517 Social commentaries poems

sometimes you know things: once at a birthday party a little girl looked at her new party gloves and said she liked me, making suddenly the light much brighter so that the very small hairs shone above her lip. i felt stuffed, like a swimming pool, with words, like i knew something that was in a great tangled knot. and when we sat down i saw there were tiny glistenings on her legs, too. i knew something for sure then. but it was too big, or like the outside too everywhere, or maybe hiding inside, behind the bicycles where i later kissed her, not using my tongue. it was too giant and thin to squirm into, and be so well inside of, or too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few days later on the asphalt playground i tackled her. she skinned her elbow, and i even punched her and felt her, felt how soft the hairs were. i thought that i would make a fine football-playing poet, but now i know it is better to be an old, breathing man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who remains standing after each play, who knows something, who rotates in his place rasping over and over the thing he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other end was wide open! the end was wide open! the end was wide open . . .”

A circle. What was needed was a circuit, and a good operating system. What’s within is without being seen to be so. Optical anomaly as unexceptional. Four left’s a square. One way turning system until it becomes its other way. A passive insistence on multiples until that divorces itself, becomes single. A single pitch made up of the sounds of multiples. Conduction, instrumental absence. Fundamentals establish separate planets. Similarity wars upon their lines, planes. Said well, here opens, his, sits at its bottom. The bodies. Spoke well, agreed in kind, general. But the way of its expression requires hurt and then, treatment of skin for leather clothes or whatever, it’s old, sometimes, often. Depending on the question, it can be the answer. One shouldn’t be proud to not have it. A knee, an elbow, three arms up. Then a last one, a fourth. Last and happiest, willing, fully skin end. The whey, foam, on the head of the safest society in human civilization. Amnesia to people who will actually harm and hurt.

One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. “My friends, I want her to be queen!” “I want to be queen!” She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other. In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.

up from slobbery hip hyperbole the soles of black feet beat down back streets a Yankee porkchop for your knife and fork your fill of freedom in Philmeyork never trouble rupture urban space fluctuates gentrify the infrastructure feel up vacant spades no moors steady whores studs warn no mares blurred rubble slew of vowels stutter war no more

Stoned by no Rosetta, merchants allowed through the fence learn to misspeak “black speak,” in Edgar’s harbor village, at HipHop Fish & Chicken on Route number 4 × 10. “Baby Girl” becomes XX. “My Man” assumes all XY. For salt & pepper curls, & baby stroller crowds, their broadcast is the same: “Baby Girl, your diabetes is ready.” “Main Man, your stroke order is up.” They know their audience: french fried lives, french fried luck, french fried us. They know corner markets of cornered markets, seldom scale the wall. Their shit is always hot. Their shit is always cheap. Their shit is always landmark of poison in pens, along with: windows wearing boards, hubcaps leaning curbs, the sound of “bitch,” the sound of “mother- fucker,” the sound of “niggah” sounding off, projectile vomiting from children’s lips — our hush puppy young, made beasts behind these bars. Some days you will see them, dirt bike knights, riding Edmondson Avenue, armor-less. They are wheelies, jousting against traffic, wheelies, jousting against stop- lights, gas tanks bleeding out on stretchers, as sirens serenade, metal flies hover. There are skeletons of chickens scattered on the ground. There are meeting bones of children fractured in the street, cordoned off. This is urban warming. This is underwear in exhibition, pants saddened to sag, hanging off ass cracks, like wet clothes on a line. This is the ecology of locks, since our country is locks, since our color is locks, since this block is locked. When your order is up, you will eat anything tossed inside the cage.

I found my muster station, sir. My skin is patent leather. The tourists are recidivists. This calm is earthquake weather. I’ve used up all the mulligans. I’d kill to share a vice. The youngster reads a yellowed Oui. The socialite has lice. The Europe trip I finally took was rash and Polaroid, was gilt, confit, and bathhouse foam. And I cannot avoid the end: I will not die in Paris, won’t rest for good behind a painted mausoleum door. The purser will not find me mummified beneath your tulle, and Paris will not burn. Today is Thursday, so I’ll die. Come help me pick my urn.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich — yes, richer than a king — And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

My Dear Conflicted Reader, If you will grant me that most of us have an equivocal nature, and that when we waken we have not made up our minds which direc- tion we're headed; so that—you might see a man driving to work in a perfume- and dye-free shirt, and a woman with an overdone tan hold up an orange flag in one hand, a Virginia Slim in the other—as if this were their predestination. Grant me that both of them were likely contemplat- ing a different scheme of things. WHERE DO YOU WANT TO SPEND ETERNITY the church marquee demands on the way to my boy's school, SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING. I admit I had not thought of where or which direction in exactly those terms. The radio ministry says g-o-d has a wrong-answer button and we are all waiting for it to go off... Count your grey hairs Count your chigger bites Count your pills Count the times the phone rings Count your T cells Count your mosquito bites Count the days since your last menses Count the chickens you've eaten Count your cankers Count the storm candles Count your stitches Count your broken bones Count the flies you killed before noon

Country people rise early as their distant lights testify. They don’t hold water in common. Each house has a personal source, like a bank account, a stone vault. Some share eggs, some share expertise, and some won’t even wave. A walk for the mail elevates the heart rate. Last November I saw a woman down the road walk out to her mailbox dressed in blaze orange cap to boot, a cautious soul. Bullets can’t read her No Trespassing sign. Strange to think they’re in the air like lead bees with a fatal sting. Our neighbor across the road sits in his kitchen with his rifle handy and the window open. You never know when. Once he shot a trophy with his barrel resting on the sill. He’s in his seventies, born here, joined the Navy, came back. Hard work never hurt a man until suddenly he was another broken tool. His silhouette against the dawn droops as though drought-stricken, each step deliberate, down the driveway to his black mailbox, prying it open. Checking a trap.

In different cities, on different forms of transportation, a woman read Daniel Deronda until the year became the arbitrary pink the calendar chose for the middle of winter. And finally she sat in the reference section of the public library finishing Daniel Deronda for days at a slowing pace between pieces of newspapers and foreign language newspapers whose syntax she enjoyed, not understanding. And when she didn't anymore she wrote in the margins of Daniel Deronda for someone who might never see. Thought of that person who might never see, staring equally at the rain, equally thinking of her and of nothing in particular. Outside the news fell apart. If one chooses to be shallow or noble, or one is born so, and if it matters. Translations are appropriate when Nature is dormant, or when one has nothing to say, or does not know what to say. These are three different things but sometimes they are the same. It is not wrong to want nice things, neither is it wrong to want to be good, or to feel that as a physical force of pleasure: Daniel Deronda, who does not know who he is, who thinks he does, and goes away on a boat. But the cover is a picture of a woman gambling. The air warms outside the reference section, and also the rain. Incomprehensible news. Whenever a book ends, silence, as if a stewardship had ceased. A person can feel the bones of one's hands by stretching them. If love comes again, know better than to speak.