The Invisible People Of The Woods

For Michelle

They cry and cry, only to deny they ever cried...

A CERTAIN CHILL

Transcendence, please —
The unforgiving evening has wrapped its shredded shawl
Around us all, the castaways spellbound,
Chattering and weeping.
We shiver over dim fires beneath a green tent
— Steel drums, liquor and guitars.
Our face meets your face
Like our eyes meet the light,
Poor children of the central nervous naked moon
Seeking entrance to the cold of the cities' exposed glow,
Peeking through the evening's shroud.
With autumn winds come autumn sadness,
Grates throbbing with lentian Toulouse-Lautrec light,
A long-lost romance offering one last clear chance.
The harvest guitars bleat like ghosts
Before they are put to one wall
To wear the faces of the dead.

ON THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY

Christ descended on the Vagabond Inn,
Involved himself in a domestic dispute
Inside, where inbred outcasts burn with sin
In what was once a place of ill repute.
Now they scatter at the first gunshot wound,
Gnaw when they talk, express any feeling with a loud
Slamming of doors, faces, the chaos of utter ruin
Impels them back and away like a cloud
Of brown rain, taking the nothing for the taking,
Sweating poison on barren fields, tattooed and maimed.
The inarticulate shriek while those who can formulate
Confuse themselves and bore everyone in range.
Christ brings down a Thermos of forgiveness
To share like coffee in the wilderness.

PROFIT TAKING

On Howard Street the cigar merchants
Peddle their virtues and roll their wares
As they perfume the air
Already thick with
Wharves of salted fish
And the chink of coopers and hawsers
Trying to contain like vests.

The ladies must dress their best
To look in the windows down Howard Street
With its deco facades and old world arcades,
Its specialty shops like the knobmaker,
The chandelier chiseler, the violin stringer
Sheltered for the pleasure of ladies with blue minks and chromium hair

Just across the street from
The liquor prison with the two-way plexiglass chute
Called Gold Rush in bold yellow.
In the ghetto there is profit.

ROADSIDE ARCANA

I'm in love with dark American movies
And bad coffee, but why, in diners
With pink space age lighting, with steel resisting neon,
Like the Chinese restaurant of your dreams,
That wide-brimmed bent hat slumps
Over the white coffee cup, the iconoclast stares
With the remorse of loneliness, with savage skepticism,
At a scene it seems is made for his needs,
As he smokes a Pall Mall as if the waitress
Hates him as an interloper, in for the ambiance,
Not the enormous clacking aspect of poverty
With white gloves and oversized shoes,
Sand dancing furiously, but with bare reverberations
Of feeling, tapping when no one has any dough,
And they've seen it all before, becoming violent and ugly.
The unrestricted face detaches itself
To bus depots, hard luck walk-ups, fleabag hitching posts at the dark end
Of the dice, stoically moving to the empty fruit crates at the junction,
The place where failure is no longer dangerous,
Seeing in its blue light not so much a gross distortion
Of those magnificent lying set of rules
We call America, but a gross distortion of need,
Fed by well-lit vending machines, and finally facing
The knuckled resistance,
As if almost nothing is too much.
One contemplates someone so wounded by the thought of failure
He can't lift his craggy, unsatisfied face from the plate
To see how his toothless, overwrought position is not
Evil, is not failure, but the kind of lean endurance
Every American movie hero is driven towards,
And one expects the tourists to drive up in their Subarus,
With film, their way of enduring it.

ONE FRIDAY EVENING

I had just one blanket need
Last bleary evening when I hailed a cab at
Bond and Edmondson. I was no more than
An article of clothing at a showgirl's command.
I was a ghost picked up by a phantom
Who will let you be a celebrity
On one last moonshine ride to the hatted goons at the border,
Or worse. The cabbie, gazing at the unimaginable,
Muttered familiar particulars as I told him where we were going,
To Pulaski highway, leaving one neighborhood of dim joints for another.
He inquired of my sick motives, keening on twisted sexual apocalypses
That leave one hanging, rendezvous in blue rooms with red electrified vixens;
No, there are those motels on the strip, I said,
But it's further in, so he took me past
The lumberyards and post offices and all the outposts of the sexually mistaken night,
Every regulated act searing in neon, up the salmon-spawning red-hot road,
I let him carry me where he, if he had been totally free, would go,
Where those who have no one or nothing go, holding on to the last stool of extremity;
He was taking me to see my baby.
He is hesitant at the roadhouse destination, hearing
That Patsy Cline was alive and living in the jukebox,
And seeing the blue pool tables and the cigarette machines dispensing decades-old brands,
Still, for 10 bucks extra, he handed me over like a parcel.
My baby smiles at me from behind the bar
While a scatological scattershot shovels quarters into the jukebox
And half dead wails of the lonely give him some small consolation,
The songs of the missing angel. He, who had spent his whole
Childhood in the nearby motels, was moved and purified enough
By this song to make you feel he'd had his heart ripped clean out.
And then he buys me a drink, because I'm Shelly's boy,
While a model of the Statue of Liberty rotates on the bar TV.

"THE COLDEST BEER IN TOWN"

I traipse the streets on the Fourth of July
(The buses don't run on Satchelmouth's birthday);
Downtown is empty, but the projects are full,
Teeming into the Seven-Eleven. I roll in
For some snakes, but there is only chaos, not fireworks
And the highest prices in town. A white man
Asks for a quarter, but seeing my guitar
Won't leave me alone, asking if I blow blues in G. I say
"Anything but that key," sparing him more than me.
I pass more homeless lined up shivering outside the shelter
Closed for the holiday, eyeing me as though I were a slave
Not quite worth eating. I cut away, through what I'd always
Assumed was an abandoned city block, only to find a kind of
Solution, a sort of reverse commercial strip where every
Beggar from downtown wandered around, advertising scars
To each other — a paraplegic here, a blind albino there,
An unconscious Indian vet propped up against a slat,
A man with his face torn off talking out the corner
Of his mouth. Concrete blocks broken all over the street,
Trash and plaster everywhere, syringes scattered, not a window
Unboarded, but people everywhere, dealing in alleys, leaning
From dead balconies, mostly silent on this, their day off.
I mingled in with them to an unnamed bar through plywood
Doors. Inside, no music, no pool, just a hand
Written sign — "the first bar in Baltimore" — and a poster
For Thunderbird, a crooked fashion model posing
Dirty and disheveled, dressed in a New York fashion designer's
Conception of rags, smiling "taste the experience."
The place reminded me of nothing so much as a Western movie bar,
With Indians perched like hyenas, an obscenely powerless
Ghost family. Even here I felt outcast,
Without even a cigarette to be hounded.
Soon I would be home, understanding a little better
That Hell is a constant repetition of the same missteps
While one learns the parameters of the trap, obsessed
With getting out, but always unable to,
Seeing only the present place,
Not the pastures at the end of the street.

FOURTH OF JULY IN MARBLEHEAD

The clock tower is stuffed with cotton.
The lean times have gone
And there's work to be done.
You can face the sea with everything reachable
That time can give a value to,
Your valuable time,
Small consolation for the indignant hammer of bells,
The cloying gong, the empty revelry of pain sounding
Keeping the fish still,
Clanging with history as vindication,
Holding our disturbance in pregnant air.
Now, you treat history with noblesse obligée,
Sip martinis, ravish cocaine, read Rimbaud in the hot tub
Behind the bar while Tuff Gong skanks on the CD.
There's a Haitian art gallery across the street from where
A lunatic gimcrack collector used to sell me wax lips and
Plastic alligator jaws full of bubble gum.
A boy delivers the town newspaper in a Volvo.
Most of the old fishermen are in jail now for smuggling drugs.
A seagull commutes out to the distant islands,
Not staying to accompany the bells
That are not ringing under the stars.
Helicopters would swoop down with their roto-blades
To whip up a wake against the current,
A reverberation to slap meaningless grey rock
And roll back like the lean times along the gravel.

The harbor blues descend, through intermediate oranges,
People in boats hoot, in unison, their alarms
Off-key, the distortion of private pains
In a conglomerate of paranoid honks and shameless dissatisfaction
At their daily spraying like insecticide out into the world.
They shriek for the free fireworks,
Continuing their pursuit of a candy beyond all candy.
Even in this paradise green, the wide-lipped bay,
The sound of conflict brings in the darkness,
Sirens must come in before the triggers are dimmed.
Feeble colors strafe the charcoal horizon.
The beating is as tribal as pain ever gets.
A whirlwind of inconclusion
Eddies to a close.
The absence in the wake of the bells sounds.

ECHOING WAREHOUSES

Here I am where dreams die young,
Where I see the trapped faces everyday,
Who think of the multi-mega-media star
Who can't deliver his lines this time
As if he finally played his card.
The pages of glory turn
And we are still mired in the smoke of its friction,
The journey through the baseline wilderness where
Everything is not plotted against you, only darkest fog.

The soft padded cats who leap in their youth
From laundry line to drainpipe
Eventually get mist covered
And eat the vermin under the porch,
And start collapsing their way through days
Where joys are more circumscribed and downward leaning;
Gaudy ice patches on the cracked sidewalk
Turn quickly slate grey, that's part of the
Humming forgetfulness, the savage sleep.
I am almost among them, who have almost the knowledge
That human beings don't do these sorts of things.
We were meant to leap and catch and praise,
Prevailing against ice mountains and surly rapids,
Crafting a slingshot from supple young trees.
Who thinks that this urge inevitably leads
To neighborhoods bulldozed down,
Full-capacity trucks moving the bones along,
Machines designed to act and belch as men
Huffing with inhuman persistence,
Mashing steel with rough-shod motions
To ingrained catches, gagging full tilt toward some
Jackpot of gold at the end of the road, some shiny largesse
Left over after the fat of the land has been stripped and sold
To meet the growing need pool. The chairman of the board
Might as well be driving this rig, with his Delaware lawyer
Counting the Hardee's in the side cab, but as the penetration
Goes on all night, the haze and the fur smoke
Take the truck grappler in numb cigarette drags away.
The distant sounds that flow in from other islands
Keep us intact in shared reverie,
Longing for the place no one yet has found
Where we belong.

The cancer stick factory looms, its walls once absorbed
Many charmed voices, who rattled chords,
Who festered in chains, claimed while they sat against its will,
The blazing flame that delivered the hot bombshells
So the choosers had a choice.
One could look through the steel to see the almost reflection of our lesser selves,
Wide magnanimous smiles and brighter than life eyes,
Which we adjusted internally, to what we remembered of mirrors and descriptions.
But the mill allocates to everyone, and takes pain to deny
That it has denied something or someone.
So many changed as the loom adjusted itself in their minds,
Not feeling how its resistance was what kept all of us apart.

Now it drops its saddened shades across
The changing play of bitter winds, an empty warehouse
Echoing, negligible, still stoking against a bare bulb.
Windows without glass, U.S. Government tags, faded slogans,
While the roads have diverted, off to greener fabrications
Of the same life-sustaining illusion.
Now the extras have populated the backdrop,
The needle was pulled out, people exploded out onto the street,
Dashing doleful disenfranchisees
Bounce like pinballs or rats
Along the salted irrigation streams of this city,
Seeking sirloins in dead walks and emptied nooks.
The building still fumes its commands
To these few who have not elected, and so stay.

Stray gladiolas are picked at the corner of Fifth and Edgar,
Herded and shipped to office parks and professional buildings
To muse together and share a well-potted plot
Where mum's the word and the scars are hung like flags to dry.
Others come from temperature controlled rose rooms, misted and massaged,
But they ain't worth a shit unless they're like a million more, only better.
The rivet rattle goes with you everywhere, you carry
The soap scum to another part of the city,
Another scene of another crime,
Another well-oiled mousetrap
That answers us with our order.
This forest is ready to burn.

ANNUAL COMPENSATION

He's as handsome as any, yet the girls swoon more.
He talks all the time just like everyone else, but everyone listens.
He walks to the same parking stone, but walks with meaning.
Every moment to him is a brilliant intricacy. It's easy to oversee
When all he has to do is appear and everyone looks at him
With the fear of some children at parents.
His jokes shape a thousand ships
In force at dynamic moments
That stop at his tongue, who is not bogged down in trivia,
Who fancies himself everyman, not making more than the necessary
Decisions any man would make, that's the secret of his success,
But how could that be?

Walking in the glow, sometimes he must want to get kicked.

I thought I saw him at George's,
Mouthing Java, unshaven, chain-smoking,
Trying to cash a rumpled ticket.
You put that expression in your pocket
To flash at a mail-room clerk
Too slow with more meaningless subpoenas.

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Button-holed, stitched up with society's threads
As wolves are left the rancid meat of singular bread.
There is no need of consequence.

The foul bell chimes, and the sinners jump the cliffs.
The saints are shot like renegades, rebels left adrift
In the space between innocence and evanescence.

The Indians work the kitty litter mines.
The billionaire walks past panhandlers with the same education, depth and drive.
There is no need of consequence.

After many a moonrise, the spectators see
It doesn't inflict for their glittering applause and merciless charity
In the space between innocence and evanescence.

While we pile all our efforts on time bombs ticking,
Others back off and retract all they've been given.
There is no need of consequence.

We rise to angers that die out as failures of will.
We move quickly past victories and linger too long in losses distilled
In the space between innocence and evanescence
There is no need of consequence.

THE LAST ROMANTIC

With austere ambivalence
And benevolent stare
Christ is caught holding
A whip and a chair,
Crucified in Peoria
And everywhere. "What was the one
Wrong thing I did?" he blares,
Exchanging his passion for a peace pipe and air,
Leaving the crippled souls
Down there.
But at this distance
His vision seems more rare,
That he is no further
Or closer here
As when the arms grabbed on his sleeve
They were not seeking miracles as much as
Waiting for miracles to fail
And the optimist promising to kneel and admit
That all he inspired was wrong
That they were right all along.
Such occasional moments sustained them
Even as God brought their troubles to an end.
Bitterness languished beneath the rock
That took Christ beyond them
Laughing how connections are all in the head.

GAY STREET

At the inner cities' deserted frontiers
The most vulnerable wear masks.
The brick skeletons are black against the lilac sky
While lights are strung over the graveyard's burnt grass.
The brooding beauty of the left-behinds
Under a thoughtless thumb
In the perfect light where everything counts
And no one ever comes.

PAEAN TO THE PRESTON STREET LONELY MEN

While women are destroying men everywhere simultaneously,
The men who lose are surrounded in grey,
Making occasional forays to the liquor store,
Waiting through streetcorner cigarettes.

Their brains are unused chambers,
The souls sucked by a pervasive self pity,
The wind can't be felt, it is only a sound
Of winter crying — in the flames of spring air.

The homes where they can be drenched in every emollient save one
Seem vacant and distressing to them from even a slight distance;
A new low pang forms when they think of returning
But another block more of such men is too much.

They think of the innumerable, in animal robes
Sharing wine by the fireside, with crescents and roses,
While on their shelves, priceless words collect dust
That could be gold to lozenge the smoky air.

They return to their own neglected treasure.
What they are has no value. They converse
With ghosts, but it is they who are doing the talking
And the ghosts too selfish to respond.

They practice being artists, weave threads of pain
In bundles of knots, a gift to love.
They seek out the junkies who suck grey dick
And look enraptured in vapors of light.

They stay in the tavern, desecrate the art on its walls,
Making it more red with violation, keen with irony
For these devotees of affectation, who still look at occasional couples
With longing, even as they throw all subtlety to the wind.

Tough men embrace cold glasses with delicate hands,
Quail at the sight of young girls out for the night
Under the romance of the beer light. The men just slap pinballs
Hitting snags and alarms on the way down.

A few wonder about those other people,
The ones who listen to the radio, who sell
Their souls for a wife, home, kids and career
When there is so much anguish that can never be shaped.

They may sit there sulking for years,
As failures create new, less sustainable fantasies.
They dissent on bootleg Nancy Sinatra
And try to find a name for another doomed band.

Most of them sleep, eventually, and make amends with the familiar.
They find ways to wake up and cook themselves eggs
And try to look on the morning with someone else's eyes,
One whose small room can receive the whole world.

LUKE LOOKS FOR A JOB

Since I lost my way, I spend my days hiding
Tense behind curtains, trying to be invisible,
Working out new places to be when the postman arrives.
I wait for the wife to get home from work with the kids
And thank me savagely once again for nothing.
The kids whose joy saps the life out of me
Tie me down with their eyes, so that I must watch them
Struggle with toy alarm clocks and shriek
Whether happy or sad.
Occasionally, I hear from the kitchen "don't fall asleep.
I don't want them out in the street again. It's dark."
But I find I must spread myself out on the carpet
And rest bones too weary from way too much scotch.
I awake to an hysterical harrangue,
Three wordless mouths when my ear can't take one,
And I find I must leave, so I walk
To Marty's, but he won't let me in,
Seems his wife wants him all to herself this evening.
I'd go to the bar, but I don't feel too guileful tonight.
So I walk down the unlit streets,
Jealous of the dogs that bark at me,
Surveying my difficulties, the least of which are what I've described.
I can't get clear of my memory.
I can't dream at a baseball game like I used to.
I can't lose this sense of dread
That all that has happened will be taken away from me.
There are too many stars tonight,
So I'll go back home once I can
Figure out a way to get in
(Maybe I can sneak in when she takes out the trash).
I envy the smile on the face of the man
I saw escorted in shackles from the court to a van —
His worries were over.

OSWALD'S CREATIONS

I.
"I developed a streak of independence brought on by neglect" - Lee Harvey Oswald

Unloved boys
Who learn what they know alone
Are seen coldly, in terms of their isolation,
Not what they are isolated from,
The violence they pick up on radar.

Local loser fires three rifle shots...
But we can't clothe the killer of America
In such humble robes, we must look beyond him.
He learned Communism in the public library.
He read all the conspiracy theories.
He joined the Marines to preach
International Communist doctrine
But the troops didn't care
And the CO's yawned
And he learned how to shoot a high-powered gun.
He defected to Russia because he couldn't stand the way
America turned his mother into a pathological liar, or so he would say,
But he also wanted to invent conspiracies of his own,
To shed his experience to the other side,
To make deals with the darkness, with a poker face
That held nothing but lies, and all only to be recognized,
Illuminated. The KGB laughed,
And only after he mocked a suicide attempt
Did they let him stay as a model worker
Building televisions. But, making deals in his dreams with some third force,
Came back home, to the FBI, and Che Guevrolet, but they
Were professional, and this man offered only vanity.
The CIA wouldn't waste its time on a returned defector,
Especially one looking for a job.
How could they have expected
Their grand manufacture to have converted any souls?
He didn't know who to kill, and when he settled
On the bullet that grazed General Walker's hair,
He got away with it because he took the bus;
His pursuers couldn't think of a man without a car.
To the lawlessness and voodoo of New Orleans he returned,
To peddle himself as the fall guy
To the Cuban maelstrom's talk show fantasies.
He became Fidel Castro in his mind, resentful at all the cigars
Kennedy had stashed away.
When the KGB saw him in Mexico City, pleading that the CIA
Was tracking him, they would have laughed
If they weren't so saddened.
The long ride back, another dream shattered,
His fantasies forced a more fervent desire
That could never be requited,
But, as luck would have it, the work he got
Opened the door like a bolt of light
To the purpose of his life
— Oswald means "the power of God" —
So he left Marina his last $70 and his wedding ring
And walked with a large bag of "curtain rods" for his job at Dealey Plaza.
The whole thing was easy, there was no one to stop him,
Even his gun did not attract attention,
Even the cops, after the shooting, let him out of the building.
He had to kill a cop to get any respect at all.
When caught, playing for attention like a schoolboy,
He protested of any attention,
Was violently innocent, desperate for response.
He bantered with the cameras, making sure his smiling denials
Left no doubt of the truth. "You won't find it there,"
He said to his brother Roy when he looked into his eyes.
A sickened Jacob Rubinstein, another bit player in a play
Whose designs he did not understand, pulled the trigger for all of us.

II.
"Football is the opiate of the people" -Lee Harvey Oswald

Thirty years and 500 books later,
Oswald's creations do not recognize his cry.
We don't understand how he did, alone, what they,
Together, thought they couldn't do. We notice
How the mob chieftain toasted Kennedy's death and offered congratulations;
We see Hoover's glee at breaking the news to Bobby;
We hear word reaching the CIA just as Fidel's death serum is being delivered;
No one seemed content to have their violent hungers
Just hang there in respectful silence, without measurable response.

When the myth of one generation's youth vanished,
The procession was fantasized — as theater, as subterfuge,
For if we are who we feel ourselves to be,
We all died, as we all pulled the trigger, as we all conjured assassins
In our efforts to connect ourselves to the empty center no one sees.

DRAFT

In Peanut's Bar, the disabled veterans room,
They are forever tuned to war sounds droning,
The moose noises of battles never fought
And men never born to begin with.
They help handicapped kids on gum machines,
And hate another war coming, will hate to see it go.
They were saved by the planes, but slowly destroyed
By rounds from the king they saved.
When it's over, political cover
Explaining inhuman orders, meaningless crates,
But here the stakes are tied more tightly,
To elude the reasons men have to die.

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAM FOR A SPECIAL LIVE REPORT

President Liberace is selling off the museum again
To feed his fat dead father, whose unquiet spirit
Is possessed by Geronimo, for when stole this last Indian's bones
For his campus clubhouse, and so the blood of America
Is demanded in sacrifice.
Housing, health care, clean air, freedom, truth —
These are the trinkets he is pawning with his glitzy smile,
As if the buyer should be pleased with these luxuries.
"One should learn to live without such things," he says,
As he stashes the receipts in a secret bank account.
"There are things more important than these," he blinks,
As he stumbles to the keys, and plays the insane
Melodies of long-dead patronized and patronizing composers
Who not less than ten years ago were scorned with a rage
Now reserved for the cacophonous moderns.
He forgets some notes, glosses over archaic flourishes,
But the song comes out about the same:

"...The magnificent flag remembers magnificent wars,
When men thought with their guns on
And all women were whores,
When those who toiled for our liberty
Were not merely sores
We must fight so hard to ignore.
Recall when the truth served at the pleasure of kings,
Not the underfed press
And disinterested magazines,
When righteousness reigned all over the land,
There were no coup d'etats,
No dirtied hands.
When we picked and we chose and we made our demands,
There was no one to talk of the wounded or missing,
They were drowned by the brass of the band.
A tone of voice could open doors
(Not like now when the rich are subjected to scorn),
Goodness depended on how you adorned it,
The ones with nothing were the scoundrels.
The trains couldn't run if the rich went to jail,
Ministers could always open your mail,
The weak willed were in chains, not begging for meat,
The unjustly imprisoned could keep quiet and meek,
Because the free were better than the enslaved."

Amid this nostalgic revelry he paused —
"Ah, but things now are not that bad after all...
The streets can be cleaned by declaring a war.
Our friends have seen to it that we can't help the poor.
We've gouged and we've gouged and we've gouged some more,
And none of the people have anything to show,
And, as we predicted, the gold is back in good hands.
We've revved up the dream machines and plugged up the holes,
The price of admission is your dark-hearted soul,
It's what you have, not what you know,
There are better off than you who can't say no.
We've bribed the do-gooders, fine-printed the sentiment of compassion,
And shown everyone that wiping your ass with the Constitution aids the digestion.
Those who oppose our wars are unpatriotic...
Those who question our values are immoral...
The poor, not the rich, are the selfish ones..."

And on and on this broadcast went on,
Followed by opponents who said "Yes, but look at my hairdo"
And critics who noted how strong and finely tuned his tone,
Then back to Liberace, with songs that went out
To every home, and no one was sure if anyone was listening,
But they stayed still, as one by one, all the doors were sealed.

HARMLESS FANTASY #1

Klondike at the gallows
Staring away his sentence,
The lonely people lined up for a thrill —
His creaking fall, as Christ rises every Spring.
The phone rings — not the Governor
(He's trying to find out when life begins),
It's just another angry commentator
Taking away more of his precious sympathy.
When he almost died, at thirty five,
He thought of how his billions couldn't help him,
And there, in the hospital ward, he swore
He would never ask for favors
And would never hurt a creature any more.
But this vow entailed certain compromises
He was not equipped to make —
So he gave away his money
To the most undeserving and ungrateful,
The violently powerless, the anti-social homeless.
He waited with a wad for the first rip-off artist to approach,
So he could hand him the cash without having to be asked.
He funded shelters in the suburbs,
Methadone clinics in the shopping malls,
He had some twisted dream that with all his money
He was beyond the law.
He thought if he returned the phone calls
And answered every letter with enough diplomacy and hope
That would be enough.
But wars are not like that.
They carted off his refugees, thinking them his friends,
And nodded, smelled corruption, when he purchased the jail
And replaced it with a high rise to house the murderers —
The white doctor they sent to him came away shaking
So hard he couldn't hold a cigarette.
The newspapers printed stories of sleaze and gross debaucheries,
Knowing he would meekly protest, but he proudly declared
All of it was true, what a shame they only printed
A small fraction of his indiscretions.
It was time to call in the law.
Treason, bribery, revolution, read the warrant,
So he hired the worst lawyers he could find
(Who were not only inept, but wanted to see him fry),
Rigged the jury, delivered the evidence, but, of course, he got off
And the people rose in fury how the rich escape justice.
All he could say to the murderous mob
Was that the rich invented justice to give the poor something to do
Besides dream of being rich.
At that, the New York Times rethought its position on lynching,
And with corporations held a telethon
With starving babies and crippled retards
All screaming "Klondike must go."
Philosophers came down from their mountain caves
To declaim "the man who would make us believe
That money is a vacuum to fill empty values
And that freedom is only selfishness,
When it is quite the other way around."
They even brought M.L. King back from the dead
To say "I cannot trust a man like him, who has never,
For justification, cited my name."
Then they rolled the horrifying pictures:
Klondike driving hundreds of Porches into the sea,
Passing out Rolexes to people without jobs,
Dropping a confetti of $100 bills on the White House lawn
As the first children stooped to pick some up.
He was so amused he called in a pledge himself,
And almost wished he had friends, so they could laugh with him,
But he knew they wouldn't be laughing.
The cops came several times to get him, but the smell and sight
Of the wasted people who lived in his house always drew them away.
Special tactical squads went in with helicopters to snatch him up,
But they came away with a double-breasted gentleman
Who swore that Teddy Roosevelt was President.
The real President came on TV one day asking for help,
For suggestions on how to get Klondike.
The letters poured in; they sent ruffians with Third World experience
Into his den, but they were arrested by the police before entering.
They tried again. They told the police, the media, the Pope,
But they neglected to tell Klondike
Who, if he'd heard, would have gladly obliged them by being there,
But, as it was, he was in Mexico City trading
Personal computers for indian beads to junkies.
By the time he got back, someone had freaked
At all the undercover cops and torched his house.
So Klondike found seedy dives, the better to get caught,
He mistakenly thought, for they somehow imagined lavish penthouse suites,
So Klondike remained miserable and free.
He turned himself in at some ghetto police station,
But they laughed at his presumption, that someone so well behaved
Could be so corrupt.
He rode the subway, pulled his money out of bank machines.
He had used the assumed names so that no one could know
Where the gifts came from, but it saddened him now
That it made him impossible to track.
Getting desperate, he ran up against a gang of prostitutes
Shrieking "look, I am Klondike" but they thought him too sick
For anything but the perfunctory offer of sex,
Which he gratefully refused, wondering at last how he ever came to care
For this madness now pursuing him.
The profligate horror continued, and the authorities
Were no closer to bringing him to justice
When he was spotted one day, buying every confection from an ancient Mister Softee truck
That had strayed too far from the green fields.
The driver sensed something as Klondike threw all the eclairs in the dumpster,
So he tailed him, at a distance, as he peeled off
Hundred dollar bills to spike-haired urchins in high tops,
Not even smiling, as they begged for more.
When he walked into the doughnut shop, his fate was sealed.
Klondike at the gallows
Reached into his junkyard of philosophies
Searching for the right final gift as he scanned
The imperturbable faces that paid to see his demise;
What lesson could he tell those who had seen his
Generosity with envy, who had seen him as another power among many
That didn't come through in the end, who didn't understand
That he really didn't care anyway?
He tried to explain, but all he could say was
"As long as the oppressed would rather suffer than educate,
I'll suffer."
Which would have been fine if
The rope hadn't broke.