Down Your Sacred Street

1. The New Life

Everything closes, finally. The libraries after the bookstores, the stores not segments in a chain after the heathen churches. Now you want to go somewhere, go to the bars, the cafes, the fast-food joints, the drive-up liquor stores, anywhere that rakes in enough money to stay open. Let the rich feed us our Walmarts, we shall be glad to walk concrete floors and go without unless the powers that be, and shall always be, grant us their sufferance, for we are not needed, they can buy our vote easily, and the longer we listen to their claques the more we understand Orwell’s 1984. You better have a copy on hand, though it's censored or will be soon: Who reads Orwell when the movie's not even available (at least not the version released in 1984), and something from 1948 or 9 could not possibly bear upon our own day. If you need to see Edmond O’Brien and Jan Sterling in the long-ago first version, look it up. The ministers of cultural frenzy slowed its access to permit it new life. See if you can find it: look it up. We are nothing if not permissive. You think we want to go without? Sign here, pilgrim. Make your X. Home schooling is not only for those who get the vouchers. Too bad public education went the way of the unicorn, it's been so long since anyone bothered to be there, in the echoing halls soon to fall but now filled by homeboys tagging, making our only art.

Once upon a time, once upon a crime, we filled our heads with knowledge, we lobotomized one another fighting over why we were so powerless and forgot to remember we had bodies. Why did the unicorn vanish? He never existed. How do we know? It’s just a fairy tale now. Where do they come from? How would I know? You said so, you seemed to be up on things. No, I just told you reality does not include the fabrications of your imagination or anyone’s. This is not a poem. Don’t try to make it one. You don’t need to read, just look and listen . . .

(5 November)


2. Ah, Yes! My Children Are Free

Still standing, echoing, the homeboys’ voices but only occasionally as they are tagging our once hallowed halls, and the cop cars patrol, the night watchman makes the rounds, and out of sight and in between our only artists now, horny artists who need to copulate with the life surrounding them if the life welcomes their entrance, and they get through the door, they get to the walls, they have their stuff, going to waste except for the wild homeboys, the little sex fiends of the Pampas of Minnesota come down from the reservation to hump the walls of the big fort going from outside in as the sentry moves around the yard and over the wall and into the shadows and in between using that day-glow paint the soldiers can only see by day. They were our first role models, the homeboys declare and waltz away when the morning star appears so they may work another night. The gauchos of Minnesota, the homeboys of the Pampas.

(6 November)


3 December 2010

copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander