In the late sixties we were so fed up we wanted to destroy it all. That’s when we changed the name of America and stuck in the “k”. The mood today is different, and the language that will respond to today’s mood will be different. Things are so deteriorated in this society, that it’s not up to you to destroy America, it’s up to you to go out and save America.
—Abbie Hoffman, National Student Convention ’88, Rutgers University
In a burst of Dionysian FRIGHT
you’re snagged
keys locked inside
first week first car in 16 years
forced to ring a stranger’s steel curtain door
for a healing coat hanger never used before
dipped in 19 consecutive generations
of herbal locksmith experimental libations
but the magic potion hanger won’t fit
in the window
till you rip rubber insulation padding
and then doorknob comes only halfway up
then back all the way down
50 times
halfway up and all the way down
till finally you realize this ain’t gonna work
So you call local police for help
but begin screaming
“You broke Martin’s new plastic jaw
with a Jim Crow hangman’s billy club law!”
then casually describe your local campaign plans
to institute civilian review board rock & roll bands
that would include 6-year olds
with no corporate two-party political bias
so by the time you ask
about getting car door opened
all officers are busy
and locksmith equipment all locked up
Just in time you remember a spare key
in your bedroom dresser
hid in pages of an old spiral notebook
you haven’t looked at since heavy drinking days
but you realize apartment’s an hour away
and front door keys
on your car key ring
with six others
now easily countably floppy in the ignition
O keys, how brilliant your bright sunned reflection
through the passengerside window!
O shit
No wonder 16 years without a car
and today at work I’m driving
an 8-months pregnant homeless Latina woman
to look at apartments
She hasn’t had house keys for awhile
and O My Keys she’s getting nervous
having contractions while I’m only
learning to deliver messages
but she knows he’s coming early
“it’s a boy” her last boy early
one before that too
she might have liked a girl
they’ll be no more apartments to see today
that she can’t have
despite shiny new
Section 8 rent subsidy certificate
and only 5 more student loan repayments before
eligible for new loans to paralegal school
where she’ll study to lawyer
once she finds a legal home
and you my car keys are in their proper place
the ignition
but the path is blocked
& I can’t reach you
no matter how I open
cleansed perception
to Blakean infinity
of blue skies above
Yvette feels guilty
doesn’t want any Amandla Crossing
Transitional Housing residents
to hear of my screw up
cause they’ll think her bad luck
so I yell second time today:
“Don’t internalize everything! It’s all me!
I’m Fucking Idiot for the Day
this’s absolutely no reflection on you!”
to no avail
she still doesn’t want me telling
and I feel guilty for losing my cool
till she says at least I’m acting
human now
not like some ice cube social worker—
role reversal—here—mid street
wherever we’re stuck
with keys where they’re supposed to be
but not now please O keys not now
please not now not now not now not now
not not not not not not now now now now now now
hypnotized into iron trance
depressed about red tears
dropping my palm’s longest line
who would believe our story
when no more than two senators
expressed belief
in Anita Hill?
Magically suspending disbelief
doesn’t cut
the mustard tree
of earthly political justice
and now a right-wing Supreme Court zealot
can help illustrate that ideology does not know
rigid ethnic or gender boundaries
though sociopolitical power
up to this historic point mostly certainly does
If Anita Hill wasn’t believed
what woman will?
Surely not 27 homeless women
in our transitional housing program
sure not 50 kids
with homelessness
carved into cranial histories
Yvette’s worried, supposed to be back soon
to take her two kids out of daycare
where we left them with 48 others
about to throw 250 million p-i-e-c-e-s
of a giant jigsaw puzzle
of the world or country or state
can’t remember which
onto the floor
Now that I think of it
it looked
a lot like
the American left
or maybe Picasso’s Guernica
as seen by Gert Stein
after reading Ulysses
and deconstructing the Cyclops chapter
Yvette’s supposed to be back by 5:00
my watch stopped at 4:30
does that mean I can’t be late?
O my bright shining keys! o my!
Things could be worse!
I could be writing an ode to my clothes
standing naked here in Woodbridge
groping for an anti-Enlightenment
edenic fig leaf technology
while Neruda gets angry with me
for ripping off his ideas while failing
to move the planet noticeably forward
I could be waving pro-choice coat hangers
as lone protection from extremist explosions
of toxic-dump land
to radioactive air missiles.
I could be Father Aristede
given unceremonious boot
by U.S.-trained guntoting cahoots
while unknown mystery beings
who look just like Tonton Macouts
in nonhuman-dimensional suits
disappear organizers against coups
before teary-eyed silent infant cries
Before Yeltsinian greed took over
Gorbachev thank Compassion’s Window
returned for a moment
from his long coupy trip
I condemned that one
right away
no more anti-democratic acts
in socialism’s name!
The dream of the utopian left was
to lead Democracy’s child
into new & underground parts
of the city
not to try saving the city
by offering the child up
as sacrifice
to the latest books
turned into the latest
manufactured biblicistic fractured
tylenol tablets
Tip those KGBCIA statues over!
America I’ve given you all
and now what & where am I?
With the key thru the window?
And no one to drive the car?
Over half our Canadian neighbors
live in provinces driven
by democratic left NDP
while here ozone layer disintegrates
& any tourist can smell
rotting perfume riding NJ’s Turnpike
with car windows open
Where’s our New Democratic Party, my keys?
I measure every grief I meet
with probing eyes that are wider
than that slot
between window and locked doorknob
here with me is a woman talking to death
saying no, I survived your phantoms
saying my kids and I
will beat you to the wheel this time
and looked at this way
car keys don’t matter
what kind of metaphor
is this?
what the ability to drive a machine
compared to this?
how the literary canon
stand up to this?
what kind
of home
is getting into a car
anyway?
Yvette:
“What, you suddenly have goddamned
time
to daydream NOW?”
And I laugh
caught
in the lack
of act
thinking how beautiful it would feel
jingling keys
in my palm’s
eye again
After the modernists deconstructed
what that exists
and postmodernists added questions
of identity construction & appropriation
to the equation that could never be
an equation to them
O reasonable unreasonableness
who am I
at this moment to them
this only jewish child
of a concentration camp survivor mom
depression-pinched chemistry dad
now helpless outside a locked car?
Who is this pregnant homeless woman beside me
whose name I have changed
to write this poem
now trying her luck with the door?
Who is that kicking her belly
to enter this polluted world
before it’s ready?
Who are these survivors
of domestic violence, of injuries
that suck up the
rent, teenaged mothers kicked
out the house, drugged out escape
routes, AIDS ripping
apart growing bones, father-in-law
rapes, local police
badges branded on their bodies, 27 different
unaffordable
reasons for homelessness, ten thousand reasons for the kids, without
playgrounds, tumbling on used heroin
needles, bunkbed torched by racism’s adult
white gasolined robes, dinner sacrificed
for parental addictions to
theft of convictions, congress-dictated plutonium
profitable neglect, 3 a.m. drunken bangings
on cardboard welfare motel doors, rusty handgun barrels
armed & aimed into
the cradle’s third eye, thunder lightning
of 100 million multinational sexual
abuse nightmares, it’s over it’s over it’s over it’s over
there just ain’t no reason for hope it’s got
to be over;
no I refuse
to give up
hope
got to get those keys
without breaking
the window
one can’t buy a new window
50 kids back home working on a jigsaw puzzle
half african-american,
one-third latino one-third white, one-quarter indian
one-tenth amerasian
and one more tenth
born into pneumonia’s
infant mortality
death grip
O endless ironizing detachment into an ineluctable void!
WHO IS GONNA HELP THEM PUT THOSE PIECES TOGETHER?!
O keys! Got to get you soon
without breaking the window O world!