The Red Sox
are about to win the World Series.

Ads and excitement and billboards and mouths
are all bubbling over in every Boston cafe, bar, and street

but you make a show of how you didn’t know
this was going on because 

you never watch TV, you don’t watch the sportsball,
you don’t watch the news, you don’t see the papers.

Is it still going on? That must explain those hooligans.
Such things are ten miles beneath your consideration.

I believe you believe this, I believe it’s all true — 
much as I believe in the moon fairies of Lingur.

You live in Boston, the Red Sox
are about to win the World Series, and you didn’t know?

Nothing overheard in the street,
no friends who care for the sportsball?

No one at work has mentioned it at all?
No customer, no client? No bus driver, no neighbor?

Hell of a bubble you’ve got for yourself, there.
Hell of a thing that you don’t need to notice the world

you’re in, or even the one next door
to yours.  Hell of a thing and hard to swallow

that not an ounce of whisper of this
has reached you at all.  

I think you’re just trying
to make a point

that you don’t care for baseball.
I can get with that — I don’t really either —

but I know enough of what’s going on around me
that I can speak of it to people who aren’t like me,

but if what you are saying
is in fact true,

if your vaunted and loudly proclaimed
distance from the day to day is true,

I’m frightened of you.  If it’s true
your detachment scares me to death. 

You live in Boston,
the Red Sox are about to win the World Series, 

and you’ve got a life so well-sealed
that nothing you dislike ever leaks in.

Somewhere in that detachment I detect
a echo that suggests that others eat cake,

an echo of the ultimate detachment:
the whistle and wet thunk of a guillotine.

Do you see yourself standing beside it, or kneeling behind it?
Are you the target or the mob?  Which position

will your detachment gain you
on the day the dirty world at last leaks in?

You live in Boston. The Red Sox are about to win
the World Series.  Take heart: 

soon enough everything will fall back into its place,
like a head falling into a basket.

Somebody
making me
unsatisfied

They say it
never can happen
Only I can do that

They never been me
or my like
Never watched me lose

Never watched how 
things were taken away
or denied

Somebody
making me
unsatisfied

You say
it isn’t true
Only I can do that

You say
a lot of things
that leave me that way

You do it
Leave me
that way

Someday
I won’t be
and I won’t have to ask

who did it to you
because
you and I will both know

Difference is
I’ll own it and
gladly

In the master’s house
they know how to have a good time
and still make it seem to those outside
that they’re as broken-down as the rest of us 

In the master’s house
they’ve got the know-how
that lets them kick up their heels
with the curtains closed

In the master’s house
all the pillows in the guest house
are filled with ultra-soft down
and lined with shattered Baccarat crystal

The master’s house is divided
There are wings for each of the children
The children keep their rooms slum-messy
All linked by corridors of marble

In the master’s house
There are a lot of doors that open out
But only a few that open in
The signs on those doors read “This Way Out”

In the master’s house they have televisions
Computers and phones and music on demand
Our music, our computers, our blessed wide screens
Everything we make they embrace and sell back

When the prodigal comes home to the master’s house
Nothing is slaughtered for the welcome feast
Nothing’s laid before him for his humble approval
Except a bill and a piece of cake

In the master’s house the halls echo and the walls stand pat
Outside the house crowds gather
to see the inside and measure themselves for the fit
in case one day they master themselves and move in

Once, they were called
a wonder of the world —
gardens suspended
above the desert, 

the green heart of Babylon.
Never mind that they
did not belong, that they took 
unimaginable labor

to build and maintain,
immeasurable resources
to feed and water; never mind
that what they were

did not belong there.  
They amazed all until
they fell to ruin,
dried out and blew away.

I think of them here in the skyscraper
where a man is speaking of deals
and leverage, thirty stories
above a garden of blue tarps

and varicolored tents full
of those who worked once
to make the country bloom.
It’s the only color in the autumnal city

today, a firefest
of inchoate rage
at the care and feeding
of unnatural wonders.  

However many centuries have intervened
between the arrogant heartbeat of old Babylon
and this equal arrogance of ours,
it has not been enough time

to change the likely result.

Greater and greater loom
the food bank and the Sally
as anchors to small and downtrodden living.

Larger and larger sound the horns of the cars
around the cardboard signs and their holders
on the traffic islands everywhere.

Wider and wider the eyes of the thinning.
Deeper and darker their sockets,
darker and sharper their cheeks and jaws,

and dumber and dumber their tongues.
Louder and louder indeed the shouting of others
but dumber and dumber the tongues of those

who know what has to follow shouting.
Not frightened by the coming violence,
just silent before it, not wanting to tell of it

for fear of it not coming. For fear of scaring
the shouters back into silence. For fear of them
not learning how they will have to back up the shouting

when the time comes.  Until then,
thicker the shadows by the Sally back door — 
and longer the food bank lines, silent and waiting.

When “up”
meant “shine,” meant
“spiral” and “rise,”

when “up” shone
and felt holy,
some heaven to which
aspirations aimed;

when “upward mobility”
suggested movement
and not stasis suspended
in payment hell,

I would glory in the prospect. 

Now it’s the promise
of a new dryer, one level up
from what I could have afforded
last month, one level up
from what I might afford next month.

And the car’s burning oil,
and the smoke rises up and floats
across the neighbor’s yard 
when I park it, and I can see them
turning up their noses.

Up, they say, might end up
up-ended for good for some,
for nearly all;

and two letters
end up looking
like a middle finger
pointing up, and the only thing
of mine that’s really rising

is red,
is behind my eyes,
is dying to get out. 

are what they want to give us

crumbs

the brown dust from the big meal

I can live on that
because I have

but if I can just hold off starvation
long enough to mold the crumbs
into a full loaf

I’ll eat well

grow strong
go knocking on their doors
at suppertime
maybe grab a little more
off their tables
run away

and if I can do this a few more times
maybe

I’ll make a banquet and feed a few more people
who’ve been living on crumbs

and if we can do this a few more times
maybe

we can build a table or two
grow strong
grow crops
harvest and prepare
make something of our own
for the tables

and if the formerly fat someday
knock on our doors
looking for crumbs

well
we’ll have enough crumbs
for them

to learn how to do for themselves

In Western Massachusetts
it can get noisy in the mountains.

We are not Boston,
the residents always shout,
and neither are we New York.
Come and play but dammit,
don’t claim us and overstay.

But Boston and New York
always want to pretend they are pioneers
when they come out to visit or squat
in Western Massachusetts for a weekend or longer.

Whoop dee do, yippie ki yi yo, they rough it in Noho,
they don’t stop in Pittsfield except to pee or poo
on the way to or from Tanglewood.

Isn’t it quaint
and semi-wild, this backyard of ours,
say New York
and Boston?  We’re so fortunate
to have this.  Such pretty colors
and how these empty mills become
so classically ruinous for us,
it’s special.

Chicopee, Holyoke, Springfield
send messages up the grapevine
to Deerfield and Montague: slit
their angsty throats in the night,
but get the money first.  You, Amherst,
Sunderland, hide the bodies
out in Florida, scatter the credit cards
in Williamstown, get back and go
to ground.  No one will look for you
in winter, they’ll just head
for Vermont, and they can have them.

If there’s ever a Berkshire Revolution
it won’t stay noisy for long.  Western Massachusetts
will leave that to the cities.  Instead
the war cry will slip like paper into
a fast stream, melt,
disappear and not be missed
until spring, will be forgotten

by next fall, when it will
start again.  And it will start again
and again.  It will never end.

A clown lifts you from the gutter
that runs deep and dirty along the street
before the church that sneers at the two of you
staggering up the street.

“Telling you, son, the next world we build
is gonna be tight,” the clown mutters. You get a look
at how smeared and thin his facepaint is
and pray that he’s right,

because that church keeps trying to sell you
on its vision of a next world
that sounds suspiciously
devoid of kitchens and fireplaces,

and right now all you want
is for this good clown to set you safely down
at some warm house with a high blaze
and a big pot of stew; then, after a while,

for him to wipe off the makeup
and pull open a notebook, saying,
“Telling you son, we can do this.
I got it all worked out.”

Sitting there poring over the plans,
you’ll start to laugh when you realize
he’s right, there’s a new world possible,
and all you have to do, you’ve already done

by getting up out of the church gutter
in the arms of a man some think is hysterical,
some think is insane, and no one thinks
might have the answer.

“Gonna be tight,” he’s saying again.  “Poor people
gonna rise up, get their share, like the song says.”
Poor people gonna rise up.  Like you did.
Like you always knew you could with a little help.

how guilty do I seem —

limping in long jeans
and ratty sneakers
to the bank and the liquor store
to pay overdue bills

pants soaked halfway up my shins
in light rain with no umbrella
or hat or coat
or smile

the teller takes a long time
cashing the check — she seems suspicious

“don’t you have a bank account
like everyone else?”

oh
my dear lady

let me wipe my glasses free of rain
let me stop panting
let me shake the cramp out of my foot
before I answer
that
though I am now
complexly broke and broken
I am innocent of the dumb you think you see on me
and whatever I may be guilty of
it is not what you think:

I belong here
am rooted here
no matter how rootless my finances
make me look to you
and while I have a bank account
I’m not explaining this to you
out of sheer pain
at your assumption

poverty I think should be no hyphen
in this town

just gimme my due
and you can click your tongue
in your own car
on your way home
through this delicious rain
you will not feel

Seeming
to stop short
of burning through,

just a little less
than engulfed,
the palace

is not falling into
a heap of embers,
rather is charred

and fragile, but remains
upright for now,
the shape of authority

preserved even as
the greasy smoke
from the masters’ pyre

covers our countryside
and poisons us, our families,
our livestock chokes

on it, but their house
stands there, shadow
of its frame long over

the land, and no one
will knock it down
no matter how rickety

it becomes, we’ll wait
for it to fall as its absence
frightens us, when it goes

on its own we’ll deal then,
but no one wants
to have the cause of that emptiness

on their shoulders alone:
let it fall, leave the bones in the ashes
where they burned themselves,

we will die of their poison
before we ever let it be known
that we will not miss their tyranny.