517 Social commentaries poems

The man who told me about war said, it's the only thing that keeps us busy. I thought of your fingers on my back counting the vertebrae one by one. The only thing?

Alice's first strike gets a pat on the back, her second a cheer from Betty Woszinski who's just back from knee surgery.   Her third— "A turkey!" Molly calls out—raises everyone's eyes. They clap.   Teresa looks up from the bar. At the fourth the girls stop seeing their own pins wobble. They watch the little X's fill the row on Alice's screen— That's five.   That's six.   There's a holy space around her like a saint come down to bowl with the Tuesday Ladies in Thorp, Wisconsin. Teresa runs to get Al, and Fran calls Billy at the Exxon.   The bar crowds with silent men. No one's cheering.   No one's bowling now except Alice's team, rolling their balls to advance the screen around to Alice, who's stopped even her nervous laugh, her face blank and smooth with concentration.   It can't go on and then it does go on, the white bar reading "Silver Dollar Chicken" lowering and clearing nothing, then lowering and clearing nothing again.

A B H O R R E N C E S 4 July, 1986 America is inconceivable without drugs and always has been. One of the first acts was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished the mansions of Virginia was tobacco, a drug now in much disrepute. Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for and they dealt it by the bale altho it was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire— people were so simple in those days. The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine making amputation a pleasure and making the block of wood between the teeth, which was no drug, obsolete. Morphinism was soon widespread among doctors and patients. At this date interns, the reports tell us, are among the premier drug ab/users of said moralistic nation. “Rock” stars (who notoriously “have” doctors) consume drugs by the metric ton even as they urge teenagers to Say No. The undercurrent of American history has been the running aches and pains of the worn path to the door of the apothecary to fetch cannabis and cocaine elixirs by the gallon. It has been all prone all seeking Florida, Ponce de León was just the beginning of a statistical curve whose only satisfaction would be total vertigo. His eager search for youth has become our frantic tilt with death and boredom, in fact we are farming death in Florida with far greater profit than we are farming food in Iowa—elixirs are as multiform as the life-style frauds we implore, a cultural patchwork fit for a fool in the only country in the world with a shop called the Drug Store.

Pretty soon the Negroes were looking to get paid. My partner, Big Trend, wiped his ox neck and said He wasn't going to wait too much longer. You Know that look your daddy gets before he whups you? That's how Big Trend looked. There was a pink scar Meddling his forehead. Most people assumed a bear Like him couldn't read anything but a dollar, But I'd watched him tour the used bookstore In town and seen him napping so I knew he held more Than power in those hands. They could tear A Bible in two. Sometimes on the walk home I'd hear Him reciting poems. But come Friday, he was the one The fellas asked to speak to the boss. He'd go alone, Usually, and left behind, we imagined the boss buckled Into Trend's shadow because our money always followed.

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls in words I cannot comprehend. All of this happening in a time no older than your last heartbeat. I’ve been told the internet is an unholy place — an endless intangible stumbling ground of false deities dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit in a world without flies. My loneliness exists in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched a neighbor braid intricate waves of cornrows into her son’s tiny head and could have lived in her focus-wrinkled brow for a living. Today I think I practice the religion of  blinking too much. Today, I know no neighbor’s name and won’t know if  I like it or not. O holy streaming screen of counterculture punks, linger my lit mind on landing strips — through fog, rain, hail — without care for time or density. O world wide web, o viral video, o god of excrement thought. Befriend me. Be fucking infectious. Move my eyes from one sight to the next.

i was mothered by lonely women       some of  them wives     some of them             with plumes of  smoke for husbands    all    lonely smelling of  onions & milk         all mothers some of them to children some to old names phantom girls acting out a life        only half a life away      instead        copper kitchenware bangles pushed up the arm    fingernails rusted with henna          kneading raw meat with salt with coriander                     sweating upper lip in the steam       weak tea          hair unwound against the nape         my deities      each one sandal slapping against stone heel      sandal- wood & oud                    bright chiffon spun about each head     coffee in the dowry china butter biscuits on a painted plate      crumbs suspended in eggshell demitasse       & they begin i heard       people are saying i saw it with my own eyes       [      ]’s daughter a scandal                  she was wearing [      ] &not wearing [   ]            can you imagine a shame                                             a shame

Six o'clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister Your dark, your housewives starting to nose Out each other's day, the claustrophobia Of your back gardens varicose With shrubs, make an ugly sister Of you suburbia. How long ago did the glass in your windows subtly Silver into mirrors which again And again show the same woman Shriek at a child? Which multiply A dish, a brush, ash, The gape of a fish. In the kitchen, the gape of a child in the cot? You swelled so that when you tried The silver slipper on your foot It pinched your instep and the common Hurt which touched you made You human. No creature of the streets will feel the touch Of a wand turning the wet sinews Of fruit suddenly to a coach, While this rat without leather reins Or a whip or britches continues Sliming your drains. No magic here. Yet you encroach until The shy countryside, fooled By your plainness falls, then rises From your bed changed, schooled Forever by your skill, Your compromises. Midnight and your metamorphosis Is now complete, although the mind Which spinstered you might still miss Your mystery now, might still fail To see your power defined By this detail. By this creature drowsing now in every house— The same lion who tore stripes Once off zebras. Who now sleeps, Small beside the coals. And may, On a red letter day, Catch a mouse.

In all this system I watched a cloud fall Carted wet down the design Need is a big pool Lo go its creaturely waves Commerce came open and bright like a starfuck "I hear, with great shame for our century" Last zing on the stairs "S0-and-so wants company to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a servant with such-and-such qualifications" Execution too diddled back then "So-and-so wants a master"

In all this system I watched a cloud fall Carted wet down the design Need is a big pool Lo go its creaturely waves Commerce came open and bright like a starfuck "I hear, with great shame for our century" Last zing on the stairs "So-and-so wants company to Paris; so-and-so is looking for a servant with such-and-such qualifications" Execution too diddled back then "So-and-so wants a master"

9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck 25 Strange that the youngest people I know Live in the oldest buildings Scattered about the city In the dark rooms Of the past—and the immigrants, The black Rectangular buildings Of the immigrants. They are the children of the middle class. ‘The pure products of America—’ Investing The ancient buildings Jostle each other In the half-forgotten, that ponderous business. This Chinese Wall. 26 They carry nativeness To a conclusion In suicide. We want to defend Limitation And do not know how. Stupid to say merely That poets should not lead their lives Among poets, They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest The boundaries Of our distances. We want to say ‘Common sense’ And cannot. We stand on That denial Of death that paved the cities, Paved the cities Generation For generation and the pavement Is filthy as the corridors Of the police. How shall one know a generation, a new generation? Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn And the wounds untended and the voices confused, There is the head of the moving column Who if they cannot find Their generation Wither in the infirmaries And the supply depots, supplying Irrelevant objects. Street lamps shine on the parked cars Steadily in the clear night It is true the great mineral silence Vibrates, hums, a process Completing itself In which the windshield wipers Of the cars are visible. The power of the mind, the Power and weight Of the mind which Is not enough, it is nothing And does nothing Against the natural world, Behemoth, white whale, beast They will say and less than beast, The fatal rock Which is the world— O if the streets Seem bright enough, Fold within fold Of residence ... Or see thru water Clearly the pebbles Of the beach Thru the water, flowing From the ripple, clear As ever they have been 29 My daughter, my daughter, what can I say Of living? I cannot judge it. We seem caught In reality together my lovely Daughter, I have a daughter But no child And it was not precisely Happiness we promised Ourselves; We say happiness, happiness and are not Satisfied. Tho the house on the low land Of the city Catches the dawn light I can tell myself, and I tell myself Only what we all believe True And in the sudden vacuum Of time ... ... is it not In fear the roots grip Downward And beget The baffling hierarchies Of father and child As of leaves on their high Thin twigs to shield us From time, from open Time