Saturday, December 18, 2021

Neo-liberal warming

 

18 December 2021


Because I can’t cry

I might be immune from grief

Skinned knees and other


Suffering, unless

Expression fails to be cause

For my suffering


Fools gladly, includes

The man in elf hat on zoom

The youngest woman


Says she also lost

Husband, careened back

Such diagnoses


Campbell’s alphabet

Soup letters at the ready

To shift positions


Each letter a hurt

Egret hobbling in graveyard

Foot mangled by mower


White punctuation

Against Ko`olau green be-

fore corporate grave


Sites gentrified with

Fountains, there I saw marker

For a couple, still


Alive, epitaph

Sweet, dates incomplete, who now

Aren’t there; divorce is


Death before dying

Mortality prep, lettered

In unresolved con-


flict inflicted on

Denizens of hope (skeptics

Need apply) resume


Works until it’s re-

sume, rhyming with Calais

Callous professors


Unfamiliar with

New austerity measures

You provide the print


The paper, belief

In individual coping

Skills—what we market


In—neo-liberal

Arts my major, graft my skill

Craft a tiny boat


Of clay and wattles

The allusive mud I learned

To spread on thick, no


Currency now that

Once future ice melt ensues

No trawler to cut


Its incipient

Absence, holes we do not grieve

Swallow us whole.



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