
Panacea Politics For The Relevant Poor
by Rob Rice
One
It’s insubstantial empathy marshland
The greens are going brown
Wet tan foams
Wake with each step as you introduce air
As if you have the right to
Your hand is
Thumbing the lifeline
grip returns a sulcus
a think tank for conceding to mud
Two
A knocked loose tooth
Spent on two more chews of hard water candy,
salt taffy carousels a movie
made in the image of war
A king and lost kid lie frozen by the same storm
A body can come up with the flesh for a whole other body, somehow
More than once, fray, the body bank writes loans
You can raise a family on humiliated shopping carts
Shuddering back into their pens
Skulls full of electric worms
Nervous in their own societies
I spoke the words of neuroscience for the making of service
I clasp and listen to the news and it reads true, don’t let it down
We feel hard crabapple wet and like our own jelly
Happenstance of spread
A kink and wallop of cream
Shallots stripped bare and brutalized into stink and sweetness
Plating a modern meal
The food was good
But the waiter was awkward
Is what I’ll report to god
Three
Cardboard box packed with little
Bags of caught rain
Poor family daughters like white cheese
Somewhere between ricotta and mold
In their stare and in how it relates to mother
Whose massive sloping bosoms still hold such water
Their shelve tops oddly flat like a left and let dead thigh
Heat from life cooling against the floor as it rises
Leaving that mold
Chaperones on day trips to reenactments of life before war
Dancing the way they did
Steps forgotten completely by the civilian most
Wrecked down by loads that creak rouge knees
Courting just one quick shuffle or dip at a granddaughter’s fifth
And last before it’s too late to have her
Grow up with it
Half trails cut and stuck standing
Upright from the mass of walls and collections
Of one day saviors searching for themselves
It’s a house lost to its owners
Mauled by a sign on the door asking
Stay out
And why shouldn’t it ask
Richness enough to deny the filmsy pools of our character
Portions that set us back, up
Find us there pleading high crime
For games harder to play
Than when she is young
And sleeping
Some cities are becoming too difficult to use
Tubs of what I can believe it’s not
Street signs stuck resident yentas
Other herds thinning out
Red dick tech
It’s all porn
Four
Knees and modern hate
A killer bands together with a master a mistress of power in cognate
A flower woven through a fence, lianas like a drowning man
Drowning the man who saves him
Procession of whitebike memorials
A minister a prole a neonate
A closer a showroom a glass patch
Affluence a miracle of here and there
After too, now where would it be without our
Oars they layer folds
Smooth liquid showings up of
White sky and a mobbing of panicky limb ends
Through flooded jungle glades bloodlines
Boasting tox spotted flowers yelling out
Panacea politics for the relevant poor
None come to serve the outside worker
Raking the dead from the coops
They’re often in the back
Unions
Between boys and the men they’ll become
Girls and the men they’ll come to resent as figures of waste
Figures and figurines
Archeology of progress and a wet smack like
Clay on clay
Five
Mental work borrowed pro bono
Self support by sabotage and gavel
Losers
Defined by the winners they laud and lost to
Tops
Of buildings
Sick of identifying patterns like it’s great to
And corporation as human
Spit back in the face of the movement
Here’s that for your picket and choose
News people bored for words
Sit perched in the hot southern sky and glare down at cars
Heat distortion
We see some
Piecemeal from their predecessors
Necessarily no longer them
Leftovers from the time before they wondered which the war
Key links
Between lakes and their kettle beds
Aloof
Just wandering off like sublimation
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