517 Social commentaries poems

Game of Thrones Follow where all is. / Follow the transfused. / Follow what is still and what is still-attracting. That light / That beauty / That love / That, that is massy-borne and rising up, like a drifting star. Like stars lift. / Like lifting stars. / Like the lifting of stars, I rose. I rise. Rose. Rose. Like a thing beyond words: satiated. Let lie in the ravage. / Let lie in what is ravaged-wrought. Why fear what hasn’t become? I beckon, like light. / Like a star, I will beckon. / You will oblige. / You will lend the want. You will eclipse my blinding. You will know nothing. Nothing. You will know nothing of what has been dark.

Tell me how you entered this poem, how you even got in here. Where my parentals come from is where I’m coming from and where where I’m coming from is from we lock the front door and the back and the side and can’t spare a single extra key. Where where I’m coming from is from we shut all the windows tight like our eyes to an ugly view: a jail if I ever saw one, and maybe I did, and maybe that was enough for me. Maybe you made the mistake, by coming here. Unannounced. Uninvited. It takes a lot of talent to step in someone’s crib and be welcomed without any alarms going off, so shake your ass something dangerous if you can, sing me a song real sexy-like or be suck out of luck if I feel like shooting strangers today. If home is where the heart is then four red bullet wounds across the chest of the city’s flag say everything there is about my feelings toward you and the whole damn world right now. Because it was my own blood this time and yet I’m still here, and the funny thing about that town and this one is that they both burned down once. And down the hall they’re burning bud and I want some kinda sorta but without the friends. Which makes you foe, I suppose, as if you are the presence of all colors and I am the absence of said colors. But maybe I got it backwards, twisted it all up. It just hurts to have my hair pulled even if it’s by my own hand. My mind is spinning blanks inside every chamber; everywhere I turn on the TV they’re shooting boys like what I used to be before I wasn’t anymore and when did that happen? And what am I now? Are you the phantom or me, me or none of the above? The last shadow I cast on a sunny Sunday stole my wallet and bought this gun and all the rounds and all the rounds at the bar, too. Where I’m coming from, when in love: squeeze. When lonely, loan yourself some time and don’t pay it back. Beware, because I’m both lonely and in love like the living embodiment of the code switch. I’m polluted air and poisoned water and whatever else they say except when I say I’m not and I’m not one to play for a fool for the record. Fear me. I’m godly and I’m just and just get the hell out demon and do come again. Come again: it’s my igneous ire toward you that keeps me a live wire, and alive.

Covet not the sun its honorarium nor authorize the stars their grants to write. The sojournors spotted a forest adrift with language, but couldn't make sense of it. The woods at odds with the usual channels and those neighboring mountains didn't look like pyramids, no matter the scale. Read this part as if the sum of lilac mattered to you. For love of someone else's vortex, toss the luminaries aside. In lieu of flowers, please donate and in exchange for your sympathy I'll give you edits on the level of the line. Poems are to war as are ghosts to the proverbial orchard. Headstones offer us nothing but an end to syntax. Microsoft Word inverts the sea. I read your manuscript. Reader, I married it. I fear for the estuaries. They are so small this time of year.

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested. By some inexplicable oversight nobody jeers when I walk down the street. I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere. What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted? Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs? They are absolutely shameless at the bank—— You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non- chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested, but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—— they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait. Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—— very clever. They think that they can scare me. I am always scared. And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you! At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it’s not done. I go on dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip, accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause, past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack-dogs— toward my place, the one at the end of the counter, the scalpel on the napkin.

Her neon sign blared two Harlem blocks. In Aunt Grindle’s Elite Chitterling Shop the variegated dinoceras of a jukebox railed and wailed from everlasting to everlasting: Come back, Baby, come back—I need your gravy. Come back, Baby, come back—I’m weak and wavy. The talk of the town, I’m Skid Row bound— and I don’t mean maybe! (O scholars) this is the ambivalence of classical blues—and the coins came from the blue-devils’ pocket of Dipsy Muse. Across an alp of chitterlings, pungent as epigrams, Doctor Obi Nkomo the alter ego of the Harlem Gallery —as a news-waif hallooed, “The Desert Fox is dead!”— clicked his tongue —a residual habit from the veld— and —stout as a peasant in the Bread-and-Cheese War— said, “The lie of the artist is the only lie for which a mortal or a god should die.” Because nobody was a nobody to him, when from his thin charcoal lips irony escaped, it was malice toward none. The therapy of his slips by design into primitive objets d’art humanized the patrons of the Harlem Gallery as much as the masterworks he salvaged from the Lethe of the American Way in Black Manhattan. Mr. Guy Delaporte III cried out before the Regents, “Mr. Curator, what manner of man is this?” Unharassed by the ignis fatuus of a lost job, Doctor Nkomo clicked throatily and, with a chuckle whispered to me, “It’s not this buckle- head’s right or wrong if he does right or wrong.” Like a humming disk came the strophe of a rebel Bantu song. Hubris is an evil the Greeks (Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus) boned and fleshed to wear the mask. Pride is the lust- sinewed wench the churchman speaks of first in the Table of Deadly Sins: Doctor Nkomo’s All hail to Man was a vane on the wing to winnow the grain in person, place and thing. Too many (perhaps) of the Regents’ corralled hours Doctor Nkomo and I left gored in bull rings of pros and cons: without a horse-opera god, the Ultra dons the matador’s black of the wherefore and the why, or hoists the white flag and lets the red cells in the marrow die. His idée fixe ebbed and flowed across the dinner table: “Absurd life shakes its ass’s ears in Cendrars’—not Nkomo’s—stable. If, anchored like hooks of a hag-fish to sea weeds and patient as a weaver in haute-lisse tapestry, a Rivera or a Picasso, with a camel-hair alchemy, paints in fresco-buono the seven panels of a man’s tridimensionality in variforms and varicolors— since virtue has no Kelvin scale, since a mother breeds no twins alike, since no man is an escape running wild from self-sown seeds— then, no man, judged by his biosocial identity in toto can be a Kiefekil or a Tartufe, an Iscariot or an Iago.” Is philosophy, then, a tittle’s snack? History, a peacock's almanac? He laughed down at me, a kidney without anchorage, and said: “You must see through the millstone, since you’re not like Julio Sigafoos and me— an ex-savage.” His ebony forefinger an assagai blade, he mused aloud as the box played in Harlem’s juke: “Curator of the Harlem Ghetto, what is a masterpiece? A virgin or a jade, the vis viva of an ape of God, to awaken one, to pleasure one— a way-of-life’s aubade.” Black as cypress lawn, the crag of a woman crabsidled in. The breath of a fraxinella in hot weather, her unlooked-for grin evaporated; then, like a well’s spew of mud and oil and raw gas, she blew her top. Dipsy Muse slumped like Uhlan when his feet failed to prop, his squeal the squeal of a peccary ax-poled in its pen. The stem and stern of the Elite Chitterling Shop pitched and ditched in the chatter and squawks, in the clatter and guffaws, as a Yarmouth yawl yaws when struck by a rogue-elephant sea. Scragged beyond the cavernous door, clamorous as a parrot against the rain, Dipsy Muse’s vanity scrabbled in vain like an anchor along the neck-gorge of a sea-floor. The jukebox railed and wailed: The black widow spider gets rid of her man, gets rid of her daddy as fast as she can. If you fool around, I know what I’ll do— like the black widow spider I’ll get rid of you. A giraffine fellow whose yellow skin mocked the netted pattern of a cantaloupe opened his rawhide pocketbook to sniff of dope a whiff, with a galley curse and an alley gag; then—laughing, choking, brimstoning his spouse, he caved in like Ben Franklin’s beggarly bag. Doctor Nkomo sighed: “The nicks and cuts under a stallion’s tail spur him to carry it higher; but the incised horsetail of a man drains the bones of his I-ness drier.” A black outsider with all his eggs but one in the White Man’s basket, he quaffed his beer, stretched his beanpole legs; then —a rubberneck Robin Hood in a morris dance— readied a hobby with another color for a ride beyond the Afrikaner’s stance. “O, Romeo,” he said, “O Casanova, prithee, what is chivalrous—what, barbaric? (Why gnaw one’s thoughts to the bone?) When a cavemen painted a rubric figure of his mate with a gritstone, Eros conquered Thanatos.” His eyes glistening dots of an ice plant, he said: “My Western friends —with deserts to be turned into green pastures— rent diving bells to get the bends, curfew morals, incubate tsetse flies, stage a barroom brawl of means and ends in a cul-de-sac. (Eagles dying of hunger with cocks in their claws!) That rebel jukebox! Hear the ghetto’s dark guffaws that defy Manhattan’s Bible Belt! Aeons separate my native veld and your peaks of philosophy: I made the trek, Curator, on Man’s vegetable ivory, in threescore years and ten.” A whale of a man, I thought,a true, but not a typical, mammal. He absorbs alien ideas as Urdu Arabic characters. In a sepulchral corner, I glimpsed a Scarlet Sister Mary on the make, her lips dark and juicy like a half-done T-bone steak. The giraffine fellow eyed us with a dog-ape look and outed his impatience in a sigh; a single-acting plunger cast the die, “Mister,who are you?” His catarrhal eye baited by Doctor Nkomo’s hair (the silvery gray patina of a Japanese alloy), he was but a squeaking Cleopatra boy when the reply came like the undershot of a Poncelet water wheel: “Obi Nkomo, my dear Watson; but that is nil, a water stair that meanders to no vessel. If you ask what am I, you dash on rocks the wisdom and the will of Solon and Solomon. Am I a bee drugged on the honey of sophistry? Am I a fish from a river Jordan, fated to die as soon as it reaches an Asphalt Sea?” Not a sound came from the yellow giraffine fellow— not a sound from the bowels of this Ixion bound to the everlasting revolving ghetto wheel. Nearer the ground than Townsend’s solitaire, Doctor Nkomo raked his hair … his brain … but he did not blink the cliff of ice. “What am I?What are you? Perhaps we are twin colors in a crystal. When I was a Zulu lad, I heard an old-wives’ tale for seven-foot-spear Chakas to be. In a barnyard near a buffalo trail a hunter discovered an eagle eating dung with chickens. He carried the feathered rex to a mountain top, although it raised the dickens. The hunter explained, ‘You're not a chicken, Aquila.’ He launched the ungainly bird into space. A fouled umbrella! In the wing lock of habit, it tumbled in disgrace … down … down … down a ghostified cock! “Out of the visaing face of the sun swooped the falcon baron clarioning the summons of an aeried race. Twice the barnyard eagle answered the Solar City wight; thrice he spiraled the simoom-blistered height— braked and banked and beaked upward, upward, into transfiguring light. Old Probabilities,what am I? Mister,what are you? An eagle or a chicken come home to roost? I wish I knew!” His character (in the Greek sense) phrased a nonplus—needed a metaphor’s translation. As an African prince, kings and chiefs peacocked themselves behind him; and he, himself tough-conscienced, had slain heathenism, the Giant Grim, without a backward cry. Scot and plot, caste and class, rifted right angles to the curving grain. The dream of Abraham’s bosom bottled long ago, he walked the Pork Barrel’s porphyry street with the man in the ears; and the glassy rivers of talk —Heraclitean, Fabian, Marxian— in the lights and shadows of the illuminating gas, bona fides, limned a figure and cast of Homo Aethiopicus who knew all riverine traffickers pass beyond the Seven Walls of Water—to join … the Last of the Greeks … of the Romans, the Last. Once in a while his apology shaped itself like the symbol Q in a skipper’s log. During the falconry in the chamber of the Regents, Mr. Delaporte III flew off at a tangent and off the handle. Doctor Nkomo’s Dandie Dinmount terrier epithet sprang across the tables. My gavel big-talked in slang. Like a turtle’s head, the session withdrew into its shell. The old Africanist bowed cavalierly and said: “I’ve called the gentleman a liar —it’s true— and I am sorry for it.” Wealth of the fettered, illth of the lettered, left his realism, like rock dust, unweathered: one who eyes the needle of the present to knit the future’s garb. In his own buttoned guise he seemed to speak to the man Friday in Everyman boned and lined and veined for the twelve great fatigues to the Promised Land: “The golden mean of the dark wayfarer’s way between black Scylla and white Charybdis, I have traveled; subdued ifs in the way; from vile-canaille balconies and nigger heavens, seen day beasts and night beasts of prey in the disemboweling pits of Europe and America, in the death-worming bowels of Asia and Africa; and, although a Dumb Ox (like young Aquinas), I have not forgot the rainbows and the olive leaves against the orient sky. “The basso profundo Gibbon of Putney —not the lyric tenor, Thomas of Celano— hymns the Dies Irae!”

Man-dirt and stomachs that the sea unloads; rockets of quick lice crawling inland, planting their damn flags, putting their malethings in any hole that will stand still, yapping bloody murder while they slice off each other’s heads, spewing themselves around, priesting, whoring, lording it over little guys, messing their pants, writing gush-notes to their grandmas, wanting somebody to do something pronto, wanting the good thing right now and the bad stuff for the other boy. Gullet, praise God for the gut with the patented zipper; sing loud for the lads who sell ice boxes on the burning deck. Dear reader, gentle reader, dainty little reader, this is the way we go round the milktrucks and seamusic, Sike’s trap and Meg’s rib, the wobbly sparrow with two strikes on the bible, behave Alfred, your pokus is out; I used to collect old ladies, pickling them in brine and painting mustaches on their bellies, later I went in for stripteasing before Save Democracy Clubs; when the joint was raided we were all caught with our pants down. But I will say this: I like butter on both sides of my bread and my sister can rape a Hun any time she’s a mind to, or the Yellow Peril for that matter; Hector, your papa’s in the lobby. The old days were different; the ball scores meant something then, two pill in the side pocket and two bits says so; he got up slow see, shook the water out of his hair, wam, tell me that ain’t a sweet left hand; I told her what to do and we did it, Jesus I said, is your name McCoy? Maybe it was the beer or because she was only sixteen but I got hoarse just thinking about her; married a john who travels in cotton underwear. Now you take today; I don’t want it. Wessex, who was that with I saw you lady? Tony gave all his dough to the church; Lizzie believed in feeding her own face; and that’s why you’ll never meet a worm who isn’t an antichrist, my friend, I mean when you get down to a brass tack you’ll find some sucker sitting on it. Whereas. Muckle’s whip and Jessie’s rod, boyo, it sure looks black in the gut of this particular whale. Hilda, is that a .38 in your handbag? Ghosts in packs like dogs grinning at ghosts Pocketless thieves in a city that never sleeps Chains clank, warders curse, this world is stark mad Hey! Fatty, don’t look now but that’s a Revolution breathing down your neck.

The face looking into the room; Behind it light, shaking, like heat Lightning; the face calm and knowing; Seeing, but not seeing who I am; The mouth may be telling something. Something about our helplessness; Something about the confusions of beasts; The consequence of error; systems Haywire, or working; the stars gone All wrong in the body’s courses. Out on the plain of Mars, brilliantly Played under the lights, searched out Beyond any answer, the game went on Far into the night; the bloodiest came Home from the battle seeking the prize. The women were disgraced; hair streaming, Pleading into the staring: buy, buy—; Was it my daughter I was seeing?— The humiliation was pleasing: tears, Laughter, smiles, all mingled together. The light swallowed itself, a balloon Deflating; somewhere in the darkness A murmuring let itself go.

I was hanging with grandparents in a kindergarten and the teacher drew an accordion wall across to keep the children in antigravity class together the grandparents separately graded balloon worksheets sunlight floated in, the grandparents thoughtful about addition, mulling vacation Come here I said to the little one too little to be in class, soft as peaches I want to tell you something and you repeat it back to me next time She toddled over, put her arms up to hug me, we hugged She had stars inside her soul, was visibly celestial beneath her coat More human than human, got it? I cuddled her Okay, she said,I’m more human than a human

Miracle of the children              the brilliant Children           the word Liquid as woodlands              Children? When she was a child I read Exodus To my daughter          'The children of Israel. . .' Pillar of fire Pillar of cloud We stared at the end Into each other's eyes                            Where She said hushed Were the adults              We dreamed to each other Miracle of the children The brilliant children                       Miracle Of their brilliance                      Miracle of

Can't swim; uses credit cards and pills to combat intolerable feelings of inadequacy; Won't admit his dread of boredom, chief impulse behind               numerous marital infidelities; Looks fat in jeans, mouths clichés with confidence,               breaks mother's plates in fights; Buys when the market is too high, and panics during               the inevitable descent; Still, Pop can always tell the subtle difference               between Pepsi and Coke, Has defined the darkness of red at dawn, memorized               the splash of poppies along Deserted railway tracks, and opposed the war in Vietnam               months before the students, Years before the politicians and press; give him               a minute with a road map And he will solve the mystery of bloodshot eyes;               transport him to mountaintop And watch him calculate the heaviness and height               of the local heavens; Needs no prompting to give money to his kids; speaks               French fluently, and tourist German; Sings Schubert in the shower; plays pinball in Paris;               knows the new maid steals, and forgives her.