More than her pugnacious breasts
Or buttocks like grapefruits in hip pockets,
Men notice her hair first:
A great silken rope swinging to her waist
They flounder for weapons
Against her strength
And hope one day to bring her down to their level;
To use her body to wipe their feet.
They find fault to lessen the terror.
Her grandmother married her to a man with 60 acres--
If a woman is a mule, let her at least be well off--
But she left him for another man.
You cain't get her with no fish sandwich.
He demanded that she hide her hair,
And when he died she let it down.
All the men came running--
Each one offering to make her a mule.
She preferred managing the store
To managing her respectability.
Until one day Tea Cake saunters in--
Camels and Courvoisier--
"Oooh! it's a lady!"
She comes home from the store,
Finding him on her porch with a string full of fish.
"Hey, sweet thang,
Can I buy you a fish sandwich?"
Author: dowdicus
2024
The most important election of our lifetimes:
Trump v.BidenHarris.
I remember the excitement
when she took the corpse-president’s place.
But then we were told
nothing would fundamentally change.
Fewer still hoped the killing would stop—
but Amerika did
what Amerika does best:
Genocide. Proletaricide. Anthropocide.
She needed our votes for the crime of crimes—
to damn our souls to everlasting hell
and save the nation’s empty myth
from a faltering husk of a man.
“The fate of the Palestinians is unfortunate,
but we must think first of our families.”
I voted for her.
Claudia de la Cruz.
The working people of Palestine are my family.
The King’s English
I wonder, before mass media,
How God named Light
In the king’s English.
Ecclesiastic hierarchy, sure,
But two men cannot see the same Sun.
And when the printing press came,
How far away was mass literacy?
How long until the masses can read the news?
Martin Luther put each man in front of his own Bible.
How could one book be read by two men?
Today’s stories come from the networks.
Corporate hierarchies, sure,
But we don’t have to read.
The internet knows things for us,
But we can’t read that.
Errata 003 (The Guillotine)
Every textbook read
Teaches us to take pride in your graft
Live for you and we can eat
And hope a few survive as children
They'll endure by tooth and claw
The world is yours, the anthem sings
Said bring you the bread
Clock in clock out pray to the calf
It's dishonorable to cheat
My blood becomes your billions
Your bloody hands stain every vault
All is yours but we have dreams
But guess what we got you instead
Don't bother dodging simple math
All for one was bare deceit
There's one of you, but we are millions
The blade is clean, and sharp, and broad
We'll only keep a headless king.
Taking Time
One called Victor, a Dutchman,
The other a Scotchman called James Gregory,
And the third being a negro named John Punch.
They had run away from Virginia, were caught, tried, and sentenced in 1640.
The Dutchman and the Scotchman were condemned
To serve out the remainder of their indentured servitude
Plus one year.
And the third being a negro was condemned to serve out his life.
John Punch became the first piece of chattel.
And so, we took his time.
Eons passed.
One man might own a hundred lifetimes.
One fattened tick
That could never live a minute longer
No matter how much time he sucked.
No matter the genteel civility lavished on his equals.
The tick’s cause was lost:
Chattel disfavored;
Wages more efficient.
And criminals… who cares what happens to them?
Oh, by the way, if you don’t have a job
We’ll have to arrest you for vagrancy.
And now we have moved on from that barbaric dispensation
All the old problems have been solved.
We join together in harmony
And ignore the strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Every day in the paper I read about time.
Time taken before it was due.
How much time does it take?
Errata 001 (Shall I Phone You or Nudge You?)
He leaves work between six and seven every night.
Takes the same route home.
Obeys every traffic sign.
Pays his bills;
No bad checks;
No registered firearms:
The world's most boring human.
He has very nice garbage:
He's not looking for buff.
Rather, meticulous.
Refined.
Anal.
He eats. They linger; she fawns over him.
The busboy,
Over the whine of the vacuum,
Tells him the pair should leave.
She loves the pinched nasally whine of his voice.
Quivering, she asks him to stay and pronounce--
Sensually--
"Passport"
He does.
"You're right we should leave"
He asks if she would like to have breakfast with him.
"Sure. Fine. Whatever."
Foolishly confident, he replies:
"Shall I phone you or nudge you?"
They did not have breakfast.
A computer would never match her with him
Love Poem No. 9
There are too many love poems in the world.
It could be a conspiracy by Big Love
to sell saccharine devotional inventories.
Maybe literary prestige and ambition
inspire in the novice poet a dream
which can only be described in verse.
I think it was a basic way to test my cleverness–
the way an artist learns to master perspective,
then learns to break
the expectations of the viewer
and folds this knowledge into their craft.
It’s simply human.
One hopes we all experience love,
and maybe some of us try to distill that love
into something that insists the world know,
“I am here–
and I love in all the ways I know how.”
Dead Labor
We added the artisans first.
Then came the drudges working the assembly lines.
The farmers, or their laborers, at least, were also mixed in.
No one really wants to know how the sausage is made.
The computers were integrated.
Their astronaut wards processed beside them.
And now we've found a way
To dig up the artists, writers, musicians, and dancers, the builders and thinkers
And feed them to the corpse machine
We asked ChatGPT to write a poem called "Dead Labor"
And called it a "corpse machine."
It returned an awful poem:
Too declarative. No pulse. Generic and clichéd. No tension. Flatly moralistic.
Perhaps, if we feed it enough corpses, it will get better.
I fed myself to the corpse machine
And it returned a corpse.
Remainder
You sent a picture today.
You were reminded of me
and you wanted to share the moment.
I listened
to the long stretches
of time
between the reminders
I Don’t Want to Say Goodbye
I don’t want to say “goodbye.”
It’s nothing personal.
I don’t want to say “hello,” either.
I’d rather come and go
without the ceremonial recognition of
one another’s presence.
I don’t want to say “good morning,”
and “good night” seems especially grotesque.
Contractual obligation has crossed our paths,
but the meeting of minds sours when politesse
is expected to sweeten the duress.
I’d prefer not to nod my head–
whether up or down–
nor raise my brow in recognition
as we make our daily rounds.
I am intentional about my relationships.
I do not make friends with passersby.
There is a finite amount of air in the world.
I will share mine only when I choose.
