517 Social commentaries poems

1 There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’. Occurrence, a part Of an infinite series, The sad marvels; Of this was told A tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness. ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’ 2 So spoke of the existence of things, An unmanageable pantheon Absolute, but they say Arid. A city of the corporations Glassed In dreams And images— And the pure joy Of the mineral fact Tho it is impenetrable As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable. 3 The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York 4 For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth And to their dwelling For which the tarred roofs And the stoops and doors— A world of stoops— Are petty alibi and satirical wit Will not serve. 5 The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge ‘1875’ Frozen in the moonlight In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, Which loves itself 6 We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always.   Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen. 7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. 8 Amor fati The love of fate For which the city alone Is audience Perhaps blasphemous. Slowly over islands, destinies Moving steadily pass And change In the thin sky Over islands Among days Having only the force Of days Most simple Most difficult 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 10 Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. 11 it is that light Seeps anywhere, a light for the times In which the buildings Stand on low ground, their pediments Just above the harbor Absolutely immobile, Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window One might wave to himself From the top of the Empire State Building— Speak If you can Speak Phyllis—not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness— So small a picture, A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us I too am in love down there with the streets And the square slabs of pavement— To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks And it is not ‘art’ 12 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’ the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world . . . They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, Families talked, They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest. They were patient With the world. This will never return, never, Unless having reached their limits They will begin over, that is, Over and over 13 unable to begin At the beginning, the fortunate Find everything already here. They are shoppers, Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal is without issue, a dead end. They develop Argument in order to speak, they become unreal, unreal, life loses solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game because baseball is not a game but an argument and difference of opinion makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger One’s soul. There is change In an air That smells stale, they will come to the end Of an era First of all peoples And one may honorably keep His distance If he can. 14 I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country, Among them many men More capable than I— Muykut and a sergeant Named Healy, That lieutenant also— How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. 15 Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me So that I will exist, find my navel So that it will exist, find my nipples So that they will exist, find every hair Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad), Find me.’ 16 ‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat, and only he who was troubled shall find rest, and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved, and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . . but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’ 17 The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why It is not easy to speak A ferocious mumbling, in public Of rootless speech 18 It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. 19 Now in the helicopters the casual will Is atrocious Insanity in high places, If it is true we must do these things We must cut our throats The fly in the bottle Insane, the insane fly Which, over the city Is the bright light of shipwreck 20 —They await War, and the news Is war As always That the juices may flow in them Tho the juices lie. Great things have happened On the earth and given it history, armies And the ragged hordes moving and the passions Of that death. But who escapes Death Among these riders Of the subway, They know But now as I know Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight, Farm animals, Draft animals, beasts for slaughter Because it would mean they have forgiven us, Or which is the same thing, That we do not altogether matter. 21 There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne. 22 Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained Clarity in the sense of silence.

My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum, watching a portable black-and-white television, reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he preferred to Modern Fiction. One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease, except the one that guarded his corpse found holding a tumbler of Bushmills. "Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher. I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet and some motor oil—my inheritance. Once I saw him weep in a courtroom— neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed me much affection but gave me a knack for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

This is the factory Where they manufacture old maids At one end of the assembly line The women are jostled into their places They wonder where they are going What will happen to them One says, “Where is my sister?” But the foreman is not permitted to answer First she will be hollowed out Her juices extracted Her natural organs replaced By parts she is not permitted to name Her five senses Are replaced by substitutes Guaranteed non-inflammable Non-toxic Her sister is replaced by a substitute At the end of the assembly line The old maid minces out Into what she calls America She has forgotten she is a woman She has no sister In her shriveled brain Something murmurs that life is an accident She wonders how it happened to her

my first drink was in my mother my next, my bris. doctor spread red wine across my lips. took my foreskin • every time i drink     i lose something • no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water • brandy was used to treat everything from colds to pneumonia frostbite to snake bites tb patients were placed on ethanol drips tonics & cough medicines spooned into the crying mouths of children • each friday in synagogue a prayer for red at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen spirits • how many times have i woke strange in an unfamiliar bed? my head neolithic • my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand & flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine he called his woman she locked the door • i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose the other half is my own hand that poured the codeine    that lifted the red plastic again & again & • i’m trying to understand pleasure     it comes back in flashes    every jean button thumbed open to reveal a different man     every slurred & furious permission • i was sober a year before [          ] died • every time i drink     i lose someone • if you look close at the process of fermentation you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body until it’s transformed into something more volatile • the wino outside the liquor store mistakes me for his son

I sit across the table from my partner in the atrium of the psychiatric holding facility our hands churched into our laps. We are not allowed to touch. The air between us thick as Perspex. They tell me all the ways this place resembles a prison. • Everything a sterile white so clean it could almost disinfect a memory. • In 1787, Jeremy Bentham conceived of what would become the most common prison design: the panopticon. Intended to control prisoners through the illusion that they are always under surveillance. • My partner tells their therapist they are afraid of taking their own life, that they balanced on a building’s edge, & three officers escort them from the room. • The first cop who ever handcuffed me [was my father] left me bound till my fingers blued. On the days when I can’t remember his face, he becomes the scent of vodka & zip ties the sound of cuffs & a bottle petaling into blades. • At the booking office they remove my glasses & the guards blur into a procession of fathers. • I bring my partner clothes & pads when the hospital decides to hold them longer, shove each shirt that could mark them as queer back inside the closet & shut it [like a mouth]. • The word faggot scrawls across the jail guard’s lips like graffiti. • When I visit my partner they insist on staying inside the sky above the patio cordoned off  with chicken wire. • I plead my sentence down in exchange for: my face, my prints, my DNA & ten years probation. When I see a cop, I fear even my breath criminal & when my therapist asks me if  I’m suicidal I lie. Perhaps both are a kind of  surveillance. • Tear gas floods the street, sharpens water to a blade hidden in the orbit of my eye. & just like this, a squad car remakes my sadness a weapon. If my partner snaps cuffs around my wrists [& I asked for this] have they also weaponized my desire? • A woman in the facility tells my partner: I know what you are. Says: Sinner. Says: Anti-christ. My partner goads her on, babbles in false tongues & is confined to their room for safety. • Once, a cop dragged me into an alley & beat me like he knew exactly what I was. What does it say if sometimes when I ask my partner to hit me I expect his fist tightened in their throat, his voice bruising their tongue? • I am arrested & placed [in the men’s jail] in solitary confinement. They tell me this is protective custody. That they couldn’t afford the lawsuit if  I were killed. In this way, they tell me I am a woman only when I am no longer breathing. • The origin of the word prison is the Latin prehendere— to take. It follows, then, that to take your life is to prison the body beneath dirt. • [Historically, suicide is a criminal act]. • Balanced on a building’s edge, I imagine some permutation of  this moment where to fail at death would be a breach of my probation. • We both weep for the first time upon release when we see the sky. Pale blue sliced through with a single helix of razor wire & bordered in sterile white.

Would you believe, when you this monsieur see, That his whole body should speak French, not he? That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather, And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hether, And land on one whose face durst never be Toward the sea farther than Half-Way Tree? That he, untraveled, should be French so much As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch? Or had his father, when he did him get, The French disease, with which he labors yet? Or hung some monsieur’s picture on the wall, By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all? Or is it some French statue? No: ’T doth move, And stoop, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove The new French tailor’s motion, monthly made, Daily to turn in Paul’s, and help the trade.

Because I gazed out the window at birds doing backflips when the subject turned to diamonds, because my eyes glazed over with the slightly sleepy sheen your cake will wear, never let it be said that I’d rather be firing arrows at heart-shaped dartboards or in a cave composing polyglot puns. I crave, I long for transforming love as surely as leaves need water and mouths seek bread. But I also fear the colder changes that lie in wait and threaten to turn moons of honey to pools of molasses, broad front porches to narrow back gardens, and tight rings of friendship to flimsy things that break when a gold band brightly implies Leave early, go home, become one with the one the world has told you to tend and treasure above all others. You love, and that’s good; you are loved, that’s superb; you will vanish and reap some happy rewards. But look at the birds.

It was not a romantic sentiment, nor self-determined; rather, it was embarrassing. My love of spearheading, from introvert to extrovert, from cowardice to consequence, from the enjambment to the unspecified dunce. It was a sabotage, a reckless moment: a purulent, tawny decree. All temptation puzzled me and drew me in. I dropped out of a large life, I flew over exams, I punched out breakfast teachers with lunch money, toiling over the idea of belonging rather than over upward mobility. I understood how power flung outward into the troves of the cursed (I felt cursed or troubled all of the time). I wasn't bearing oranges, limes, or even lemons. All of it blurred together so that a mere suggestion made by an outside force was something to be freely ignored. I could nod off, I could misinterpret, it could be reconfigured as a negotiation. The fog felt like an aphorism. Never lifting, always dull, always an added pull. The tribunal cloud judged below, judged my direction. There was lying, conning, faking, elucidating in order to get away with undoing. I was interested in preserving yet I can't tell you if it felt sacred or befallen. Your anxiety might have represented a crushing faith or a character assassination, my own or someone else's. Or a lack of grip on reality: the wet rip of the grocery bags all of it falling— your body on all fours. Accumulating soot upon retrieval. There were downsides to feeling different so I huddled in the corner (not a ball, not rocking). I felt friendless and yet social. I felt no aptitude towards refining a skill. However, words cut my brain into two brains with their precipice their demarcations, their incisions (too strong a word). They held me captive against their edge, their influence: I felt like insinuating something delicate or dear. Now—I am holding on—trying to pay attention to the collusion that I must be playing over and over in my mind, and it was my mind, it needed me to leave everything outside, on the steps or in the sky, to feign exhaustion in order to meet an aberration, the one in the corner that felt large and carefree with its own vernacular sprawled with whitewash on bricks or floors or that ghastly far above that kept me standing very still but perhaps I wasn't inactive, I was just interpreting what had already been an assumed boundary, immersed in its insularity and in what stuck to its roundedness. for Katy Lederer

Most people would rather not, but I indulge, every few weeks, the thought of it. Sometimes the oily smell of an evening flower appears and hangs in the air, a slightly browner spot. I think most people had it wrong when they said forget about it and find a fresh patch of  grass to lie down in. There are prayers, though, about that kind of peace. I have to admit, sometimes I want nothing more than to be lying on the bottom of an unimpressive river. I can watch all the leaves and sticks skim over my head, and no one will bother me because they’re swimming in the more impressive rivers. The water’s not too cold. It doesn’t feel like being dead. It also doesn’t feel like being old or fetal. I came to the humble water to lie down. I did what I set out to do. Now I don’t have to tell you anything more about it.

The style a form of concealment the way style is. His manners seemed a parody, almost, Of manners, a movie star of bygone days; Strangely elaborate, highly stylized manners, Complicit with his fame and with your praise; Looking toward you and then away from you, Star-like, movie-star-like, a dance routine, The walk almost a glide, or elegant shuffle, Always on the verge of veering away, Circling away and over to the other side Of the frozen skating arena that he was on; A dancer’s courtesy, the courtesy, I mean, of the dancer to the audience, Flirtatious and familiar, only for you, And entirely impersonal and withheld. All of the above, though, maybe, misses the point, Because it seems to say he knew about What he was doing or what the style was for, And nothing let one be sure that this was so; A look on his face of amusement, as if he knew A secret that he shared with you and yet Kept to himself, as if it only showed The cryptogram but wouldn’t provide the key To read it with. But could he read the code? One night, late at night, as we were driving Home from having had dinner out, in Boston, We saw him figure skating through Charles Street Circle, Right through and among the circling lights of cars As if with champion skill on thin ice whirling Oblivious to the astonished blaring horns, As a dancer or skater seems, while dancing to The music that we hear, oblivious to The music that we hear and listening to Some other music heard from somewhere else. So Peter moved like a dancer or skater through And among the dangerous outraged cars as if Untouchable and untouched and moving to The sounds of something else from somewhere else— The music maybe of his madness was it? It was as if he skated in solitude And glided whirling on a lonely tarn Far out away from everything there is.