Daily Archives: November 3, 2013

November 3, 2013

What We Won’t Acknowledge

By Tony Brown

Admitting failure,
complete collapse,
Ernest “Fatman” DiCicco
spends his last days
hoping for a warm spell
before first snowfall.

He looks over 
all he’s done and 
gives away most
of his best things,
his favorite guitars, 
his pens, his knives.

Burns his letters, 
every book he’d ever 
made a note in, 
all the cheap jewelry
he’d loved, clothing
and caps and gloves.

When all is done,
Ernest begins to starve himself —
Fatman changing before our eyes,
such peace in his  — 
will not speak of what he’s thinking,
and for once we won’t ask.

When he’s gone, we won’t notice
the absence for more
than a moment.  Why be hypocrites?
We have always wished he would go away
and once he has, everything’s
fine, everything’s for the best.

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November 3, 2013

America the Beautiful II

By Tony Brown

He cries with his gun
and she weeps with her cleaver.
If I am mistaken in this,
burn me with money for my kindling.

What a sad hole
of formerly shaded secrets.
What a barn full of slaughterhouse
cows seeking escape.

The roses we planted
and fed with convenient blood and sweat
are blooming long after the hard frosts
have set in, and we have no more

to give unless we source it
from each other, from the ones we thought
were like us.  The message goes out:
find a reason to stick them and drain them.

He cries on his gun, she
tear-stains her cleaver.  But 
that doesn’t stop them from working,
and the roses earn a temporary reprieve.

It’s cold, though.  So cold
tears and sweat and blood are hardening.
So cold we can see now that those cows
aren’t breathing.  Our sustenance:

nothing but ghosts.  So cold the roses
break off the stems and shatter.
Our easing: nothing but scraps.
We look at each other weeping,

and realize how hungry we are.

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November 3, 2013

America The Beautiful

By Tony Brown

We’ve become
so angular
in America
The Beautiful,

lurching along with no grace,
our bones somehow stark
in grim faces in spite of our
slack obesity.

In the street,
in factory or office,
in church or temple,
we have to stare at each other

a long time to see
anything transcendent
there, and then
we turn suspicious;

we wonder what source of joy
they’re hiding that should be ours
as our faces get leaner,
and meaner, and more and more cruel.

How far we’ve come
from the Good Old Days.
We don’t remember them,
but there are those who do

or say they do and they
are the itch on the side
that won’t stop pinching,
the ones who goad us to claim

Good Old Days
that never were,
Good Old Days
that for others

were the Dark Times.
Maybe that’s why we’re
all so glum, so mad,
so tuned to the key of war.

We all have heard by now
that the myth’s a myth
and America the Beautiful
is bait on a trip wire.

The Good Old Days
some of us had were built
on broken backs, stolen earth,
raped minds, and bounty scalps.

Some of us
are angry
because we trust karma
and know what’s coming.

Others clench
their fists
because they miss ignorance
and the peace that comes with it.

No matter what the cause,
we’re a nation of angular, sharp-faced
soldiers these days, all of us,
no matter how soft we seem.

One of these days
we’re going to cut loose
and start to cut our losses
in a wild stab

at finding our visionary
birthrights, our Good Old Days
in our Beautiful Americas.
It will not be pretty.

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