Power, Exclusion and Privilege


like Random House or CBS
obsessed with packaging
products fed by intimacy.
Fights that I don't have to fight
anymore, bothered by the music
because the lyric has a bad name
in the balcony seats, the tongue
passes through solid walls.
Am I giving something away?
The memory of silk a single
catastrophe, my engineers alter
waterways, a big timber division
like concrete emotions, taken
down in a day, the inside of
a briefcase in a day's work.
Not fuzziness, double negative
splays out a hand fan making
wind in the academy, cobwebs
and dust bunnies under
Baudelaire's bed. Just across
the water, grilling steak
over hot charcoals becomes
genuinely political.
I put my finger in it and stir.
Stilts chatter behind the chalkboard.
I would let myself go if I hadn't
already gone, my prose up in curlers
and my poems around my ankles.
There's a party going on
in my notebooks, blasting tangos
over the Golden Dawn. There is no
efficacy of poetry, and if there was,
I would lie about it anyway,
and that was my point.