Oliver de la Paz

Dear Empire,

These are your percussionists. On the ground, we feel the roll of their approach. Treads turn the dirt in a succession of rat-at-ats.

 

Every so often the heavy bass of a turret fires a shell into a stuccoed wall. And the earth's stirs with machinery in the dark. We hear their engines drive the vast mesas; the tinnier sound of their metal plates a high metronomic pulse against the drone of their motors.

 

We wait for their approach. We are the silence that multiplies itself in the night. We are the dark with our eyes closed. We are the hard knots pressed against the drum.

Dear Empire,

These are your revelers. They've pulled acetate from video cassettes and are running through streets with their arms full of these streamers. And the cellulose shines in almighty colors in the sunlight. The cellulose swallows the din of their joy. Nothing like this will last. To dream en masse like this is to watch the ramparts blaze.

 

To dream as the revelers pour pass the state houses and past the human debris is to watch the oxidation of the Empire happen overnight.

This will not happen to you. The world is full of dreams spinning around their reels. In this cell, a man lifts a glass. In this cell, he is still lifting a glass. In this cell, there is a hand on a glass, and the glass rises.

Oliver de la Paz

Create Poetry

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three books of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems and the co-chair of Kundiman.org's advisory board. He teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Western Washington University.