517 Social commentaries poems

In a room more chicken coop than room, I rent a fan that feels on my face like sound. Low traffic from San Fernando, named for a king who became a city, a valley, a saint. We are meant to repeat his name. Instead I say prickly pear, a cactus which spreads its many-paddled hands into the space around itself. No pears. I call Mom to ask what the latest austerity measures mean. Some ants on the wall make their way from one unseeable point to another; the banks have closed. I tell her to barter; barter what, she says. An acquaintance posts “Tourism: The Best Way to Be an Ally to Greece” as if in each tourist’s pleasure bloomed a charity. Mules clabber down the stone paths loaded with grapes to make next year’s wine, if the tourists come back next year, and we hope they will. I say we, but I’m closer to they. Living temporarily in a neighborhood named for the happy, who were who exactly? I grow a little stiff with, a little lean with, a little faint with, a little worn with seeming. I must need to conquer my mind. The roses dead because of drought because whoever lives here cares enough to let their roses die. I must need to conquer the notion anything needs conquering. Something in me can’t tell what belongs. The ants for whom anything is a street. What sounded like a gate opening was eucalyptus branches dragging themselves along the tin roof. A yellow butterfly that has no interest in me. I have no interest in kings.

Passing through huddled and ugly walls, By doorways where women haggard Looked from their hunger-deep eyes, Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands, Out from the huddled and ugly walls, I came sudden, at the city's edge, On a blue burst of lake, Long lake waves breaking under the sun On a spray-flung curve of shore; And a fluttering storm of gulls, Masses of great gray wings And flying white bellies Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Hard Rock / was / “known not to take no shit From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it: Split purple lips, lumbed ears, welts above His yellow eyes, and one long scar that cut Across his temple and plowed through a thick Canopy of kinky hair. The WORD / was / that Hard Rock wasn’t a mean nigger Anymore, that the doctors had bored a hole in his head, Cut out part of his brain, and shot electricity Through the rest. When they brought Hard Rock back, Handcuffed and chained, he was turned loose, Like a freshly gelded stallion, to try his new status. And we all waited and watched, like a herd of sheep, To see if the WORD was true. As we waited we wrapped ourselves in the cloak Of his exploits: “Man, the last time, it took eight Screws to put him in the Hole.” “Yeah, remember when he Smacked the captain with his dinner tray?” “He set The record for time in the Hole—67 straight days!” “Ol Hard Rock! man, that’s one crazy nigger.” And then the jewel of a myth that Hard Rock had once bit A screw on the thumb and poisoned him with syphilitic spit. The testing came, to see if Hard Rock was really tame. A hillbilly called him a black son of a bitch And didn’t lose his teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock From before shook him down and barked in his face. And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and looked silly, His eyes empty like knot holes in a fence. And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his first name, We told ourselves that he had just wised up, Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long, And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed. He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do, The fears of years, like a biting whip, Had cut deep bloody grooves Across our backs.

Went down home ’bout a year ago things so bad, Lord, my heart was sore. Folks had nothing was a sin and shame every-body said hard time was the blame. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Sun was shining fourteen days and no rain hoeing and planting was all in vain. Hard hard times, Lord, all around meal barrels empty crops burnt to the ground. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Skinny looking children bellies poking out that old pellagra without a doubt. Old folks hanging ’round the cabin door ain’t seen times this hard before. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. I went to the Boss at the Commissary store folks all starving please don’t close your door want more food a little more time to pay Boss Man laughed and walked away. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had. Landlord coming ’round when the rent is due you ain’t got the money take your home from you take your mule and horse even take your cow get offa my land you ain’t no good no how. Great-God-a-mighty folks feeling bad lost every thing they ever had.

I HEARD a woman's lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: "A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin' For all her hustlin'. Somebody always gets What she goes on the street for. If it ain't a pimp It's a bull what gets it. I been hustlin' now Till I ain't much good any more. I got nothin' to show for it. Some man got it all, Every night's hustlin' I ever did."

Muscular as a stallion in fact — but I have no horse in this race of people against people. It was made certain I wouldn’t, that I’d inherit nothing except a whipping of my hindquarters as a form of correction, in the cadence of I love you, tar baby, I love you. This is not unlike how my parents were raised, to comply, and their parents before them, and theirs before them and so forth as far back as anyone cared to speak of what they lived through, the preposterous preposition of it all. Therefore and thereafter, whenever I hear the word pedigree, I think of the blank check I don’t have behind my name, and then I think of saddles and stirrups, and then the soreness of my lower back, and then the source of that. How a boss can ride you: of this I am personally familiar, plus know by blood drawn from two lines of family men forced to cut out their own tongues to keep food on the table they could no longer taste or even stand to. Their tongues grew back, yes, after some time and with sharpness I’m told, needing to cut against something, anything, to be purposeful given their new forms. Woe! Woe! Woe! How a man rides his wife, his children, how he’d ride a horse he’ll never have, could never give them unless said horse is immaterial, hence not a horse at all — just muscular, as a stallion is, as a word is that’s denied striving families horsepower, any engine beyond their fragile bodies to propel them forward; the whole race: forward, even if it pits people against a people, even if it means rearing a rear end tender and raw. I love you, tar baby, I love you something strong.

Eugene, OR Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through by Jacob’s Gallery, you have now entered the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book I store between my temples; in that mean and moonless city, you must hang fraught in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed, and in this cutty version of forever, forever calling on your unseen beau, one flake in a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze. And now the rain turns, light but going steady on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace from devil-may-have-me to heading-somewhere and still your mouth in the haze calling is a ruby carbuncle woken by a miner’s head-beam, the reddest berry in the hedgerow, which all but the bird in the fable know not to pluck.

He sees through stone he has the secret eyes this old black one who under prison skies sits pressed by the sun against the western wall his pipe between purple gums the years fall like overripe plums bursting red flesh on the dark earth his time is not my time but I have known him in a time gone he led me trembling cold into the dark forest taught me the secret rites to make it with a woman to be true to my brothers to make my spear drink the blood of my enemies now black cats circle him flash white teeth snarl at the air mashing green grass beneath shining muscles ears peeling his words he smiles he knows the hunt    the enemy he has the secret eyes he sees through stone

When Heavy tells a story the millwright shanty under the electric furnaces chokes with quiet, amid the roar, as Heavy pauses, adjusts his mountainous weight over a creaky grease-stained metal chair and looks up at the whirling ceiling fan next to fluorescent lights hanging by wires. His fingers lace like so many sausages across the canvas of blue workshirt on his chest. Heavy tells his story and the voice of reason quickens the demise of foulness from red-faced millwrights just back from a repair job and sitting around for the five air whistles that again call them to combat on the furnace floor. All laughter stops, all nonsense sayings and cuts of wisdom cease their echo when Heavy tells a story. Heavy talks about the Mexican melter who once had an affair with the Pit Boss’s wife. The heart of the problem–and the fact from which the story’s plot revolves– was that the melter lived across the street from the Pit Boss. One night just before the graveyard shift, the melter left his home, kissed his wife’s round face and proceeded to walk to the bus stop. But a bullet pierced through his hardhat and he fell, like an overturned stack of fire bricks, onto the pavement. The moral of this story: Never have an affair with someone whose old man lives within shooting distance. Heavy tells a story about a furnace foreman who always yelled at the laborers for failing to clean the bag house of the built-up filth from hours of cooking scrap iron and ore. The men told him it was too dangerous to walk on the tin-roofed panels; their weight could cause them to fall some 30 feet into the gaping mouth of a flaming furnace below. “Nonsense,” the foreman yelled, “you’re all just lazy Polacks.” (he called everyone Polacks). The foreman then proceeded to walk across the roof as the men stood nearby, with mouths open, near the safety of side beams. “You see,” he said standing in the middle as hydraulics moved shutters up and down to capture the sulphur dust. Then the foreman moved forward and before anyone could shout, he crashed through the roof, screaming into a reddened pot of molten metal; the oxygen in his body making popping sounds as it entered. The furnace operates continued to pour ladles of scrap iron and to melt the steel. They skimmed the slag off the top and when it was ready, they poured the molten mass into ingot molds. There was nothing they could do for the foreman, they said. Production had to keep going. Heavy looks into the eyes of his listeners and says: Somewhere there’s a skyscraper in downtown LA with steel beams made from the ingot with the foreman’s body in it. Somewhere there’s a bridge or underground pipe with the man’s remains chemically bound within the molecular structure. Heavy tells a story. . . and the men lay down their tools, and coffee is poured into heavy ceramic cups, the shanty stills beneath the rumbling, and even foremen stop by to pay a listen when Heavy tells a story.

Over time, you picture them after dark, in searches focusing on streets and houses close above the churches or balancing on narrow wands of light. And find so much depends upon the way you choose to look at them: high in the night their minor flares confused among the stars, there almost beautiful. Or from way back over the map from where they might resemble a business of flies around the head wound of an animal.