517 Social commentaries poems

Professional Middle-class Couple, 1927 by August Sander What justifies the inequality That issues her a tastefully square-cut Ruby for her finger, him a suit Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity Declares a life of working sitting down, While someone in a sweatshop has to squint And palsy sewing, and a continent Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground, Could not be justice. Nothing but the use To which they put prosperity can speak In their defense: the faces money makes, They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse, Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong; Only among the burghers do you find A glance so frank, engaging, and refined, So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.

Crooks run the whole world, and the Dow just fell. Crap rules the airwaves. All your best plans stall. The air is dirty, and you don’t feel well. Your wife won’t listen. Friends no longer call. Sad songs from youth no longer cast a spell. Cancer research has run into a wall. Some inflated hack just won the Nobel. You witness clear signs of decline and fall. The neighbors are cold, and your house won’t sell. Your cat has bad teeth. Your paychecks feel small. Maybe you’re really sick. It’s hard to tell. Up ahead, traffic has slowed to a crawl. The world didn’t just start going to hell. You just noticed for the first time, that’s all.

Lissen to the whistle of night bats— oye como va, in the engines, in the Chevys & armed Impalas, the Toyota gangsta’ monsters, surf of new world colony definitions & quasars & culture prostars going blam over the Mpire, the once-Mpire, carcass neural desies for the Nothing. i amble outside the Goddess mountain. Cut across the San Joaquín Valley, Santiago de Cuba, Thailand & Yevtushenko’s stations; hunched humans snap off cotton heads gone awry & twist nuclear vine legs. Jut out to sea, once again—this slip sidewalk of impossible migrations. Poesy mad & Chicano-style undone wild. Rumble boy. Rumble girl. In wonder & amazement. On the loose. Cruisin’ shark-colored maze of presidential bombast, death enshrined archipelago fashion malls, neutered wars across the globe come barreling down on my Neo-American uzi mutations, my uppgraded 2Pac thresholds. My indigo streets, i say with disgust & erotic spit, Amerikaner frontier consciousness gone up long ago. Meet my barriohood, meet me with the froth i pick up everyday & everyday i wipe away with ablution & apologia & a smirk, then a smile on my Cholo-Millennium liberation jacket. No motha’, no fatha’, no sista’, no brotha’. Just us in the genetic ticktock culture chain, this adinfinitum, clueless Americana grid of inverted serapes, hallucinations of a nation, streets in racist Terminator coagulation. Get loose after the day-glo artery of a fix. Power outages propel us into cosmos definition, another forty-million-New-Dollar-Plantation Basilica, or is it tender chaos? My upside-down Kahlúa gallon oración drool blackish metal flake desires, the ooze of Dulcinea— Tepeyac stripper, honey from Tara’s open green fans. Tara? Tara, where are you? Tara of the blessings & weapons against illusion. Against administrator pig, against molester snake, against rooster corporate lust. Remember me? i am the black-red blood spark worker, Juana Buffalo’s illegitimate flight usher, back up from Inframundo. Quick ooze again, this formless city space i live in— my circular false malaria. Fungi Town says everything’s awright without your Holy Wheel, your flaming tree wombs, this sista’ bundle i ache for, the one i lost in a fast brawl for redemption at the gates of this Creation Mulatto Hotel, this body passage, this wonder fire from the chest. i stand alone on Mass Man Boulevard. Look east, look south. Bleary sirens come howling with vats of genocide & grey prison gang buses jam with my true brotha’ wetbacks. Pick another bale of tropical grape, another bushel of pesticide & plutonium artichoke. Cancer tomatoes the biggest in the world. Bastard word,bracero produce, alien culture— power & slime. Crawl up my back, heavy loaded on cheap narratives, Salinas doubles, Atlantis sketched on Gorbachev’s forehead: you, yes, you, gator-mouthed agent—like gila progeny. Let’s hustle. Let’s trade. It is 1:27 A.M. in da rat Arctic. What do i trade passion for? Language escapes me. Passion is smoke. i dissolve. It is in my nature to disappear. No sista’, no brotha’. No motha’, no soul. This shred iciness is all, a crazy register that destroys itself into Polaroid, into a glacial sheet of multicolored border walls. Let’s foam & spin flamey bluish tears for the Thing-Against-Itself, soul-less soul, this film word surface. Sing out, baby. Wobble & bop to town. Drag yo’ hands across my fine-tuned work train named Desastre en route to Freetown—engineered African shaman houses smell of licorice, Ebola & famine blood, of hair torn, of death owls & cancerous alcoholic livers, of babies sucking this deep night to come, then—a busted chink of afternoon copper light wakes us, yo’ sista’ rolls in with a bag of lemons for Evil Eye, for the seven-inch ache in her abdomen. Keep me in stride. You. i am talking to you, fool. Don’t just sit there stretchin’ yo’ face. Tell me why fire yearns for the heart. Write it down. Say it. Fool. Speak the names. Conjure the recitations from the coffee cup, the steel-toe, border-crosser boots. The grass rips up the morning snow lights, jagged & yellowish. My AIDS face is hidden. Your rot, my epistemology. i stand in pure light, a blaze of eyes & arms, volcanic & solar, autistic, anti-written, burned by mad friars & clerics, uptown octopi readers, my long hair falls as reddish honey, on a naked supple back, on breasts small & secretive. Mystery evades me. Shadows crumble. Without attention i locate the love void & yet, i know all is well. My blood rocks to a bolero out of rhythm, a firefly’s bolero that is, the one in the dog eye. Hear me warm up to the multi-night. Scribble poems & shout rebuke for the sake of scarred angels, for Tara, who guides me in her emeraldine, sequined night of lies. Hear me now, kin to the half-collie language that i keep & walk. Kin now, to the leaves that plunge to the floors; swivel whiteness without axis, tectonic blasts without mercy. Straitjackets float on the river infinity. Pink-skinned fishes stare back as they evolve into my shape, my babble stream magnetic juan-foolery. Arm wrestle me on the soccer lawn, kick me in the balls. The murder music is for everyone. The Last Mayan Acid rock band plays Berlin’s latest score: dead trade market systems for the dead proletariats, rip up from Bangkok to Tenejapa. Everyone is meaningful & vomits, everyone deposits a stench pail, into the Cube— Neo-America, without the fissure of intimate thighs. Cross over into fire, hunger & spirit. i write on my hand: the road cuts into a star. Go, now, go, fool. In your lyric wetback saxophone, the one yo’ mama left you, the Thing-Against-Itself strapped across your hips. Do not expect me to name—this Thing-Against-Itself. Play it. Screw it. Howl up to the Void, the great emptiness, the original form. Night Journal: Keep on rockin’, blues fish, the gauze of hte day into night. Out there somewhere, Dis-America, pick up a chrome bone, the shards of the last Xmas Presidential extravaganza. You, of course, fool. Swivel into the clear. Float over the greenish migrant barracks pocked with wire torsos, toes wiggle & predict our forthcoming delirium—there is a velvet panther shouting out OM in funk, there is a tawny word in the middle of the city thoroughfare, a planetary semi of lives slices the wet animal in half. i am that punk half panther. My fierce skull & mandible, formidable, my pelt is exact as witch quartz, a slashed leg tumbles down the highway, battered by every dirty, steel wheel. Face up to the sky, you, i said, to the brilliant gossip from the Goddess parade. Outside, outside. So. Crawl up, baby, come on, keep on floatin’— sliding’, always: for black journeys, always in holiness. From Border-Crosser With a Lamborghini Dream,1999.

Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff, Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff, Stink and are thrown away. End fair enough.

After lockdown, tier by tier undresses to sleep: Each skull nestles in its mattress-hollow. Wall facing wall inside of wall shrinks to a keyhole: A fly creeps through and starts to buzz, reeling through bars Down steel corridors. A dreamer’s eye follows the fly, And wherever the fly lands, the eye touches down With an airier Midas touch that turns all to glass: The eye wakes to Bentham’s panopticon, glazed cage Of an inspection house where only the Warden sees all. —I am asleep and not asleep, I stare up into faces swarming: Cellblocks of memory focus face by face, Mine flitting in and out of theirs: In prison issue They come, footsteps mingling over mine in a child’s game Of chase from yard to cell, only we’re all grown men, Meatier, less and more malign than A boy’s imagining himself grown... —I was asleep and not asleep, Faces came and went. Frank the Joker, the West Virginia biker, who composed “A rhyme to fit the crime”: “There was a young fellow named Frank Who gave his girlfriend a spank; She fell in a heap In front of Frank’s jeep And old Frank ran her down for a prank.” Or the white-haired lifer, densley oracular: “Sometimes, after lockdown, your thoughts Just don’t have the energy to climb the wall.” The Giggler who bolted His brother in a barn and burned it down, Eyes challenging, sly: “They killed this guy and see, I think this is funny, hilarious In fact, but you, you won’t think so—they cut off his dick And shoved it in his mouth.” Or the child molester who said about flowers At funerals: “They’re there, aren’t they, To hide the stink off the corpse?” Or Pat, armed robber Who held aloof: Rolled shirtsleeves, forearms Carved from basalt, smoke rings Lazily effusing: “The johns here, they got no doors: You ever try to take a shit while someone’s watching? It took six months to get used to that— But here, man, the bars feed on Time, they nibble It to nothing.” —I wanted to sleep and couldn’t sleep, I stared up into faces swarming. Three o’clock dark dissolves The walls, faces start to drift, their atoms Mix with concrete’s Atomic swirl, bodies get stuck Floating halfway through, heartbeats Booming as through a stethoscope: Like Michaelangelo’s slaves, if a fly Landed on their noses, They couldn’t lift a hand to brush it off. Dark velleities buzz in this hive of steel Where power handshakes Flower in forests Of interlocking fingers: In red prison uniform, a man On death row, convicted 1984, exonerated and pardoned October 2000 (New York Times, Dec. 10): “You could hear the humming of the chair Every time they cut it on, like an air-conditioner Cutting on. My daddy came to see me, he said, ‘What's that?’ I said, ‘The chair.’ The way they put it, they got to test the chair.” —I was asleep And couldn’t wake up. Inside my skull, glass Keeps shattering: Dream-beings Unsubscribed to the will, with insect bodies And human heads, dash against walls, mammal softness Of cheeks and lips join with stingers Pulsing...my eyes awake and not awake, where is the chamber As in the horror movie Return of the Fly that, circuitry and test-tubes Sparking, would unscramble these divided Natures? (They called me “Teach” As in “Hey, Teach, how do you spell...” When I confessed I’d been in jail, they looked disappointed in me: Their side of the wall was theirs, not mine.) —I tried to turn over, to look away, But couldn’t wake up, couldn’t not wake. Chemicals drip into a man’s veins, one each For heart, lungs, brain. Strapped to a table, he stares Impassive, eyes flickering shut, body A meat wall, IV tubes Almost empty... —I was asleep and not asleep, I couldn’t move to wake. I hear shrill wings—that fly inspecting bread crumbs Under dining hall tables while the Warden blares Descartes over the Intercom: “If a man’s head were lopped off His mouth would keep on moving, faultlessly Justifying his crimes.” But that fly, that speck against Steel, its wings steered in ways that seem crazy To eyes awake, not awake, Not seeing, all-seeing, the head unmoving Moving to turn away...oh seely fly I can’t not see, can’t move to brush away From my unsleeping eyes, you veer In spirals unflattened into pathos Of careening chaos, your eccentric Flight path darts Through bars, oh alas, hairy Vibrant fly!

You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes.I’ve got a sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not holding me reaching out for a sale.Does anyone want to buy my sack of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only two people in the room.

You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes.I've got a sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not holding me reaching out for a sale.Does anyone want to buy my sack of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only two people in the room.

Count heads. Count the men's. Count the women's. There are five main counts in the cell or work area. 4:45 first morning count. Inmate must stand for the count. The count takes as long as it takes. Control Center knows how many should be in what area. No one moves from area A to area B without Control knowing. If i/m is stuck out for the count i/m receives a write-up. Three write-ups, and i/m goes to lockdown. Once in lockdown, you will relinquish your things:                         plastic soapdish, jar of vaseline, comb or hairpick, paperback                                 Upon return to your unit the inventory officer will return your things:                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, hairpick, paperback                                 Upon release you may have your possessions:                                 soapdish, vaseline, comb, pick, book                         Whereupon your True Happiness can begin In the Mansion of Happiness: Whoever possesses CRUELTY Must be sent back to JUSTICE Whoever gets into IDLENESS Must come to POVERTY Whoever becomes a SABBATHBREAKER Must be taken to the Pillory and there remain until he loses 2 turns

Count your fingers Count your toes Count your nose holes Count your blessings Count your stars (lucky or not) Count your loose change Count the cars at the crossing Count the miles to the state line Count the ticks you pulled off the dog Count your calluses Count your shells Count the points on the antlers Count the newjack's keys Count your cards; cut them again

I want to go home, Patricia whispered. I won't say I like being in prison, but I have learned a lot, and I like experiences. The terriblest part is being away from your families.—Juanita I miss my screenporch. I know every word to every song on Purple Rain.—Willie I'm never leaving here.—Grasshopper, in front of the woodshop, posing beside a coffin he built This is a kicks' camp. Nothing positive come out of here except the praying. Never been around this many women in my life. Never picked up cursing before.—down for manslaughter, forty years I've got three. One's seven. One, four. One, one. I'm twenty-three. The way I found out is, I was in an accident with my brother. He was looking at some boys playing ball. We had a head-on. At the hospital, the doctor says, Miss, why didn't you tell us you were pregnant. I'm pregnant? I wasn't afraid of my mama. I was afraid of my daddy. I was supposed to be a virgin. He took it real good though. The last time you was here I had a headful of bees. See what I did was, I accidentally killed my brother. He spoke without inflection. Asked how many brothers and sisters did he have— On my mother's side, two brothers, well now, one brother, and two sisters. On my father's side, fifteen sisters. When I handed Franklin his prints, his face broke. Damn, he said to no one,I done got old. I kept a dog. When you walk through Capricorn, keep your arms down and close to your body. That's my sign. No, she can't have no mattress. No, she can't have no spoon. See if she throwed her food yet. No, she can't have no more. I am only about thirty-four minutes from home. That's hard. —George, field line seated on a bag of peas on a flatbed My auntie works here, and two of my cousins. If I get in trouble, get a write-up, my mama knows before supper.—George My name is Patricia, but my real name is Zabonia, she spoke softly. Some have their baby and are brought back on the bus the next day and act like it doesn't bother them a bit. Some cry all the way. And for days.—guard That's hard. I don't go there. My mama was fifteen when she had me. That's common. in the country. Some can learn, and will be okay. Some could stay in the class forever and not learn. S── when she was a little girl was struck in the head with a machete, and I don't think she'll learn much more... She is so sweet. You wouldn't believe she had did all the things they say she did. Don't ask. My mug shot totally turned me against being photographed. I miss the moon. I miss silverware, with a knife, and maybe even something to cut with it. I miss a bathtub. And a toilet. With a lid. And a handle. And a door. When Grasshopper came to Big Gola his wife was pregnant. He saw the baby once. Next when he was twenty. Now he's inside. In Texas. Second time. But he's short now. He'll get out soon. That's hard. I don't go there. I miss driving. We're both here because of love.—Zabonia of herself and her best friend I am highly hypnotizable. I would wash that man's feet and drink the water.