Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Rant 'n' Role

Why are the lights off where cars line the street in single file?
Shouldn’t darkness stay in the country where land is valuable?
I don’t know if City Hall wants to hear about the absence
of light, why it is or what it costs per capita. Without question
any number of churches can take up a collection.

Is a red light on a cordless phone showing it’s ready
a planet where red is the wet color of blood and one more
lifelong dream a palimpsest of sleep and on waking, true?
How many years does it take for the bottom to fall out
where no one holds up a house in quest of a new foundation?

It’s in houses in the country where the pols live, up to here
with their fill of constituents complaining. Bad enough to work
in town, they quip. Soon there will be no money left from years ago,
when you were innocent and would go along with the way
things were, always have been, always will be . . . the pols say.

It’s good to stay north of Mexico the last half of your life.
Border’s open any day and night. Even if you can get high up here,
I want my little Diamond match boxes filled with dope from Saigon.
Not orange peels. Lay off the heavy stuff. You have no taste
for suicide. I wish I could get in a car and fly down to the Yucatan.

In Merida, life is inexpensive and yet not cheap. The color red is life’s
own. Go sleep in the jungle in your dreams. Find Mayans at home.
Check the calendar. Watch the ball game, whose losers lose
their lives. Civilizations here then are nowhere now. When they disappear
–Allende’s Chile, say–compare the World Trade Center, falling.

I jump in to say they’re not the same.
Don’t compare the human to commercial babble.
Lives are always lost that way; Allende himself, for example.
Who among us saw George W. Bush diving off either of the Twin Towers?
All that zero left to fill with the third Bush baby inaugural orgy!

(23 October–23 November 2010)

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