517 Social commentaries poems

With a nod to Jonah Winter Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like, A semi-demi goddess, something like A reality-TV star look-alike, Named Simile or Me Two. So we like In order to be liked. It isn’t like There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike” Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like Is something you can quantify: each “like” You gather’s almost something money-like, Token of virtual support. “Please like This page to stamp out hunger.” And you’d like To end hunger and climate change alike, But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like- Wise props up scarecrow silences. “I’m like, So OVER him,” I overhear. “But, like, He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... ” Take “like” out of our chat, we’d all alike Flounder, agape, gesticulating like A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike With other crutches, um, when we use “like,” We’re not just buying time on credit: Like Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like, Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click “like” If you’re against extinction!) Like is like Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike Redundant fast food franchises, each like (More like) the next. Those poets who dislike Inversions, archaisms, who just like Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t “like” Their (literally) every other word? I’d like Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like. But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike, How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.

The people people work with best Are often very queer The people people own by birth Quite shock your first idea; The people people choose for friends Your common sense appall, But the people people marry Are the queerest folks of all.

Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done, And start their silent swinging, one by one. Black horses drive a mower through the weeds, And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds. His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.

I’m terrified of a number of fates, Poisoned water under a tyrant’s wage, Being fired for doing nothing, my parents dying, Committing a thought like this to the page, The splash of acid to the face The Queens non-profit boss received Leaving work one blue August evening. Hell’s So eloquent and poetry’s no fate at all Unless you count the story of the divided sea Waiting to wash its assassins away. Says the Pharaoh, “That’s so sad.” But that story is less fate than news, whereas That Queens boss? Permanently burned, the Times Says one eye won’t stop weeping.

Family, lover, colleague. Notions, veneers, nation. Teeth of no health insurance. A boom can be a microphone affixed to a pole and not an explosion. Shadows, we sweep at them constantly and on the table is chocolate, newspapers, commentary, and vastly different pay stubs. I lean in to you and wish to love you perfectly. Suffer, tumble, strive, the right shoes, and vacation. At the table, conference and always pretty, the fixed. Shimmer of repulsion or fairy tale of cleavage. I count pleasures like cream, sipping, speaking. I like fashion as well. All the hymns you and I know as his headboard knocks against our wall, the slap when he coughs, our neighbor. The most racist of all positions at the staff meeting is to tell us about your shocking talent if there is a most. A prayer dangles over this bitter. Looping coves of sympathy. How to history. My flat speech in variously adopted professional tones. Merger of you and me and take whatever you want. Her beautiful poetry face. His intellectual arms. I worry about the ferocious place in you while framing it. A person as diversion, a thing beautiful, a small green-blue egg in a spring next and now the field is gendered. Have you seen the moment of last light? It means something to me. Assuming my gender qualifies your hearing and therefore my speech, you overlap words with mine in what appears to be a neutral manner but your speech acts as solvent. Down the hall, high heels as metronome, watched. Out of our bodies comes speech as clouds, flag, windsock, bandage. Dear— You could make more money if you wanted to. Such as a day of beauty, persuasive levels of caring. For example: doing both brow and lip. Are you spending or quiet? Let’s go to lunch would mean exchanging speech and then carrying warm food in plastic bags. Coherence as my mother sleeps after a complicated surgery. And if I were, would you be generous with me as well? Race ran the organization which one. We socialize in this real estate of gerrymandered potlucks. I think there exists silence as a legitimate response and I will say that now. The caring for our souls by old black women in the narrative of a college president, passing. Excuse me for not knowing passing. You remember but only after the spine is broken. Something in chemistry called suspension equals your ghosts caught in my air. The Bronx is horning was a line they wrote where I was educated, teaching. Response to migration: the pullback of the form remains as a hum, a tongue.

And so among the starry refineries and cattail ditches of New Jersey his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow. When he next looks up from Kafka a blur of green sanatorium tile flows by then presto, Port Authority, full daylight. He has been cheated of the river, dawn, a considered fingering of his long and polished rosary of second thoughts. Is it any wonder children are born weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble? The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers, the third simply glistens, noncommittal. Except to mention Kafka's restlessness before his death, his trips from spa to spa to country house to sanatorium, and that she's awake now, sweet with sleep sweat, patting her belly's taut carapace and yes hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister how was your trip and what have you brought us, and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage, the poem has nothing further to report.

Words torn, unseen, unseemly, scene some far suburb’s mall lot Summer’s theme: this year’s humid —to sweat is to know— pen squeezed too tight yields ink as blood or pus so the phrase scraped, removed offending thine eye: “Outsource Bush” Against which, insource what? Who will do it? Most terrible predicate—high above mountains snow-capped even in August in-flight motion picture Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I spit my smack, Jim slugs his Jack, Rob stews his lack, Carey prepares his rack, herons hunker on blowdowns, deer wait on high moon for their rounds, and the campfire might as well be an empire we all watch dissolve (in the slough, a carp roll, a splash) into ash.

12 foxes thumping; rechristened people. The Elizabethan Underworld as a precursor to the furnished. In the year of the calm fox, girls. The heavyweight watch just to see the mechanics of victory, that is, as above, a precursor to a tradition, changed into a cartoon. The furry, soon to be protected from insults, or humor at their expense, in law. The drawn fox, the heavy hippo. Ambush, false witness, poor translation. In the pressure going down, blood, bicep cuff. Correction, the neighbor is ill, a shame about the lion but there remain frequent accounts of premature burials and lack of perspective so unforgivable to transform.

Nothing for days, then a message: “I want to see a fight. An old one,” so I bring a fight to you. You know nothing of these men; even the most famous get to slink in their youth again — for you Foreman is Leviathan, unstoppable; Ali just past his prime flown “home” to muscle back his title. Not sure how you’ll react to violence we lie down again together — your feet in woollen stockings kneadable across my thighs, your mouth close to my ribs and their inmate: a pouting lifer. I fidget and you scold. As Ali opens up with right-hand leads you flinch but soon you’re lost to the screen where he waits it out along the ropes, takes everything Foreman throws. You don’t believe he can soak up all this pain and go on standing; we cheer him on, winter softened in the tropic of his strength. When Ali comes alive to put Foreman on the ground I see a hallelujah look as you turn to face me. “He won,” you say into my cheek. “He did,” I say.