517 Social commentaries poems

Well I guess that’s all locked up tight Says Sam who guards the mall at night. Sam’s a puppet! He can’t use his eyes. His body is an excellent disguise. I’m Muffy the Mouse! I’m condemned to rhyme Until the Christmas special end of time. That’s Jodi, my human friend. The world goes on and on and will not end Hiya there Jodi. Oh hi Sam. Jodi straightens Jeffrey’s magic tam. Everything’s safe here let’s go upstairs Sam says through a moustache Props repairs. Jodi is so pretty. I hate her. She carries Jeffrey up the escalator To the kid’s department every night Where he turns into space and starlight When I say the magic rhyme. Jeff’s a mannequin Until the mall goes dark. Then he’s a man again.

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor, pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us, his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet. He smiled, our brother, at the story he told of   deliverance at the hand of   Master Tombo, lord and creator, whose round energy lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk our butter our eggs: see Him there, in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case? In that elder by the yogurt shelves? I believed his happiness and coveted a tidy universe. He picked his feet while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s mango aura made the cold blown air touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body and felt my silly bones collapse again. I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save this faint believer and the indifferent world that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle lavender respired from the flower stall and Security spoke kind words to our prophet. Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash of speech and flowers and winds and the tides and crave plain rotund stories to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god, spilled blood made corn grow, the blood gods shed watered needy ground and became People who worshipped the corn. Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one inarticulate incoherent moment to the next. Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh. Orion turns, burning, unchanged again. Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees. My poor belief   lives in the only and all of   the slur of   what these are, and what these are streams toward loss in moments we live through. As children we were lost in our opaque acts but fresh and full in time. I remember how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy broke another’s face, how we all stood in hard gray summer rain so it would run down the tips of noses to our tongues.

for Arthur Freeman Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes The heat’s on the hooker. Drop’s on the lam. Cops got Booker. Who give a damn? The Kid’s been had But not me yet. Dad’s in his pad. No sweat. Margaret Are You Drug Cool it Mag. Sure it’s a drag With all that green flaked out. Next thing you know they’ll be changing the color of bread. But look, Chick, Why panic? Sevennyeighty years, we’ll all be dead. Roll with it, Kid. I did. Give it the old benefit of the doubt. I mean leaves Schmeaves. You sure you aint just feeling sorry for yourself? Lamb Lamb, what makes you tick? You got a wind-up, a Battery-Powered, A flywheel, a plug-in, or what? You made out of real Reelfur? You fall out the window you bust? You shrink? Turn into a No-No? Zip open and have pups? I bet you better than that. I bet you put out by some other outfit. I bet you don’t do nothin. I bet you somethin to eat. Daddy Gander’s New Found Runes Rain, rain, grow the hay. Grow the weeds another day. If I die before I wake, Skip it. Little Boy Blue come blow. Can’t Man; learning a new instrument. What’s with the old one? Where’d you get the new one? Found it in a haystack Man. Old Mother Hubbard, Decently covered, Went to her final reward. She had to laugh. Manger was half Empty and half kennel. Ol’ Shep. At it Again. Livin’ on Principal. I fired a missile up. It came down maybe. Maybe it stayed up. Things aint much like they used to be.

A lavender fog breeds with our children. Our girls are dying on the roadsides, their wombs pried open by the scramble that grows inside. Save us from the lavender fog — it’s the ghosts of your dead people, who have never bothered our village before. Their shapes convulse in our water sources. When we get close enough to hear their ghostly voices, they say yum-yum pleadingly and shout out better better as in I’ll get better. Some of our children have taken these as lyrics. Your ghosts are corrupting the youth. Stop using us as musical instruments, this is a great taboo you have violated! Go back to making tubes of wood vibrate and scraping your goat gut.

—For Dioniso D. Martínez Take Detroit, where boys are manufactured into men, where you learn to think in American. You speak to no one unless someone speaks to you. Everyone is suspect: baldheaded carriers from the post office; old Polish ladies who swear to Jesus, Joseph, and Mary; your brother, especially your brother, waiting in a long line for work. There’s always a flip side. No matter what happens, tomorrow is a day away, or a gin bottle if you can’t sleep, and if you stopped drinking, a pack of cigarettes. After that, you’re on your own, you pack up and leave. You still call the city beside the strait home. Make no mistake, it’s miserable. After all, you bought a one-way Greyhound ticket, cursed each and every pothole on the road out. But that’s where you stood before a  mirror in the dark, where you were too tired to complain. You never go back. Things could be worse. Maybe. Detroit is a shithole, it’s where you were pulled from the womb into the streets. Listen, when I say Detroit, I mean any place. By thinking American, I mean made.

1 These guys try to make us match moods to products the way once, under love’s spell, we attached meaning to sound, attached sounds to objects. The old magic won’t work now, but it’s nice to be reminded of it. 2 She’s a tease, tears her skirts off one by one. Really? Drops her petals as if she could always make more. It’s tiresome. We know what she looks like naked. On a cold night, we can see forever.

Is unwritten, though it has lived in violence. First the factory stood, quiet as an asylum. Then the annihilating mallee with its red fists of blossoms and the mountain ash creeping over it like a stain. I have no proof, but I tell you there were leadlight windows here once, barred. They cast a little striped light on the women. Now in scrub and yellow broom I stand on a history braided and unbraided by stiff Irish wrists. The rope and span and carded wool are unpicked as are their faces and names. Londonderry, Cork, Galway, Kildare— as I say the words they are sucked away to a hemisphere in darkness. I will not presume to say what suffering is or how it was meted out in this place. At what point it breaks a body I cannot tell. But this morning I saw a young rabbit hunched in brush and shadow. I saw its lesioned face, its legs too thin to scramble, the blood-berry red and pink scab of its eye. It had caught the disease we brought here for it and wanted a quiet place to die. And it was lucky, or as lucky as it would get— there was time and light, the hawks and dogs had not been written yet, and were still out of sight.

Very well, you liberals, And navigators into realms intellectual, You sailors through heights imaginative, Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets, You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits, And Tennessee Claflin Shopes— You found with all your boasted wisdom How hard at the last it is To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms. While we, seekers of earth's treasures Getters and hoarders of gold, Are self-contained, compact, harmonized, Even to the end.

Our cabdriver tells us how Somalia is better than here because in Islam we execute murderers. So, fewer murders.But isn't there civil war there now? Aren't there a lot of murders? Yes, but in general it's better. Not now, but most of the time. He tells us about how smart the system is, how it's hard to bear false witness. We nod. We're learning a lot. I say—once we are close to the house—I say,What about us? Two women, married to each other. Don't be offended, he says, gravely.But a man with a man, a woman with a woman: it would be a public execution. We nod. A little silence along the Southeast Corridor. Then I say,Yeah, I love my country. This makes him laugh; we all laugh. We aren't offended, says Josey.We love you. Sometimes I feel like we're proselytizing, spreading the Word of Gay. The cab is shaking with laughter, the poor man relieved we're not mad he sort of wants us dead. The two of us soothing him, wanting him comfortable, wanting him to laugh.We love our country, we tell him. And Josey tips him. She tips him well.

The pure products of America go crazy— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gauds from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt sheer rags—succumbing without emotion save numbed terror under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum— which they cannot express— Unless it be that marriage perhaps with a dash of Indian blood will throw up a girl so desolate so hemmed round with disease or murder that she'll be rescued by an agent— reared by the state and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs— some doctor's family, some Elsie— voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us— her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry and rich young men with fine eyes as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us It is only in isolate flecks that something is given off No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car