Labor is the Curse of the Living Classes

My brother works where people have been shot at.

More than one.

Things happen.
He checks out customers.
He works odd hours.

He sometimes walks home from work,
at any hour. My husband works those odd hours too.

Waking, raising, driving, working--

not even the ass-crack of Dawn,
the small of her back,
where night caresses Her as she sleeps,
and she dreams of makers of doughnuts,
bakers of bread,
counters of tills, and cutters of meat,
all up and at their day
before she arises
rosy fingered
and red-handed
arriving at the scene of a day
already stolen from working people.

I witness her some mornings
as she breaks in a world where I was told to
admire the watchers of the
the new day.
And drive as the sun rises,
and in winter, drive home as the sun sets.

I have seen the sun come and go
from my car window,
my office time artificially lit,
and my life comes and goes with it--
and when homeward bound in winter's dark,
I think my day too short and done,
my best hours consumed
in a lighted yet lightless place.

I work in a neighborhood where
people have been shot.
I work where cars shoot past, drivers needy
to be speedy

to get there at the punch-clock time.

We aren't friends, the people I work with.
They are and they aren't.
I know them, and they know me.

And I think work is
necessary but how necessary
are all the things that come with it--

not the benefits or pay--

just the thing where one lends one's life
out to anything,
anything at all,
so long as bills are paid.

Sanctified

I found it there again
by the blasted fig
under the withered vine,
the bloody ache
called the divine.

In a bombarded hospital,
a blue-skinned savior
draws breath;
while overhead, chronology
is defied,
the fruit flings back
towards a bloom of fire,
and the summer air
darkens with
a pollen of
smoke.

Elsewhere,
108 tears of the Buddha
have fallen;
needlessly shed
blood,
their compassion cut short.

I can walk in the footsteps
of the cross carriers.

I can't yet bear
the hand the wields the hammer.
But the hammer fits my own.
Perhaps that is where
one starts.

Sprach

This tongue I have is a forked gift
as natural to me a fingerprint.
I do not think of the things I lift,
or lilt or trill or drop or crop,
nor seed the already-littered earth with.

My history is this story--
a tongue entwined within several faces
a pastiche of words of many places, yet
my spoken word would leave no doubt
to my geographical redoubt,
indeed some Henry Higgins could
place it within a neighborhood.

The English language built
cathedrals with
the plundered lumber of sunnier
climes,
and if my accent drips
with juniper and lines
and a certain bracing tonic,
I can only toast the tongue I
host, and hope my tongue also hosts me
allowing the things I speak to be
as meaning-laden
as I hope they'd be.

Skinned

Holding myself together
stripped of all my surfaces,
trying to keep my features smooth,
trying not to bleed on the floor,
watching you take a little more,
I wonder what my skin was for?

Artist

I hurt my feet to come
here to this place outside the page
where you are now,
and it hurts
hurts to walk where I used to swim,

crawl this dirt where I used to fly,
talk these words, when
thoughts race in my head,
and be alive
when there was a place where in repose
I made my bones into
beautiful things.

But here now I will
play myself
act my art, and ply this trade
stolid in this three d form
existing in the life I made.

No mermaid I nor
fairy child
or special thing in poetic conceit,
I only pour my heart out neat,
to let you drink me dry
the undiluted why is I

might be medicinal,
or else Lethe for your too-
remembered self.

I recall myself too much, too.
Let me help you with you.

Mona Eltahawy's "Sekhmet's Tits"

The poem is found here--Sekhmet's Tits.

I have been a fan of Eltahawy's reporting for awhile, but her poem strikes me with its provacative language and juxtaposition of sexual and violent images. And I have been in love with Sekhmet as a poetic image for some time--the lioness breath of the goddess is a source of strength and an image of aggressive feminist aspect. The use of popular song lyrics ties the ancient image of the warrior-goddess and the age-old clash of love and war to the present. It's a palimpsest--even the lyric from Oasis: Gonna start a revolution from my bed--calls to mind the Beatles' Revolution and John Lennon's bed-in. Which calls to mind Lysistrata's strike.  Except here we are with a new configuration--"Make Love, Not War", evolves to Making Love as a kind of War.  A better one. A war of healing.

The backstory of Sekhmet is that she is the Eye of Ra, poured out on the desert to destroy people because they displeased the gods. Her breath created the desert. Ra tricked her into ceasing her bloodlust by dyeing the Nile with wine, so that she would think it was blood, but would be made drunk on it. Once drunk with the wine, she became an aspect of Hathor, and fell in love with Ptah, the creator god. In this story, a goddess goes from uncontrolled wrath to a benign goddess. We have a picture of an entity capable of  "creative destruction" who tears down and rebuilds. This makes her a figure ideal for comtemplating healing from a destructive event, as the poet depicts.

The evocative language, referring to her pussy and tits, strikes me as intended to shock those who would be shocked by reference to perfectly natural female body parts. They are perfectly natural, and the words used, the "vulgar", remind us that culturally, some people don't see the natural bodies we are given as beautiful, but unclean. The pussy is our entry into the world. The tits nourish us. But the poet is birthing a revolution from her pussy. She is nourishing herself. And she seems to do this to continue fighting for herself. And that is a beautiful construction right out of feminism--the urgency of self-care. Because the disregarded self is a house on fire--like the wrathful Sekhmet, it leaves a desert in its wake. But pacified with love, the self makes a new path.

Maybe I'm taking my reading too far. Eltahawy admits herself she wrote this rather quickly, but sometimes deep meanings in poetry come across just like that. In any case, I found the poem meaningful to me, and it struck a lot of notes in my mind.

Sidekick, licked

Oh woe is me
oh woe times three,
as sad as a very sad thing I be--
my laptop mouse expired--he
clicks no more the links
that pleaseth me.
My scrolling finger
scrolls no more
on the dial that such a scrolling's for,
but darts about uncertainly
on touch pad that touches not
the soul of me.

Oh Amazon delivery,
restore my mousy reverie
by furnishing outside my door
a box like that two years before
that brought me my plum-berry
Belkin jewel,
a most trustworthy blogger's tool,
that copied, pasted, deleted and
linked
more words of mine than were e'er inked.

With red-light gleam and
worn-out hue, the cursor moves
for now, for you, but
in mere days you will be through
when another newer
mouse comes to--

And yet in a box you may well rest,
the buggy nature of electronics in their test
being felt--my $8 prize
perhaps a dud, will render you a
momentary stud, in at least connecting,
and without much jerking, permitting the cursor to
glide--almost working--

Not much, alas, to crow about,
but I'm not quite ready to do without
a thing that that served me fairly well.
Remember that ungodly spell--
the Jack and Coke keyboard incident?
When Mouse and I were left,
keyboard bereft,
to conquer the Web's ebb and flow
and even hunt and pecked some posts
with on-screen keys?

Moments like these keep you in
my memories, my USB-connected
squire.

You helped me interface
the world.

You'll see a rubbish tip inside a week.