517 Social commentaries poems

A drain spout splashing rusty stains on concrete, the taste of doorknobs you kiss before squinting through the musty keyhole at the knife-sharpener’s daughter, while across the city the knife-sharpener limps his pushcart with its dinging axles, with its screeching whetstone up wet alleys crying: scissors! knives! axes!

I almost insist on the words as doors left swinging from the force no one saw A wrap around hotel with empty courtyard boarded up, sprayed white Hiding Out. Nick is too kind two black and slowly moving marbles against flesh Sara, a model of containment Brian is luminous (all eyes) twin fires beyond the pit that only crackles green brighter than the edges of the neon lining Fairfax Family Books The Films of Robert Blake We score a trim ocean blue windbreaker and Dinosaurs of the Land, Sea & Air I slipped away from the bench when they brought the car around My black hobo sack abandoned and thought a bomb. I was seamlessly high on my air heels and driven away to where the camera could not follow 8-4-13

In the seam between day and night, wind ruts the dirt road and ruffles the milky way of dandelions. The young among them are greasy gold and urgent, while the old are balanced between growth and that burst past growing—annihilation, culmination of a beginning each has always been ending toward, admitting more and more space, until what's left is beyond color, a bleary truss of matter and air. Shocked accomplice of the rounding light, how you tremble in the stretch of your death, which is like all deaths, geometric with seed. Wind-swimmer, eye-floater, white nightgowned grandmother dancing your platelets on the head of this pin, can you show me how to wish, how to gather and scatter this single hooped breath?

Even the bosses are sleeping late in the dusty light of September. The parking lot’s empty and no one cares. No one unloads a ladder, steps on the gas or starts up the big machines in the shop, sanding and grinding, cutting and binding. No one lays a flat bead of flux over a metal seam or lowers the steel forks from a tailgate. Shadows gather inside the sleeve of the empty thermos beside the sink, the bells go still by the channel buoy, the wind lies down in the west, the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines turning a little, this way and that.

So I say to my friend at the day job “We are bored sometimes, and scented like realtors but if everyone’s equally disconsolate under labor’s gooey caul then nuance can be stitched more vividly to secrets lodged inside of everyone until it becomes your own country with highways that carry you silently past the jetty which, from their heavy drinking, the case managers come out to failing to be stable and badly attempting to sing” We’re pushing our barques past the mansions as I say this, near the dwellings of persons whose lives have no mooring outside the slow fact of our passing— huddled arrogantly under their air-conditioning they want us to be users moved by advertisers enticing the constituency to join them and sit there and weep But we’re too busy pulling toward centers where workers assemble. While time for them is a melody played at long intervals across condominiums we who are the power know our systems so much better now come to this hour outside it now give it new form on guitar

pigs prey to piggishnesses. get ate from the rooter to the tooter. I’m a hog for you baby,I can’t get enough go the wolfish crooner. the gust buffeted porker roll in the hay or laid down in twig rapine. let me in, let me in. no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement: his deadeye bigger than his brick house. Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose, whose greedy void like a whorehouse full of empties getting full. can’t get enough! rumored Stagger would root through pussy to plumb a fat boy. here piggy! what Lee see he seize. manful, ham-fisted. sorry Billy, your name mud and who love dirt like swine? they get in it like a straw house. it’ll be cold out before Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls. he got down. he get dirty.

Santa Maria Assunta, Torcello Mater dolorosa , here I am hungry And ill-disposed on worn flags at your feet. Through high windows wintry sun seeps in And floods the six-tiered polychrome Apocalypse, This Sunday's text in comic strip. That's my son over by the door, impatient To be off somewhere. Other boys pose On attila's Throne while their fathers snap pictures And mothers price lace - clotheslines of lace Strung from trucks selling pizzas. Around the lagoon, your fields have grown wild; Vines redden on half-fallen fences That no longer keep the allotments apart. On some islands the women make lace, punti in aria - stitches in air - Materializing the spaces between things.

Lagos you are dirty Your sand is soiled Your fruits pithy. I am tied to you in a strange land by lines that queue up for foodstuffs you should be eating but ship off to me here where I stand on check out lines and marvel at the cost of one paw paw, just one mango singular, along and apart from you my dirty city. O Lagos, your streets are packed and pollute the air while here in a smug smogged city I choke. Your cord cuts my throat. I am hurt and I cry like my Mami market mothers who go home night after night with the same tin pots. Their food is rotting and ought to be thrown out to the birds and beasts of the forest/ but the lines! O God, these lines are so long and between the houses and the foodstuffs so many palms must be oiled. Nairas are dripping with black gold and yet a beggar man’s lot is the same/ He covers his shame as best he can and little boys skip school. A policeman holds his right hand out a green car passes him dash. And we go dash you dis and we go dash you dat and mek we do business. O Lagos, Lagos, ah say, you don tyah fo dis? Yousef wey you de com fom? Me, I long for the cleanliness of sand roads that breathe long in carefully spaced intervals between cars running wild like mustangs roaming the plains. There are no drivers to speak of. They have vanished over the hills and into gulleys. The seeds have been planted. It is a bitter harvest we reap. The deeds have been done. What has been sown is the flower of our calabashes on the eve of harvest. If only the waters in the Marina If only the waves would whisper louder the secrets of her beaches I would know all/ My harbour is named after a queen whose son’s footprints are planted like a bad seed on the headdress of my children. Lagos, lay your plans carefully. There is no way to stop the rise of bicycles and lorries, hopeful bodies and empty pots. You divert dash for food, care for business. We are not an oasis in a dying desert/ Have we not learnt, o Lagos, the sound of seductive songs and sights that blind us between need and life there must be hope/

I am unable, yonder beggar cries, To stand, or move; if he say true, he lies.

A giant bird- of-paradise has climbed the bar: in this paradise there are no flowers, no flowers at all. When Happy Hour becomes Last Call— Adam in drag our royalty— we buy her gin for eternity (an unseen deejay scores the years with pulsing music of the spheres). Now the queen has gone, gone again in search of love, in search of sin. It’s closing time. You were not at fault. I drain my glass and lick the salt.