From Words Dance

GENERIC STRUGGLE

It’s sort of a horror—
ashes in the mouth, fish subsisting
on mud—
hypothetical fringes, camps, camps
of cracks where real humans slip…

Homeless, here on the last frontier
there’s room enough for millions
to live out of a car, pitch a tent, grow
up in a dark texture of thatch.

To taste the stale odor of resources drying,
to breathe that exhaust
is to suddenly find yourself another
bottle-tossed boat person
washing, washing…

I’m inside that knife
experiencing the exposed belly’s
sensations, and what pierces, and when.

It’s the heart of a photo of three women
weeping over some body shot down.

Madonnas aren’t myths. Truly, martyrs feel:
grief, the black garb, not a symbol simply,
but more a face wrinkled expressive with
gestures, of having stolen sights gelling
as dreams at the edges of breathing, of breath.

Is to lose them to harden, become brittle,
hollow, a shell of straw
whistling in the breeze?

Down at the bowels of featureless dots on
a chart, down past the grid to a network
of sewage tunnels, the human soul’s reduced
to the garble some loudspeaker blasts.

Each evening, on the airwaves, that trouble,
a roomful of mirrors, delivers the same
news.

© Stephen Mead 2005