Short Speech to My Friends

A political art, let it be tenderness, low strings the fingers touch, or the width of autumn climbing wider avenues, among the virtue and dignity of knowing what city you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes —even what buttons—to wear. I address / the society the image, of common utopia.

/ The perversity of separation, isolation, after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms, now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes. The poor have become our creators. The black. The thoroughly ignorant. Let the combination of morality and inhumanity begin.

2.

Is power, the enemy? (Destroyer

of dawns, cool flesh of valentines, among

the radios, pauses, drunks

of the 19th century. I see it,

as any man's single history. All the possible heroes

dead from heat exhaustion

at the beach

or hiding for years from cameras

only to die cheaply in the pages

of our daily lie.

One hero

has pretensions toward literature

one toward the cultivation of errors, arrogance,

and constantly changing disguises, as trucker, boxer,

valet, barkeep, in the aging taverns of memory. Making love

to those speedy heroines of masturbation or kicking literal evil

continually down filmy public stairs.

A compromisewould be silence. To shut up, even such riskas the proper placementof verbs and nouns. To freeze the spitin mid-air, as it aims itselfat some valiant intellectual's face.

There would be someone