
Maybe he practices his speech while stalking the parapets.
Particularly that list, list, O, list part.

Gong.
Tibetan bowl.
The enemy.
Rug.
Bell.
Grandfather clock.
The face of the hysterical person.
The set.

The Hour.