517 Social commentaries poems

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation. They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned to call this a nature show. Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for the face. Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed meditation. But the song was never familiar. Because this was the only room this was the only room where we undressed—: that was the plot. They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening to us. The image burning in. Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed skin. We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous advances. All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but not enough. We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed you to the story. This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire wrapped in ripe gray gauze— you like it. (2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry speed—the Laws prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.) They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down. This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the room like sand. Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire. The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of kinked plot which can’t be straightened like a motel wire hanger looped around your wrists. The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought— the image burning in now. We began to understand what they were—: the Thou& the shalt& the not

You used to be able to flag a ride in this country. Impossible now—everyone is afraid of strangers.   Well, there was fear then too, and it was mutual: drivers versus hitchhikers. And we rode without seat belts, insurance or beliefs.  People would see me far ahead on a hill like a seedling, watch me grow in the windshield and not know they were going to stop until they got right up to me.  Maybe they wanted company or thought I’d give them some excitement.  It was the age of impulse, of lonesome knee jerks.  An old woman stopped, blew smoke in my face and after I was already in her car she asked me if I wanted a ride.  I’m telling you. Late one night a construction boss pulled over. One of his crew had been hit by the mob, he said as he drove, distraught and needing to talk to someone. We rode around for a long time. He said,I never wore a gun to a funeral before, but they’ve gotta be after me too. Then he looked at me and patted the bulge in his coat.Don’t worry, he said,you’re safe.

Pity the beautiful, the dolls, and the dishes, the babes with big daddies granting their wishes. Pity the pretty boys, the hunks, and Apollos, the golden lads whom success always follows. The hotties, the knock-outs, the tens out of ten, the drop-dead gorgeous, the great leading men. Pity the faded, the bloated, the blowsy, the paunchy Adonis whose luck’s gone lousy. Pity the gods, no longer divine. Pity the night the stars lose their shine.

The jaunty crop-haired graying Women in grocery stores, Their clothes boyish and neat, New mittens or clean sneakers, Clean hands, hips not bad still, Buying ice cream, steaks, soda, Fresh melons and soap—or the big Balding young men in work shoes And green work pants, beer belly And white T-shirt, the porky walk Back to the truck, polite; possible To feel briefly like Jesus, A gust of diffuse tenderness Crossing the dark spaces To where the dry self burrows Or nests, something that stirs, Watching the kinds of people On the street for a while— But how love falters and flags When anyone’s difficult eyes come Into focus, terrible gaze of a unique Soul, its need unlovable: my friend In his divorced schoolteacher Apartment, his own unsuspected Paintings hung everywhere, Which his wife kept in a closet— Not, he says, that she wasn’t Perfectly right; or me, mis-hearing My rock radio sing my self-pity: “The Angels Wished Him Dead”—all The hideous, sudden stare of self, Soul showing through like the lizard Ancestry showing in the frontal gaze Of a robin busy on the lawn. In the movies, when the sensitive Young Jewish soldier nearly drowns Trying to rescue the thrashing Anti-semitic bully, swimming across The river raked by nazi fire, The awful part is the part truth: Hate my whole kind, but me, Love me for myself. The weather Changes in the black of night, And the dream-wind, bowling across The sopping open spaces Of roads, golf courses, parking lots, Flails a commotion In the dripping treetops, Tries a half-rotten shingle Or a down-hung branch, and we All dream it, the dark wind crossing The wide spaces between us.

Oh. Sorry. Hello. Are you on your way to work, too? I was just taken aback by how you also have a briefcase, also small & brown. I was taken by how you seem, secretly, to love everything. Are you my new coworker? Oh. I see. No. Still, good to meet you. I’m trying out this thing where it’s good to meet people. Maybe, beyond briefcases, we have some things in common. I like jelly beans. I’m afraid of death. I’m afraid of farting, even around people I love. Do you think your mother loves you when you fart? Does your mother love you all the time? Have you ever doubted? I like that the street we’re on is named after a tree, when there are none, poplar or otherwise. I wonder if a tree has ever been named after a street, whether that worked out. If I were a street, I hope I’d get a good name, not Main or One-Way. One night I ran out of an apartment, down North Pleasant Street — it was soft & neighborly with pines & oaks, it felt too hopeful, after what happened. After my mother’s love became doubtful. After I told her I liked a boy & she wished I had never been born. After she said she was afraid of me, terrified I might infect my brothers with my abnormality. Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers. Eventually, a street appears where they can meet again. Or not. I’ve doubted my own love for my mother. I doubt. Do I have to forgive in order to love? Or do I have to love for forgiveness to even be possible? What do you think? I’m trying out this thing where questions about love & forgiveness are a form of work I’d rather not do alone. I’m trying to say, Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain, & continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.

I dreamed myself of their people, I am of their people, I thought they watched me that I watched them that they watched the sun and the clouds for the cities are no longer mine    image    images of existence    (or song of myself?)    and the roads for the light in the rear-view mirror is not death but the light of other lives tho if I stumble on a rock I speak of rock if I am to say    anything      anything if I am to tell of myself    splendor of the roads    secrecy of paths for a word like a glass sphere encloses the word opening and opening myself and I am sick for a moment with fear let the magic infants speak we who have brought steel and stone again and again into the cities in that word blind word must speak and speak the magic infants’ speech driving northward the populist north slowly in the sunrise the lapping of shallow waters tongues of the inlets glisten like fur in the low tides all that childhood envied the sounds of the ocean over the flatlands poems piers foolhardy structures and the lives the ingenious lives the winds squall from the grazing ranches’ wandering fences young workmen’s loneliness on the structures has touched and touched the heavy tools    tools in our hands in the clamorous country birth- light savage light of the landscape magic page the magic infants speak

Some people say prison is the country where life is cheaper than anywhere else

praise the Hennessy, the brown shine, the dull burn. praise the dare, the take it, the no face you’re supposed to make. praise the house, its many rooms, hardwood and butter leather couches; its richness. praise the rich, their friendship. praise the friends: the child of the well off, the child of the well off, the child of  well, the child of welfare, the child of welfare. praise the diversity but praise the Hennessy, and again,           and again.           praise the new year upon us. praise my stumble, the shaky eye, the fluid arm, but the steady hand. praise my hand, the burning it has. praise the dive into the gut of a friend; the dousing of my hand in his ribs. praise the softness of skin, the way it always gives. praise the pulling, the calming down. praise the fuck that, the jump back into all five of my friends fist first. praise all five of my friends pinning me into the thick carpet, knees in my back. praise my back, how it hurts and raises anyway, how it flips, how it’s the best friend of my fists. praise the swinging pool cue, how it whips air like a disobedient child, praise the disobedient and all the chilling           i won’t do. praise the child smile on my face, the fun plunging a knee into a cheek of my best friend. praise his blood, the brightness of it, a sun i bask in. praise my blood, the nose flowing wild with effort, the mess and taste of it, praise the swallowing, salt and its sweetness. praise the morning, the impossible blue, Midwestern  January above us. praise the blues dulled in my denim by all the brown. praise the brown shine, the dull burn. praise all six in my jeans, our salt and life sitting dry on my thighs mixing, refusing to wash away.

Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned. This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long. Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of burnt lime take him back to the moment the cold war ended. The other day his sheet was hung up in the courtyard as if to flaunt the blood stain after a wedding night. Faces tarnished by sun surround him, all eyes and ears: “What did you dream of last night?” A prisoner’s dreams are parchment made sacred by its missing passages. His sister is still discovering his odd habits: the bits of bread hidden in pockets and under his bed the relentless chopping of wood for winter. Why this fear? What can be worse than life in prison? Having choices but being unable to choose.

It is always the dispossessed— someone driving a huge rusted Dodge that’s burning oil, and must cost twenty-five dollars to fill. Today before seven I saw, through the morning fog, his car leave the road, turning into the field. It must be his day off, I thought, or he’s out of work and drinking, or getting stoned. Or maybe as much as anything he wanted to see where the lane through the hay goes. It goes to the bluff overlooking the lake, where we’ve cleared brush, swept the slippery oak leaves from the path, and tried to destroy the poison ivy that runs over the scrubby, sandy knolls. Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car needing a new muffler backs out to the road, headlights withdrawing from the lowest branches of the pines. Next day I find beer cans, crushed; sometimes a few fish too small to bother cleaning and left on the moss to die; or the leaking latex trace of outdoor love.... Once I found the canvas sling chairs broken up and burned. Whoever laid the fire gathered stones to contain it, like a boy pursuing a merit badge, who has a dream of work, and proper reward for work.