Cliché
So polluted, it can’t be water
I tread, am under, breathing,
knowing I shouldn’t be …
Piss-colored light,
doors like old cardboard that
could mean escape but are
so rotted I put a hand through
and awake, shouting. Dreams
are cliché, but this one was
so bad, someone must pay.
I seek him later on a floor without
exit or elevator, the key
to all the doors behind each door
and every door locked tight.
Eugénio de Andrade
With envy enough to excuse
another poem about reading,
I read Levitin’s translation
of Eugénio de Andrade.
Who spoke with expertise
of the entrance to seasons,
of the specific diameter
of the smell of horses,
of a single immanent blade
of harvest. And I wonder
what analogue exists
for the child of cities
to earth, air, fire, and water
(fear, contempt, dependency, apathy)
or the poet’s beloved familiars
goats, sheep, birds, cicadas
(fools, fanatics, fascists, and sociopaths).
Ingénu
Before what is no longer called
second childhood comes a second adolescence.
Women you won’t possess
drift as before
with drinks and bikinis
over the sand and into the lives of others,
vividly recounting
just out of hearing
secret criteria
you needed, till you gave up needing to know.
The world slips sideways like a beachball,
whether seen from waves or dunes
or the delusive shade
of an umbrella, which lets through
the deadliest ray.
Again the fear you won’t be heard
however you pose and shout,
the posing vital for without it
is only nothingness, which wants you,
and childhood, which cast you out.
Years of the Stranger
The rapist at the point of rape
feels amazing pain in his groin
and crawls to the police to make it stop.
The molester finds a knife in his ass;
the torturer, everywhere in his body,
the measure of his art, until
he opens all the cells, and even then …
While the abusers of language,
secular and religious, froth
and choke on their lies until
they occupy all media to correct them.
For years this image has been
my talisman, my charm. I think
I may use, here, the intimate pronoun,
no longer certain the myth
accomplished anything, and never having
imagined *myself the Avenger …
Of whom bullies, defying pain
with the disheartening
courage of bullies, demand
that he show himself, not hide
in a ubiquitous cold shadow,
and he does! A nondescript fellow,
however immortal, lacking
the style of a Redeemer
with official backing –
that archetype which,
in his professorial tenor
from the midst of his work, he
spends years, years, an eternity
refuting. His words
seem over-nuanced, hard to understand,
like poetry to the common reader.
I’m Like Wow
They believe in *getting on with their lives*,
a creed they learned at the feet
of serial absent parents
or when they beat some juvie rap. Professors
who can’t get on with their lives
perceive the burden of their speech that staggers
forward like reggae,
their look of non-respect and non-contempt
that holds not even Culture in contempt.
It’s the sort of regret
that lets them know they’re getting on with their lives,
the precious unexperienced
experience, the unknown knowledge.
Such as that freedom
is archons, celestial policemen, hustling one
into the traffic, saying, *Move along*.
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