Poetry
• Why grow uncomfortable - Hillary
Kaye
• The Scope - Hal
Bogotch
• Can't Move Yet - C.V.
Beck
• Packing - Douglas
Eisenstark
Why grow
uncomfortable
with this prison
now?
Why ask more of the walls
now
more of the
view?
Why be desperate to know
now
what has been long so
buried
Why care to question
now?
Why want to know their
views
couldn’t the world become smaller
still?
Why want to
know?
Why think to want love
now?
Why need a
friend
who can’t now know
you?
why ask more of the
day
that gave you reason to hope there would
be another.
–Hillary
Kaye
-----------
THE
SCOPE
Always the
cry
primitive,
wild
fluttering in the
night
the cat devours the
spider
spares the
butterfly
there is a
wolf
inside the
eye
open to the tearing
open
to the
telling
sometimes it is the
sheep
that feels the
bite
sometimes the
she-wolf
there is
blood
and there is
pain
so that life will go
on
let the howl take
you
lips round and
black
head way back
tilted
to the
zenith
animal is no
more
human cannot be
human
the primal scheme
erupts
from the
vegetation
the universe
burning
in the
telescope
we all have cat's
eyes
taking in the
night
holding still until the
kill
shedding no
tears.
– Hal Bogotch
-----------
CAN’T
MOVE YET
Can’t move yet - I
still have printed checks
I can’t move,
I still have address labels left
I
can’t move yet --I just learned my phone number by
heart
I can’t move, I love where I
am--it’s my home, my neighborhood,
mi
barrio, my schtetl, my turf and
I don’t
wanna
–C.V.
Beck
------------
Packing
David
Byrne’s internet radio station is playing Country Music this
afternoon.
I’m dismantling my bed with
the same screw gun I used to put it
together.
Cloudy, drizzle, Friday afternoon,
leave work early.
What to do with the old
screws?
Save them? Toss
them.
Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Hank
Sr.
It all fits in a Grapes of Wrathy kind of
way,
I turn it up loud, so it can be heard by
those left outside.
Damn, those
aren’t dust-bunnies under the
bed!
Those are
Kangaroos!
Find an envelope two decades
old.
German stamp. What was her
name?
Why didn’t she print her name at
the bottom?
I can’t read this
signature!
Good English though. What was her
name?
I’ll save it for the time when my
long term memory
works.
hahaha!
Unlike
some,
I have no animosity
towards
the fascist corporate motherfuckers
who are evicting us.
Nor the spineless mayor
and gutless city councilpersons
who are
whipped into submission by them.
No, I give
them all good, good energy
While this
afternoon outside our squatter camp, they
sit
betting on college football. DO YOUR
BEST, ASSHOLES! DO YOUR
BEST!
Yesterday, I paid a younger
friend to help me.
He lifts a box I once
lifted
from Massachusetts to Missouri to
Chicago to New York to L.A.
Stick your nose
in the box, I say.
That, my friend, is the
smell of film, I say.
The bed is almost
gone.
The place is getting pretty clean. If
the sheriff comes,
we’ll go to my
storage space and I’ll show you my art
work.
–Douglas
Eisenstark
Lincoln Place Evictee
Posted: Wed - February 1, 2006 at 11:37 PM