Poetry
three
from The End of America, Book 10
I see why people
say they want
something big to happen
in the big world--
something to stop
others from hoarding what
they have
while jail cell keys are turned on some
Something to stop the organized
public robbery and stern
authoritative political lip
designed to misdirect hunger
but myself, I don’t
want the big crazy
I don’t want war
don’t trust revolutions
and their new
opportunities for conniving
under new banners
and new assemblies
I don’t want an event to carry me laughing
into some promised
new wild sun
I want there to be
no need for big things
no need for people
to hope that history will pull
them up
no need to be full-throated furious
I want small things:
for someone to look
up and say,
“I’m glad
we’re talking,
I’m glad I’ve made
a thing I’m proud of”
and not just someone but everyone, see
as small as that
and in it, a revolution
would be a thing
carried away, not the people in it
such a small
thing that all the big
things would be small inside it
like a moment
in which people might recognize themselves
and not
loathe
the world they’ve made
(November 2011)
from The End of America, Book 18
If real news
is the fact of rich
people plundering
the poor even
in dreams, then this street
of puddled water
splashing up at the feet
of people with nowhere
indoors
to go is the basis
on which the vacation
city builds its high rise
fantasies of ease
Awareness
that politics preserves
the constant
saying that not much
reveals more
than struggle does
helps me walk
along while laughing
faces pass,
raincoats knit sweaters tilted hats
shoulders drawn
up in wind
Nothing less than experience as
it presents
itself calls
for acknowledgement
one
un-isolated instant
then another
There’s no way to avoid
giving back the particles
of a body
to the air,
hoarding doesn’t
prevent loss
That sucking sound,
the breath that cannot
draw itself,
is all the grasping
to control the streets the buildings the trees the sky
happening at once—
which has never
saved even one
person from death
(February 2017)
from The End of America, Book 20
Is dirt different
on top of a high hill
looking down on neighborhoods divided
by a tech influx
of hasty millionaires
The old streets,
the city’s spine,
become home to new generations
seeking gold or trade or to buy up buildings,
displacing old new-world dreams,
the “heterosexual dollar” eyeing
through the Ginsberg ghost light
its own denuded landscape
Where now will new ways to live
take themselves off to?
Time is a poor mistaken measure
of the way dirt moves--
see it or not
from this hill or that--
at last we glimpse
the limits of ourselves--
and I am peering down
through layers of shattering crystal cloud
at high rises, highways,
houses, warehouses
above earth plates that often shift,
found homes and stayed here and died,
who came here and went and came here
and went,
of dreams of wholeness that welcomed the weird
and the time to go,
wheels above stone and dirt
over hills and wide plains
bringing the next ones, never waiting
but pushing up from the ground
(San Francisco 03/16/19 for Suzanne)
