517 Social commentaries poems

Gay Fashion thou Goddess so pleasing, However imperious thy sway; Like a mistress capricious and teasing, Thy slaves tho’ they murmur obey. The simple, the wise, and the witty, The learned, the dunce, and the fool, The crooked, straight, ugly, and pretty, Wear the badge of thy whimsical school. Tho’ thy shape be so fickle and changing, That a Proteus thou art to the view; And our taste so for ever deranging, We know not which form to pursue. Yet wave but thy frolicksome banners, And hosts of adherents we see; Arts, morals, religion, and manners, Yield implicit obedience to thee. More despotic than beauty thy power, More than virtue thy rule o’er the mind: Tho’ transient thy reign as a flower, That scatters its leaves to the wind. Ah! while folly thou dealest such measure, No matter how fleeting thy day! Be Wisdom, dear goddess, thy pleasure! Then lasting as time be thy stay.

There is far too much of the suburban classes Spiritually not geographically speaking. They’re asses. Menacing the greatness of our beloved England, they lie Propagating their kind in an eightroomed stye. Now I have a plan which I will enfold (There’s this to be said for them, they do as they’re told) Then tell them their country’s in mortal peril They believed it before and again will not cavil Put it in caption form firm and slick If they see it in print it is bound to stick: ‘Your King and your Country need you Dead’ You see the idea? Well, let it spread. Have a suitable drug under string and label Free for every Registered Reader’s table. For the rest of the gang who are not patriotic I’ve another appeal they’ll discover hypnotic: Tell them it’s smart to be dead and won’t hurt And they’ll gobble up drug as they gobble up dirt.

This downpour of bad reasoning, this age-old swarm, this buzzing about town, this kick and stomp through gardens, this snag on the way to the mall, this heap and toss of fabric and strewn shoes, this tangled beauty, this I came here not knowing, here to be torched, this fumbling ecstasy, this ecstasy of fumbling, this spray of lips and fingers, this scrape of bone, this raid of private grounds, this heaving and rocking, this scream and push, this sightless hunger, this tattered perishing, this rhythmic teeth knocking, this unbearable music, this motionless grip, grimace, and groan.

I got a letter from the government. It said let there be night. I went through your trash. There was night, all right. I consider how your light is spent. I have butterflies a little bit. I have some pills I take for it. I’ve been up since four the day before. Agony’s a cinch to sham. Don’t worry about the environment. Let it kill us if  it can. I give a tiny tinker’s damn. I put the ox behind the cart. Consume away my snow-blind heart. Fastened to a service animal it is waiting for the beep. It is waiting for the right to change. Hello, I know you’re there, pick up.

Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, war, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death—and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last. —Samuel Palmer, 1858 I. Pan Awakes: Summer Marches In Pan’s spring rain “drives his victims out to the animals with whom they become as one”— pain and paeans, hung in the mouth, to be sung II. What the Flowers in the Meadow Tell Me June 6, 1857, Thoreau in his Journal: A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature… Now I am ice, now I am sorrel. Or, Clare, 1840, Epping Forest: I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down and The book I love is everywhere And not in idle words John,claritas tell us the words are not idle, the syllables are able to turn plantains into quatrains, tune raceme to cyme, panicle and umbel to form corollas in light clusters of tones… Sam Palmer hit it: “Milton, by one epithet draws an oak of the largest girth I ever saw, ‘Pine and monumental oak’: I have just been trying to draw a large one in Lullingstone; but the poet’s tree is huger than any in the park.” Muse in a meadow, compose in a mind! III.What the Animals in the Forest Tell Me Harris’s Sparrow— 103 species seen by the Georgia Ornithological Society in Rabun Gap, including Harris’s Sparrow, with its black crown, face, and bib encircling a pink bill It was, I think, the third sighting in Georgia, and I should have been there instead of reading Clare, listening to catbirds and worrying about Turdus migratorious that flew directly into the Volkswagen and bounced into a ditch Friend Robin, I cannot figure it, if I’d been going 40 you might be whistling in some grass. 10 tepid people got 10 stale letters one day earlier, I cannot be happy about that. IV.What the Night Tells Me the dark drones on in the southern wheat fields and the hop flowers open before the sun’s beckoning the end is ripeness, the wind rises, and the dawn says yes YES! it says “yes” V.What the Morning Bells Tell Me Sounds, and sweet aires that give delight and hurt not— that, let Shakespeare’s delectation bear us VI.What Love Tells Me Anton Bruckner counts the 877th leaf on a linden tree in the countryside near Wien and prays: Dear God, Sweet Jesus, Save Us, Save Us… the Light in the Grass, the Wind on the Hill, are in my head, the world cannot be heard Leaves obliterate my  heart, we touch each other far apart… Let us count into the Darkness

In the new century, we lose the art of many things. For example, at the beep, I communicate using the wrong machine. I called to say we have two lives and only one of them is real. When the phone rings: you could be anybody. In the evening: you are homeless and hunting for good light, as safe a place as any to make a bed for the night. In both my lives, my nerves go bust. I’m certain that I’m not as I appear, that I’m a figment and you’re not really here. The struggle is authenticity. I have a message. You must believe me.

Every bus ride is theater, giddy schoolgirls trying on the tawdry masks of women, flirting with my nephew, red and green lights, shop windows piled high, gold glistered skeletal mannequins in slips of iridescent silk. At night in the wind blowing over the Pont Marie I hear Camille Claudel crying from the walls of her studio, and two days before Christmas Elliot and I stand miraculously alone before La Gioconde, follow her eyes, cracked surface of her skin like softest sand before the deep water of her mouth, and later standing in the cold our Buddhist gardienne Nadine tells me in rapid-fire French that in all things she tries to remain neutral,neutre,neutre, neutre, the only word finally I understand in the barrage tumbling out of her mouth like a waterfall, but I can’t be neutral, passion welling up in my heart for the exhausted maids, dapper men in berets, the madwoman on the PC bus, screaming,Salope,salope, as she descends at the Pont d’Ivry and everyone on the bus looking at each other,Whore? Who’s the whore here? or the chic older woman, leather pants baggy on her skinny shanks, reading a battered paperback Rimbaud as we take the bus to see Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, the master himself as Chaucer, spinning his ribald stories of human folly, each one a mirror, and when I see myself in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off, for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time, because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light, and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, myself most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d’Arc, and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?

woke up this morning feeling excellent, picked up the telephone dialed the number of my equal opportunity employer to inform him I will not be into work today Are you feeling sick? the boss asked me No Sir I replied: I am feeling too good to report to work today, if I feel sick tomorrow I will come in early

O F my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky, And the reckless rain; you put them between walls To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages, To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

colored pictures of all things to eat: dirty postcards And words, words, words all over everything No eyes or ears left to do their own doings (all invaded, appropriated, outraged, all senses including the mind, that worker on what is And that other sense made to give even the most wretched, or any of us, wretched, that consolation (greased lulled even the street-cars song