Poetics of History

I felt poetic today
Yesterday
And the day before
Probably all last week
Kept singing in the streets
Thought my soul
Was going to choke
On cigarette garbage truck exhaust smoke
Fell in love
Wanted to write
A song
He broke my heart and
I sang all day long
I felt poetic today
As I walked down the street of
unsafe mixture
zombies lost
in brown junk
fixture
South Orange Ave
Is like dark yellow
During the day
The sun stays softly away
Afraid of some danger I feel
In a pulse
The block is hot
The block is hot
The block is hot
Un/em/ploy/ment bakes
Un/der/em/ploy/ment boils
Rich folk enjoyment never
Toils but troubles you and me
Loss of industrial base
Leaves us all out of place
And I felt poetic when I saw
That junkie in the doorway
Wanted to bang out
Some kind of nutritional
Vitamin A/B/C and D rhyme scheme
Obscenely twisted reality on the streets
I felt profound and profane and poetic with disdain when you forget how to cry or Don’t have the time
Or tear ducts are dry
Your heart seems left without
Direction and touch
On uncertain lunch breaks
Breaks your heart and comes out
In weird ways
I needed some Chuck Berry or
Motown Marvin Gaye or
a superhuman redistribution
to save the day

I felt bottomlessly deep
Wanting to dance to the tune
Of ambulantic melodies and
Firetruck symphonies
Save a waltz for me at the
Bodega first row meringue

Warnings whispered softly
out the mouths
of babies
they know drug culture
like their add’s
some more riddling please
midnight car alarm serenades
Krasdale
Krasdale
Food substitute
for renegades
and death breathes with
certain breath
in a culture of violence

I felt pastoral
Melodious and lyrical today
Confined and misjudged
Leonard Peltier
Innocent yet condemned
I guess we’re all political prisoners
In cold cities to some end

I felt poetic today
Last year
Last night
Thought I woke up screaming
Dreaming I was in the fourth world
Where children are commodified
And exterminated
As surplus
To keep prices
Up, up, up and away

I felt poetic today
Just fought for the words
I’m sorry I miss you I don’t
Know where to turn
Prisons loom on the horizon
Where sunsets used to play
Dubwa declared
The Rising Sun of a
New Day Begun!
3/5 of a day

We are all going to be put away
when uncertain men contemplate
this redhead
at 12 pm on a jim crow
street I’m looking downtown
for the klan in their sheets
I am sorry if I sound
dismayed,
I feel poetic today
And sometimes
When it gets too hectic
I find myself
On my knees penning prayers for a
Marxist dialectic

Tracey Luszcz
Copyright 1999