The Gentleman from San Francisco’s 401(K)

Action, action, action,

Armchair factions? Lottery

ethos insisted that I note down

wallets, pomegranates, and youth,

the speaker of my house demanded

“sift through and sow magnifying lenses,

devour defenses, battery power insurance”

Being a gook, I wasn’t allowed solemnity.

I asked for indemnities but He was absent,

I called for anti-poet Parra, he was laughing,

I ingrained my thoughts on bra, ob-la-daing,

And I’ve been truant, now like an old hit song,

I was dying for a bathtub, aching for lost loves

Our cellophane bag lunches swallowed the oceans,

but that is not our concern but God’s, always, forever,

so let’s just live, live, live til we die, die, die, die slowly,

in a gooey death refusing to—retired—believe that the

consumerist blame is not on the veiled abundant plastic

fishes murderous in reefs, but on the leeches in a forest

of a capital city’s rivers and old houses and banks and . . .

 

I was happy to see you but you were not so happy

to be born, and though there was the TV, sure,

“I know I can’t hunger or clamor for more,”

throwing your arms round ‘n’ round

in desperation, asking for respite,

for salutations, while I sighed

in my own incarceration

In twelve years

I will be

free,

see