February 3, 2004

• Near the Reagan Building
  
  When work disappears, there is dissipation.
  The world of the new urban poor is overly weepy.
  Standing on your corner
  Leaning haphazardly on flashing lights,
  You look at me and my spinning wheels
  Catching your reflection with rimmed eyes
  Aware that we will not meet again -
  Nor will any of us care.
  
  Moving fast, I still see that
  Calendar section and syntax
  Serve as a blanket.
  
  As an immigrant child, I felt pity for the man at McDonald’s
  Eating his lonely cow alone; he was scraggly.
  We had just watched
  A movie.
  
  —

  
  —
  

   

  Mao’s Little Red Book

   

  Enter the whistling piccolo, whoop for the drummer boy.  The Eastern Bloc stirs a wind and somewhere in the distance, the strains of the Battle Hymn fly high o’er the Republic.

   

  Red and ready, a silent hunter navigates the Marianas.  She’s cold; she’s vicious; she swims with sickle and hammer, paddling uneven through the swirling cold.  It’s dark here, that’s what I think under the weight of an intermittent ping, searching for movement.   In my gun-metal bunk, my hands interlock and form a pillow to hold my neck steady.  I am reading Mao’s book and in my ears sound the stomp of slate-suited peasants, weapons held high and proud, Marxist caps making them look like newsboys.  I will read all about it in the morning, if there is such a thing down where the only light is a caged bulb, flickering with moisture.  It’s a stale, sweaty air and to sneeze is to wake this corner of the vessel.  Like the luddites of yesteryear, they stick wedges through capitalist gears; they roust the chicken coop and take what’s theirs; they run a sword through watercolor; they drink from the same artless cups.  

   

  When I sleep, I dream I’m still here.  Under the drone of pistons and the turning screw, I know we are moving, lost to the world above.  I dream of children running to the lake’s edge, laughing and leaping high, knees tucked tightly to their chins.  Then, in the maddening volume of so much machinery, the lights turn red and we rush to our stations.  The muffled explosions of lazy barrels finds us weeping as we weave our way through these hidden trenches.  In my dreams, he is sleeping and I run to ask him if he cares that we drown.
   
  We flood the tubes with brine and catch a mackerel.
  
  In the dark, we sing a secular hymn for fortitude.  With pipes dancing and spitting heat, we refuse to be caught with our eyes closed.  In faded pictures, I see how they found him cooking fish on the shore; he looked different.  Once, on a bankrupt afternoon for fishing, they took his advice and gave their nets one last dipping; there was tearing.  A line circles in front of me, marking their advance and I am now wearing Ceausescu’s dainty shoes, standing on the terrace of his mansion’s balcony.  Foreign pings tickle us like Elena once did.  
  
  Things fall apart with the yaw and pitch.  I am lost to the shouting.
  
  —
   
  
  —
  
  In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
  (Margaret Atwood)
  

  —
  
  Living for glory – just for glory – is a bit lame. 

  Man, time moves so quickly. 
  
  I want to see the world!  We’re truckin’.
  
  
  

  Matt11:28

  • 10:48 pm
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