517 Social commentaries poems

A vigilant gun that always picks out The right target—even if it’s you— No matter who you’re aiming at. A computer that listens and blows you, As you blow it, to your favorite tune. Meat that cleans your teeth As you’re masticating it. A truck so awesome, only the President Of the United States of America’s allowed To careen in it, to his own beat. A dictionary with positive adjectives only. A dictionary with no wet verbs. A dictionary with negotiable definitions. A dictionary that defines words by their antonyms. All the greatest hits from the last millennium Performed live, on stage, on the inside Of your state of the art, acoustically-enhanced skull. A complete set of nude photos Of you, taken by you and sold Back to you—at a discount. A sex doll with a mirror for a face. A sex doll with a Ph.D. A sex doll with adjustable skin tone. A sensitive sex doll that just wants To be friends—a Platonic sex doll. Rain water in a bottle, sunshine in a box And ambience sounds from a bus stop Down the street, recorded on a CD. A 24-hour video of what you did yesterday. A 24-hour video of what you’ll do tomorrow. A super realistic photo of what’s outside Your window, pasted to your window. A baseball game that never ends, To be played simultaneously with A football game that never ends. Cluster bombs that scatter copies of Leaves of Grass Over a thousand mile radius, for a thousand years. Landmines made with dough, Topped with mozzarella and all Your favorite toppings. An airplane that never lands. And, finally, your favorite fairy tale Painted on your new plastic limbs.

I. TO THE FATES They cannot keep the peace or their hands off each other, breed not yet preach the old discredited creed. Love is charity conceived as a coin dropped in a beggar’s cup. Reason not the need. Gluttony is no nicer than greed or wrath, but lust is our categorical must. We have no choice but to breed. II. OLYMPIA Olympia lies on her couch with an insolent stare, her hand hiding her crotch, a flower in her hair. She splits the lot of us with a sneer: we are either breeders or queer. We will fight wars because of her. She will root us on. We will win. The face in the mirror is not brave, but we crave contact with her skin and the jewel in the mouth of her cave. She tempts like a sin and under her spell we fall into a deep enchanted sleep, and wake up ready to make the leap, ready to heed her call, only now we’re alone, on streets less friendly than wilderness, a platoon of ex-pals in Manhattan. Olympia tempts like a sin, but then sends us home to the wife, commands us to resume the life we had planned to give up in her honor: the life of a dutiful husband, a modest success in his profession, impressive in credentials, in mood depressive (but nothing that a pill won’t cure). You ask if he is happy? “Sure.” And Olympia lies on her couch, with her insolent stare, her hand hiding her crotch, a flower in her hair.

1 Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things, from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need. Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block, and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected, where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectation as cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood. Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman? It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are. Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations— Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye. 2 But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surely that hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain, aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards. Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztec your heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance! Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling, we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher, who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosure where dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters,unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things— at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D .... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

Let us honor the topmost banner fluttering over the kingdom of commodities— the encoded soul of price rose of the name and name of the rose, bundle of stems, fasces of tendons and veins— wrist on which to auscultate the pulse of money.

Learn from the man who spends much of his life speaking To the back of your head knowing what it means to follow The razor’s edge along a worn strop or random thoughts As they spring so invisibly from the mind to a mouth Who shouldered soldiers in two wars and fled fire fields Undecorated who fathered once but was fatherless forever And who works his sentiments in deeper into your scalp Under a sign on the knotty-pine walls whose rubric reads quot homines, tot sententiae which means he sees In you his suffering smells of horehound tonics and gels Pillow heads and powders and a floor full of snippings Swept neatly every evening into a pile for the field mice All those roundabout hours only a man who fixes his tie To clip crabgrass crowding a lady’s grave could believe With a certain clean devotion and who would never for one Moment dream of hurting you when your back was turned

Every day I peruse the box scores for hours Sometimes I wonder why I do it Since I am not going to take a test on it And no one is going to give me money The pleasure’s something like that of codes Of deciphering an ancient alphabet say So as brightly to picturize Eurydice In the Elysian Fields on her perfect day The day she went 5 for 5 against Vic Raschi

These are the saddest of possible words: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.” Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double— Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

The little girl won’t eat her sandwich; she lifts the bun and looks in, but the grey beef coated with relish is always there. Her mother says, “Do it for mother.” Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch. And a mother’s life? “What can you do with a man like that?” she asks the sleeping cook and then the old Negro who won’t sit. “He’s been out all night trying to get it. I hope he gets it. What did he ever do but get it?” The Negro doesn’t look, though he looks like he’s been out all night trying. Everyone’s been out all night trying. Why else would we be drinking beer at attention? If she were younger, or if I were Prince Valiant, I would say that fate brought me here to quiet the crying, to sweeten the sandwich of the child, to waken the cook, to stop the Negro from bearing witness to the world. The dawn still hasn’t come, and now we hear the 8 o’clock whistles blasting from heaven, and with no morning the day is sold.

Trade, Trade versus Art, Brain, Brain versus Heart; Oh, the earthiness of these hard-hearted times, When clinking dollars, and jingling dimes, Drown all the finer music of the soul. Life as an Octopus with but this creed, That all the world was made to serve his greed; Trade has spread out his mighty myriad claw, And drawn into his foul polluted maw, The brightest and the best, Well nigh, Has he drained dry, The sacred fount of Truth; And if, forsooth, He has left yet some struggling streams from it to go, He has contaminated so their flow, That Truth, scarce is it true. Poor Art with struggling gasp, Lies strangled, dying in his mighty grasp; He locks his grimy fingers ’bout her snowy throat so tender. Is there no power to rescue her, protect, defend her? Shall Art be left to perish? Shall all the images her shrines cherish Be left to this iconoclast, to vulgar Trade? Oh, that mankind had less of Brain and more of Heart, Oh, that the world had less of Trade and more of Art; Then would there be less grinding down the poor, Then would men learn to love each other more; For Trade stalks like a giant through the land, Bearing aloft the rich in his high hand, While down beneath his mighty ponderous tread, He crushes those who cry for daily bread.