TWO POEMS
by David Hoefer

THE NEXT LEFT

"a tulip raves among the murmuring metals" - Philip Lamantia

Epochal woolgathering, chromium sepulchers. Slash-and-gigle presidents.

FREE THE AMERICAN 250 MILLION

Our wise men, our policy wonks, all the Solomons of nerve gas.

BECAUSE A NATION CAN RUN ON AUTOPILOT.

Aliens in the District, ludicrous aureole. Funded gentry driving golf balls and monuments into the sky, from inside a trance.

SMASH MATRONLY FASCISM, RULE OF LAW SUITS.

In the boutique, designer historians supposing themselves to be time's ultimate payoff.

RIGHTS ARE THE GOLEM OF INDIVIDUALS.

With iconic aspirations, the democratic feeling frenzy, scientific wrestling between mobs and more discrete interests.

GENERAL INTEREST COORDINATES POWER IN PEACE,

Plans and spectacles not graduating to the event-horizon.

GOVERNMENT DEVOLVED TO ATOMIC LEVELS.

Corporate-man, that trembling alloy.

THE MARKET IS THE MASQUE OF THE PEOPLE!

Wind falling, consortia reaping the dark issue of glands, for-profit bureaucrats at their catch of the day.

DESIRE SPEAKING LOUDER THAN WORDS,

Invocational training, ethnic waxworks, grope therapy, math lite, baby-sitting.

A "DICTATORSHIP OF DREAMS' MEANS

Nonsense in puddles, publication in gusts.

POPULAR CULTURE VICTORIOUS ON ALL FRONTS!--

Make-work making war (superpowers in alcoholic decline).

BOURGEOIS BY DAY, BOHEMIAN BY NIGHT.

Each of us a potential tornado above the genetic plain, uprooting railroads, barns and steeples, Sherman's army in our daily affairs.

WE CAN HAVE OUR CIVILIZAITON AND EAT IT, TOO.

Right-wing doves, pro-market leftists, anarcho-American Firsters: to the cells and barricades of becoming! To a nightly tryst of green factories and automatic cornucopias!

THE NEXT LEFT WILL

Rain, after a dry spell, closes parentheses.

FREE THE AMERICAN 250 MILLION.


CINEPLEX

Our busy silence. Out site, bisected with Fragrant competition.

Boy/Girlfriend in progress. Patches of want hooking up. We lash harbors, their merchandise and wily groves. Weather display on veranda of faces.

Green means go. We pick the lock of space (intimate banners, kiosks, offers).

Slack pressure unspools pooling rain. Broadening raid, straight on orange to the cineplex.

We enter parallel films adjacently screened. The villain's in both: one guy, part suit, part tick, moving parts like a bomb. Japanimated, wolfing down access. Instruments soldered in flesh tingle and thrash. Legacy piss-red with pain.

Her role in Female Kills Rapist, rising in light, commendable slaughter. Her dreams blacken smokestacks. "Fast eyes, the sky's footprint."

His role in Male Kills Rapist, sectioning action, veneration of peace. Mountainy prowess, rupturing "my great conveyed anger..."

We emerge, tenderly beating pots and pans. Fresh stars fit the night, our cyborgain calendar.

What a date, every position clarified like butter...


Grist On-Line original publication, © copyright 1995 David Hoefer.