Unemployed Elegy
The mood of a hand,
extended, finding
no returning clasp,
is that of the unemployed elegy.
Soldiers, falling, fall in,
because orders, given and taken,
make order where there is none.
(Their enemies also,
shamefacedly, form ranks,
unnerved by the absence of
seventy virgins
and some large, responsible voice.)
The multitudinous possibilities
of an afterlife, layer
upon layer of them, blur
into a single lie;
and in its milky light,
the soldiers recite
each his particular –
no leave now, no girl;
no street cred, returning;
no failed farm or suburb; no
job, ever –
in a flat burst like a serial number,
their voices soft and remarkably polite
as they are field-stripped by that milky light.
And the unemployed elegy
barks unnoticed
around their boots, dissolving, like a mascot.
Then flies home
among the coffins in a transport plane
always ironically at its disposal,
and thinks it should apply itself
to the middle class;
which is, however, not a class, and lives
in the middle of nowhere –
ecstatic (which means “standing outside”),
rapt in texture:
the leather bucket seat like eunuchs’ flesh,
the felt of cubicles despair might stroke,
the subtle weave of sheets and grain of pixels,
real or unreachable and hence more real …
A whore at heart, the elegy would feel
pain in these things if asked, but won’t be.
Meanwhile, on either side of the border fence
at sunrise, the very poor
sink back in their crevices;
they can’t afford to see or hear
this indigent or use its services.
So in its usual diner
the elegy consumes itself –
wondering if its extended hand
*was grasped, somehow, by a finger
unnoticeably small and sweet
that will mature into a fist,
beat down the author of all pain
and mourning, and,
like a good son, make its father obsolete.
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