it's a slow boil
by Andrew Kozma
All poetry is politics, and all politics are lies
we tell ourselves so we can sleep. The alarm
has been going off for hours and the sun
won’t stop staring through the window, but we sleep
with earplugs and blindfolds and the alarm
lives in the garbage where we threw it. O bumptious
cretins! O soft-shelled, half-hearted resisters!
The buses run on time. The grocery stores are stocked.
Houses are built as shells for snails, for oysters,
any organism which dresses the tables of the rich.
There are no trains. There is no healthcare. And yet
sickness is a moral failing and where can you go?
Here is the emptied Wal-Mart filled with children.
Here are the bears being shot in their dens. Here,
a prison rushing to please its stockholders.
Here, a wall to keep them out. Here, a passport
in a pile of passports, taken to keep us in, and we
are quiet as a graveyard or an audience in a theater
where we don’t understand the play, but are afraid
to say so. How embarrassing it is to be wrong.
we tell ourselves so we can sleep. The alarm
has been going off for hours and the sun
won’t stop staring through the window, but we sleep
with earplugs and blindfolds and the alarm
lives in the garbage where we threw it. O bumptious
cretins! O soft-shelled, half-hearted resisters!
The buses run on time. The grocery stores are stocked.
Houses are built as shells for snails, for oysters,
any organism which dresses the tables of the rich.
There are no trains. There is no healthcare. And yet
sickness is a moral failing and where can you go?
Here is the emptied Wal-Mart filled with children.
Here are the bears being shot in their dens. Here,
a prison rushing to please its stockholders.
Here, a wall to keep them out. Here, a passport
in a pile of passports, taken to keep us in, and we
are quiet as a graveyard or an audience in a theater
where we don’t understand the play, but are afraid
to say so. How embarrassing it is to be wrong.
Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Believer, Redactions, and Bennington Review. His first book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award and his second book, Orphanotrophia, will be soon be published by Cobalt Press.