What’s a poet?
A poet is one who catches fire breathing in orchards at night.

What’s a dissident?
A dissident is one who sleeps under rocks on fire and dreams of breathing and orchards and rocks.

What’s a dissident poet?
One who lies on a bed of rocks in the rain and screams skyward and loves worms and makes apples. A dissident poet fears death by black loafers. A dissident is not an exile.

What of being saved by white columns?
White columns are black loafers disguised by nationalism.

So nationalism’s best expressed in bumperstickers?
Bumperstickers and movieposters and Christmastreeornaments.

Does America have and can it ever breathe in dissident poets?
Only if America has stopped being America. Only after its leaves have come to embody the fence around the orchard around the fence.

What do patriots believe?
They believe their apples are the only ones that touch God.

That God’s dead and resurrected as apples?
For apples, and of them, and by them. That God is chiseled and polished and spraypainted and resembles a fence. Not a fence, but a freemarketeconomy.

Were the Puritans ever poets? They were, but only in that they set fires with candles and chopped down orchards and found ways to use windfalls in recipes.

Were the Puritans dissidents?
They were, but only in their minds. They were colonists who, not long after tearing their hull on Plymouth Rock, began enfencing it. And who, not long after that, began evacuating the waves of grain and burning the witches.