Creative Writing
At semester’s end I tell them
that when the novel founders
with the bourgeoisie, survivors
of the latter are peasants, electronics
are gone and movies myth,
poetry will resume its place
by the fireside of illiterates. Their look
(for they too have survived:
rehab, bulimia) combines
forbearance and that will
to take everything under advisement,
show no enthusiasm,
indefinitely defer judgment.
I return their last works, make some
grand, self-revealing, verbal
gesture. One or two shake my hand
as we leave. The campus, bankrupt
girls’-school absorbed
by the costliest university,
is blocks from my house. To walk
to work! Luck happens.
Like the view downhill I pretend
is ruins and forest … None of which
counts as *teaching, a less fortunate friend
reminds me. Whose voice
is to most of her students a noise
before pregnancy, between
some intolerable insult
and shooting or being shot;
or itself provocation, earning
warnings: “You borin’ me, bitch.”
Once home – it was fall semester, night
comes fast – I drink,
field late pleading emails, answer one
that thanks me. And think
(it’s an end; one philosophizes)
how poetry mustn’t be tastelessly
pertinent; how taste ruins poetry;
how poems are at best anomalous
fossils that may or may not
be unearthed. How my kids are already
scattering to airports, parents,
hopefully … How the most rational,
propitious eras presented
to their young no face better
than mine, regretful, doubtful, fighting to focus.
Pleasure of Your Company
To pluck a voice, worldview, hint
of disastrous life from abstractions
and let him her it them
you wander between my lines
and find yourself there, in the form
of shells, mines, friendly fire:
that’s my invitation.
My engraved rice-paper note.
A diabetic rotting
without “benefits,” sucking the sweetness
of that word in a rusting chair;
a cadet lately evangelized
at the Air Force Academy
who sees himself now, with his billion-
yard stare, as one of Christ’s
avengers; four more
evicted, sobbing, their bowels
loose with no john of their own –
they hoped to the last for a miracle, as one
is praised for doing, but the sullen men came –
these and others contended
all day for a narrative thread.
However unlikely, with no
catharsis except the eventual, smooth
trigger-touch of the airman.
But they’re invited, and you.
What is the psychological function
of political hope? Baseline humans
have kids, to replicate or at best compensate
their horrors. But progressives
imagine that the people of the future
will each eat a little dead
progressive and be saved.
And readers, reader,
like subject-matter, readers,
play both ever-popular roles. You swine,
you poor bastard, I see you lurking
behind a crumbling pillar, dodging
zombies and sun. I’ve tried
to reach you all day! Show up tonight.
We’ll party like it’s 2099.
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