517 Social commentaries poems

The upkeep of the castle is The downfall of the cottages Where fishermen and peasants live Or used to live. The young men leave In homemade boats in which they drown, In makeshift planes that burn and crash, Or die of boredom on the train That starts each month for Cold Cash, Only to find when they arrive That that’s not where the castle is. The women left live in the sticks, And when they do the weekly wash Or mend the nets to catch the fish, They sing this song: “We work for weeks For nothing. Now the men have gone, We’d like to be where money talks, For all the rest is gibberish.” They pack their bags and take the train And travel through a strange terrain, But not to where the castle is. When there’s no one left but children And the very old, the young And lame survivors play a game Invariable in its details In which they take the daily trash Down to the dump and sing a song About ash heaps and burials Whose burden always is the same: “If we were old, if we were young, We’d find out where the caste is.” At Cold Cash, where the castle is, Or where it is supposed to be, Nobody ever dies, it seems; They just go on—from first to last A series of monotonies— And they play bridge, mah-jongg, and gin The while they sing their tribal song, Which has no verse but a refrain: “We’re here. And if we’re here, of course, This must be where the castle is.” But even kings get sick and bank Accounts go bad and miracles Occur, though sometimes in reverse; Elaborate discrepancies Narrow down from bad to worse; Abysses open in a wink Below the shining pinnacles— “We do not know the place,” they sing, “That once we thought the castle was. Do you know where the castle is?” They travel near, they travel far To seek out where the castle is, And come upon the cottages, Which lie in smoking ruins, and there’s No man alive, no woman now To point the way, and though they sift Through the debris and pan the clay, Searching for the smallest clues, They haven’t found out to this day Just where the castle was, or is.

He knows how to do what he sets out to do with perfectly obvious procedure. The sea is dark and forbidding. The horizon is dark and forbidding. Even from a distance, the less said the better. The colors in some of these landscapes are perfectly desperate. In a portrait there is never anything wrong with the mouth. There is never anything wrong with anything. Machines are not choosers. The next best things are certain. Heaven knowing the next best things. The young can explain it, but who would they explain it to? More promise than performance as all sorts of things begin to interfere. An energetic hostess seated me at the counter next to a beautiful woman. It is possible the timid portion of the population unless held firmly in check will imitate the silliness of timid people of years ago. Supplication is valued. As soon as I learned the facts I gave up on the exchange. She wanted something mysterious, as if everything were the same. Life changes and so-called truth changes with it. The businesslike haste of the surgeon as he scolds the public. To look at him and the thing he can never look at shudderingly as the blood is drawn is the duty of every patriot. In a constructive age such as this I should have neglected everything for the supreme duty of aiding in the reconstruction. I took my courage, which starts everywhere and goes nowhere, and spoke to her. Here one can unquestionably infer the inside from the outside. The leaders of the free world, assembled as if by magic, seem to have the enemy at their mercy. It can be argued that Christ himself spoke to the mob. The crowd will stop to see almost anything. The crowd will stop to see something about almost everything.

It was the blind girl from the rez who stole the baker’s missing bread; it was the guitar playing fool who crooned and raced the wild mustangs through our heads. It was the village idiot who played his chess without the fool, the bowl of soup who said too late, too late, too late to blame the thread, the spoon, the text, the mole.

I dreamed of you tonight, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, as I walked down on the sidewalk under plumeria trees with a vog headache looking at the Māhealani moon. In my need fo’ grindz, and hungry fo’ modernity, I stumbled into the gentrified lights of Whole Foods, dreaming of your manifestos! What pineapples and what papayas! Busloads of tourists shopping at night! Bulk aisle full of hippies! Millennials in the kale! Settlers in the Kona coffee! And you, Richard Hamasaki, what were you doing kissing the ripe mangos? I saw you, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, broomless, ghostly janitor, sampling the poke in the seafood section and eyeing the smoked fish. I heard you ask questions of each: Who butchered the mahimahi? What price opah belly? Are you my ‘aumakua? I wandered in and out of the canned goods aisle following you, and followed in my imagination by Sir Spamalot. In our bourgeois fancy we strolled through the cooked foods 
section tasting hand-churned cheese, possessing every imported delicacy, and whispering to the cashier, “Go fuck yourself.” Where are we going, Wayne Kaumualii Westlake? The doors of perception close in an hour. Which way does your pakalōlō point 
tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our huaka‘i in Whole Foods and feel dādā.) Will we sail all night through Honolulu streets? The coconut trees no have nuts, tarps up for the homeless, we’ll both be lonely. Will we cruise witnessing the ruined empire of America, past pink mopeds in driveways, home to our overpriced apartments? Ah, dear uncle, Buddhahead, ghostly poetry teacher, what Hawai‘i did you have when TheBus quit turning its wheels and you arrived in Waikīkī and stood watching the canoes disappear on the murky waters of the Ala Wai?

It is very hot—92 today—to be wearing a stocking cap, but the adolescent swaggering through the grocery store automatic door doesn’t seem to mind; does not even appear to be perspiring. The tugged-down hat is part of his carefully orchestrated outfit: bagging pants, screaming t-shirt, high-topped shoes. The young woman who yells to her friends from an open pickup window is attired for summer season in strapless stretch tube top, slipping down toward bountiful cleavage valley. She tugs it up in front as she races toward the two who have just passed a cigarette between them like a baton on a relay team. Her white chest gleams like burnished treasure as they giggle loudly there in the corner and I glance down to see what costume I have selected to present myself to the world today. I smile; it’s my sky blue shirt with large deliberately faded Peace sign, smack dab in the middle, plus grey suede Birkenstocks—a message that “I lived through the sixties and am so proud.” None of the young look my way. I round the corner and walk into Evening descending.

Having to make eye contact with the economy— A ball cap that says In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon will turn blood red and then disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched over an anatomy textbook, a student traces a heart over another heart—lunar eclipse. In the bathroom, crayoned graffiti: fuck the ♥ • He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over, Mr. feverish Mange Denied: like puzzling sabbath or street pupas; we shared some recent typos:I’m mediated(his), my tiny bots of stimulation, he loved the smudged and swoony words that proved him human— not a machine trying to infiltrate the servers of the New York Times, from which he launched (gad shakes or hefty lama) obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s black disaster, he lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio) a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum, some people “from where I used to work,” so much info (we both agreed), “The umbra,” the TV explained, shadow the earth was about to make— • ...and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness... ...firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened... ...so benighted and hopelessly lost... ...their eyes to the errors... MOON LORE , Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room, hour two. • Urgent Care. That was pretty multivalent. As in: We really need you to take care of this. We really need you to care for this. To care about this. We really need you to peer through the clinic’s storefront window, on alert for the ballyhooed moon— And there it was. Reddening in its black sock, deep in the middle of the hour, of someone’s nutso-tinsel talk on splendor— My fevered friend. Describing the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads fitting like a flash drive into the port of a healer’s hands.

“I would make love to one of our whores before I would fuck one of their bourgeoisie.” There was a proverb, like this: Don’t trust a         if he becomes a         even though he remains a       for forty years. And the sister opposite proverb: Don’t trust a       even though he has been in the grave for forty years. It was a difficult day, a bomb had spun open a bus, and children had been crushed down by a machine. Each wondered if he was born too soon, if later would have been better, if 40 + 40 + 40 + 40

On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared in Ojai, California, having left a Christmas Eve slumber party barefoot to “go with a guy” in a green truck, and all Christmas Day volunteers searched for her body within a fifteen-mile radius, and her father and grandfather searched and spoke to reporters because TV coverage might help them find her if she were still alive, and her mother stayed home with the telephone, not appearing in public, and I could imagine this family deciding together this division of labor and what little else they could do to do something, and the kitchen they sat in, the tones they spoke in, who cried and who didn’t, and how they comforted one another with words of hope and strokings of backs and necks, but I couldn’t imagine their fear that their daughter had been murdered in the woods, raped no doubt, tied up, chopped up, God knows what else, or them picturing her terror as it was happening to her or their own terror of her absence ever after, cut off from them before she had a chance to grow through adolescence, her room ever the same with its stupid posters of rock stars until they can bear to take them down because they can’t bear to leave them up anymore— on this day, which happened to be Christmas, at the kind of holiday gathering with a whole turkey and spiral-cut ham and beautiful dishes our hosts spent their money and time making to cheer their friends and enjoy the pleasure of giving, in a living room sparkling with scented candles and bunting and a ten-foot tree adorned with antique ornaments, the girl’s disappearance kept surfacing in conversations across the room while I was being cornered by a man who said his wife was leaving him after twenty-one years of marriage, then recited his resumé as if this couldn’t happen to someone with his business acumen; and it did again after I excused myself to refill my punch glass when someone at the punch bowl said what she had heard about it from someone else who had played tennis that morning with the girl’s mother’s doubles partner, while I filled a punch glass for somebody’s dad brought along so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas, a man in his eighties with a face like a raven’s, his body stooped, ravaged by age and diseases, who told me he was amazed to still be alive himself after a year in which he had lost both his wife and son, then, to my amazement, began telling me how important he is in his business world just like the man I had just gotten away from, that he’s still a player in international steel involved in top-drawer projects for the navy, and I was selfish enough to be selfless enough to draw him out a little, and the younger man, too (who appeared at my elbow again and started talking again), but not selfless enough to feel what they each were going through because my own fear and hunger cloud how I imagine everyone, including the bereaved family of the missing girl, and the girl herself, and certainly her murderer, although I know what it is to hate yourself completely and believe all human community is lies and bullshit and what happens to other people doesn’t matter.

A vagabond is a newcomer in a heap of trouble. He’s an eyeball at a peephole that should be electrocuted. He’s a leper in a textile mill and likely to be beheaded, I mean, given a liverwurst sandwich on the break by the brook where the loaves are sliced. But he oughtn’t meddle with the powder puffs on the golf links— they have their own goats to tame, dirigibles to situate. He can act like an imbecile if the climate is propitious, a magnate of kidnap paradising around the oily depot, or a speck from a distant nebula wishing to purchase a certain skyscraper .... Well, if it’s permitted, then let’s regulate him, let’s testify against his thimble, and moderate his gloves before they sew an apron. The local minister is thinking of moving to Holland, exchanging his old ballads for some lingerie. “Zatso!” says the vagabond. Homeless, like wheat that tattletales on the sermon, like wages swigged. “Zatso, zatso, zatso!” cries the vagabond. The minister reels under the weight of his thumbs, the vagabond seems to have jutted into his kernel, disturbed his terminal core. Slowly, and with trifling dignity, the minister removes from his lapel his last campaign button: Don’t Mess with Raymond, New Hampshire.

After the steaming bodies swept through the hungry streets of swollen cities; after the vast pink spawning of family poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies; after the gamble of latex and diaphragms and pills; I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge of Increase and Multiply, made affirmation:Yes, deliver us from complicity. And after the precision of scalpels, I woke to a landscape of sunshine where the catbird mates for life and maps trace out no alibis—stepped into a morning of naked truth, where acts mean what they really are: the purity of loving for the sake of love.