My last apparently didn't go over well, so I'll bid farewell to '08 with
these two:
Painter of Light
They don’t read. TV is enough,
the gentler sitcoms.
The mother works for the city,
learns new procedures, stays awake
during meetings, mocks no one,
and is, at work, in a continual state
of blessing and being blessed –
because she’s secure,
because no one speaks
unnecessarily to her,
because she’ll go home. At home,
the daughter is already home
from high-school, where she has been mocked,
though not, as in previous years,
beaten; she too is silent
and blessed. She clears the breakfast dishes,
prepares dinner, avoids seeing herself
in surfaces, sometimes croons
show-tunes. The mother,
returning, thanks her for dinner; they hug.
They hug often
throughout the evening, compare slights
from the day, repeat to each other
heartening slogans
behind their shades and drapes and locks and bars.
They love the paintings of Thomas Kinkade,
“the Painter of Light”™, and buy,
when they have extra money, texturized prints
of them. Impossibly soft-edged flowery half-timbered
cottages in sourceless light, with candles –
an image beyond improvement
of heaven. Passing these
in the window of one of his outlets
or of a Christian bookstore,
I think how nice it must be
to have fans.
The War on Drugs Will Continue
*The Bureau won’t like this*, thinks
the FBI man, staring at infinity.
But the gangs he has cornered
show no hesitation. Soldiers, *capi
leap into the hole. Generations
in the life have given them
an identical fist-face. Trucks drive,
planes dive in, shake themselves to pieces,
leaking those well-taped bricks
of money and product that are
the life. The gangs shoot
at each other (cartridge- and human
casings roll into the hole);
at the cops they pay to miss;
at the FBI man. The hole
is a swirl in space. The goons
reappear in it, red-shifted, swollen,
smiling. Whole carrion cities
on both sides of all borders
follow them in, including those legendary
junkies who smell too bad to be arrested.
The Bureau man hesitates, but what can he do
but order his team to proceed into
the singularity. Which eventually
dissolves, leaving granules like those
you sprinkle on ice cream. Nomadic herdsmen
find that they give you a mild buzz.
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