Dark Knight
Over breakfast, a bagel,
in the Family Room,
the boy starts with cartoons.
It’s a kind of self-pacing. Later
he’ll watch saved programs, vetted
for violence (and sex, but primarily violence)
by his mother. His one aim
is to see the new *Batman, but she
won’t let him because it’s too violent.
She stands at the door of the Family Room,
negotiating. She wants him
to turn the television down,
but soon she’ll want him to *read
for half an hour, as he promised
to do each day this summer, as she’ll
remind him. Many concessions
(concerning unwholesome
friends, the clothes on his floor)
were exchanged for this concession
of his, and he knows
he must negotiate carefully
to have any hope of seeing *Batman.
But her bright, strained, ever-
reassuring, ever-censorious
voice is as boring
as reading, and, with
a sort of grunted whine, he tries
to become pure watching.
If he did, he’d be free.
Who succeeds in seeing *Batman is Batman.
Notes from a Train
Condo and corporate towers, greater
and lesser malls, apartment houses sprayed
with charm give way to ruined factories,
and pincered magnets sorting hills of scrap.
Then boarded windows, fire-scars,
a steppe of brick, some package-store
oases, and, ten slow miles later,
the last brown duplexes,
bordered by empty warehouses.
You pretend there’s no more energy,
so far from wealth and property,
for the manic pride and endless war
of those who know they have and are
nothing, and will never have or be.
That they stand in lines, waiting
for the State in its self-congratulatory,
reluctant mercy to hand them
some sort of pill that gives them
the illusion of being healthy, fed, and free.
Then, walking home, they speak
as eloquently as they can
of beauty, love, and truth, which mean
among these weeds that church:
a black mole on a lined and stubbled cheek.
Lips and Eyes
I wish I could write love-poems.
Some people write only love-poems.
Instead my poems philosophize.
(Badly – allusions, hand-waving
of the sort Hollywood uses
to portray serious thinking.
At least they *suggest philosophy.)
I think the appeal of love-poems,
love aside, is to show you’ve arrived.
That you’re not merely feeling, yearning, wanking,
but *doing. Some poets, guys even,
keep it up long into marriage –
they escape crib and kitchen
to write poems about their wives.
Well I love my wife but keep quiet
so as not to tempt the Demiurge,
who loves to deprive us of happiness
and can’t be philosophized.
If I wrote, however, of old girl-friends
my wife would look at me cross-eyed –
unless, perhaps, I did so
with no trace of eroticism.
Described the ones who left me
for lack of financial, genetic,
or entertainment potential.
Or the ones *I left, hysterical
because I hate to hurt women
and thereby hurting them more.
It’s always possible to learn
something new, however cold
and shriveled, in the cracks
of what you learned earlier.
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