Meeting With the Social Work Administrators

  Meeting With The Social Work Administrators


Soft gestured; Light falling on the faces just so.
All blood rinsed out and sailing off to the sea sand shore.
Words cleaned with silica,
Each turned in upon itself, a polished snail.

They chant polices.
Who made policies?
God made policies.

Their eyes are glazed in a familiar dream.
Many are the offices.
Many are the beehives humming.
Never are there enough parking spaces.
Holy are the many forms of many forms.
Blessed the flow charts. Sacred the silos.
Faces buffed. Fingers manicured.
There is enough honey to preserve the bodies forevermore.

They arrive in six separate cars
And leave in six separate cars.
Two speak. The others utter not a word.

Late Winter Letter to an Old Friend

                                                                                                                       

  Late Winter Letter To An Old Friend



The days are much the same now.
Deep cold. Howling wind.
Dark trees. White fields of snow.
The fire must be fed, kindling split.


What were you like when you were young?
What kind of face did you have then?
A lonely one perhaps,
Or a split face,
One side for God, another for the human beings.
The dog’s face is drawn now.
Sometimes his eyes fill with pain.
He’s deaf. His corneas shiny with cataracts.

Yesterday I shoveled snow.
Tomorrow I’ll have to shovel again.
This morning I tried to write a poem. Useless.
My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.
My head stuffed with straw.

I thought of you then,
And wondered how you were doing.
Perhaps you could drop me a line.
Send me a note full of your usual nonsense,
And I will be in your debt forever.


The Poor

                                                                                                                     

  The Poor



Plans for social ascension are announced now and then
By men in tailored suits,
Whisked away afterwards in limousines.

But the poor are not whisked away.
They remain, whistling through dark alleys, same as before.

Kind Hearts long to raise them to respectability.
Poor Kind Hearts!
What good’s respectability,
Naked, all by itself, without a foil?

Starving, racked with frenzy,
They can rise like a single beast, striking a blow unbelievably savage.

In bare sufficiency they build structures so elegant, so subtle,
They escape the attention of those who purport to study them.

Some fear them for their sarcasm, irreverence, sudden spikes of passion;
But these, to a lively mind, are the very reasons to love them.

Relations

Relations


I am related to the crescent moon;
Scimitar like we both end ourselves in a sharp point,
Death in my case but for the clever moon metamorphosis.

Similarly the round, bulbous moon is my second cousin,
Once removed;
Not that she is aware of this lumbering her enormous white belly across the sky;
More relatives I am thinking;
Soon it will be the whole human race.

Certain men in coastal China look just like me;
Missionaries maybe or traders or even a Jesuit;
If we met we would throw arms around one another
And hug like lost brothers;
But this is unlikely as we lack bus fare to the next village.

My mother claims the old Highland Scots treacherous,
Alternately indolent and violent,
Fighters, crazy, lovers of death, planters of oats and semen;
Raiders, builders of stone huts,
Women with shoulders that shine in the dark, tiger eyes.
Some of me belongs to them although I don’t know which;
Punking off the nobs, coveting my neighbour’s wife maybe.

In Malaysia there is a man and his daughter
Who share a sense of humor;
Cracking jokes together, rising in a great crescendo of snorts and guffaws
And belly bendings. They are my first and second cousin as are the coyotes
Who sing badly arranged songs when I’m trying to sleep.
They are my relatives too.

There are farmers in Chile who bend their elbows
Just like I do;
Shopkeepers in Cairo who share the line of my eyebrows exactly;
Miners in the Urals sniffing tea the way I sniff tea;
Carpenters in Poland who stretch upon getting out of bed the way I stretch;
An Isreali wine merchant scratching his lower belly in exactly the place I scratch;
And so on.

Five billion human beings; All relatives for goodness sakes; It’s ridiculous.
And then there are the animals and rocks and the vegetable world
And the great astronomical world of nuclear explosions and spun out galaxies,
The Great Immensity and somehow I am related to all that too.

I can’t remember all the names;
I don’t have enough money to send everyone a birthday card.
So I decided to write this poem. Happy birthday.
Consider yourself kissed. Blow out the candles.

Chickens

Chickens

Chickens eat anything;
Ten bags of winter kitchen scraps;
Peck, peck, peck,
In two days they are gone.
Meant for the compost but I didn’t mind;
Quano also provides wonderful nutrients.

They love grubs;
When I dig a ditch
Gather round like inspectors,
Shouldering, getting in the way of the shovel;
A white grub throws them into a frenzy
Till the lucky one runs off with it in her beak.

All day they wander about pecking, pecking,
Investigating the vast world of possible eating;
They peck at my pants and boots,
To them a tall column of reluctant birdseed;
They even peck at the dog who snaps his teeth
To show them who’s boss.

Cement mixer stomachs filled with sulphuric acid.
Worms, bugs, grass seed, small mice,
Safeway birthday cake, mouldy bread, rotten potatoes,
Anything small enough or reducable by fierce pecking.
They walk in a weird, water wading style,
Rocking from side to side on powerful thighs,
Rhythmically nodding their heads,
Always ready, searching with bug eyes.

They have no God or Art or Ethics;
Their creative act is laying eggs.
They cluster in a corner of the hen house all night,
Softly book booking;
Then each lays an egg early morning.

When I open the door it’s
“Boook, boook, where’s the feed?”
“Boook, boook, poor chickens are starving!
They pour out, a river of combs and feathers,
Scrambling over one another,
Pecking mercilessly to get first places at the tray.
How strong their desire to live!
How they long to fill the world with bustling, eating and perfect brown eggs!

Rankor

Rankor


Barry claims nobody loves him
Which is probably true for he is a most unlovable man,
Whose drunken behavior, foolishness and acting out,
Hardly endear him to anyone.

Yet he does his best in his own way,
Working like a Trojan six days a week bulldozing basements.
Jet black hair, wide forehead,
A wild, deranged cast to his eye
Terrifying anyone passing him by on a city street.
Was that Raskalnikov?  They might say,
Or some other terrible St. Petersberg murderer?

“I saw smoke coming from the chimney,” he says,
“So I thought I would drive up and find out what the hell is going on!”

Nothing much, Barry, just the old bookworm
Nose between the pages
Or giving himself paranoid lectures on Literature.
Six times he repeats the reason for his visit,
A disjointed one for Barry is six sheets to the wind,
Soon to be nine for he snorts from his mickey
As often as a bird pecks seed from a feeder.

He has woman problems.
He gives me the details which are very graphic.
He always picks the wrong woman.
They drink too much or they steal his money and run off.
Ungrateful they are and they have no love in them.
What do I think?

“Look around for a good one, Barry.”

“Easier said than done,” he says.
“Yes, by God, easier said than done.”

Theorists

                                                                                                                   

Theorists


The Parisians hated the watery rice,
Lack of wine, civilized amenities;
The marshes were stinking sinkholes;
The muddy fields in need of paving.
They have friends, they said,
Who would gladly replace them with statues and fountains.

‘And you, my good man,’ They said to me,
‘Are a depraved rustic, a semi literate bumpkin.’
Which is true. Then they smoked opium and entered a trance.
I dug a new drainage ditch and composed six poems.
Upon awaking they snorted cocaine
And fondled one another’s genitals.
Afterwards they left in a railway car
Painted with scenes of ancient cathedrals.

I still love Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire,
But can find no solace in semiotics or hyper intellection.

They left behind four thousand books, which,
In an inquisitorial mood, I tossed into the fire.
Now the cabin is warm as toast
And in the mists above the dugout my visitor’s ghosts
Are suspended in a passion of disbelief and weeping.

The next day I leapt through my left earlobe
And came out the other side processed in stainless steel.
I lay upon a bed of nitrogen
Covering myself with plutonium rods.
Of course my earrings were of human flesh but no matter.

And yet when I looked through my enhanced eyeballs
I saw the world exactly as I saw it before!
All that and still rolling in the human bubble!
All this and my nose still exactly eighty-seven degrees from my left eye socket!