Well, leaving the Midwest for a while,
these next two poems take place at opposite ends
of the country--
this first in beautiful downtown Berkeley
in San Francisco and the other on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Somehow, the mood that I was in seemed
to reflect newspaper articles and TV shows that I saw.
Perhaps this is always the case.
But it seemed that way during this particular year
more than ever.
Poem's called "Destiny."
"I'm eating cold Chinese in Joy's friend's flat.
I have been trafficked like a drug planted
by a child in Oaxaca.
Like the story, you are happy without me.
A lie I believe you believe.
And I am traveled like the mercies
on Telegraph, the street lamps burning down
the throat of this thoroughfare in Berkeley, where I lived in
the '60s and now see my book in a window
and find its theme useless in the act, where, had I not
been so privileged then, I might have had hope, well-humped
for a quantity of uncut drugs.
Out of the city on Joy's cocaine where
it's always the freeway in the hour the bars
close and no English spoken, where men chain to each other
as to an idea, say, that prayer is
as useful as a condom against the current cancer.
Here is the black Mercedes of an acquaintance, top down.
And with the stars tied against my body like a drunk,
I'm singing because in a war you taught me
your people flaunt the joyous will.
How is it fair?
You have raised fairness to an exquisite pitch which
sounds like the wrong gear.
To go on as the ever present red light
we run parts of its mouth for a tongue,
three queens high on Stevie Wonder crying, "Where were you
when I needed you last winter?"
Now that it is summer and the only person
I know drives by in his cab, my name on his red lips the sun,
I call back every minute the hour
of the days of the weeks of summer.
Friend, not naming him, remembering his name.
And that's how it's been, one with the universe,
blanking out at the Art Institute, an expensive drug,
cleared to black and white like a spaceship to another galaxy.
MTV, while you are happy with someone, somewhere,
there is the same crying and laughing.
Two peasants.
The one you are and I become one day when
we aren't dead to each other.
I hear the story of a stripper from her mother,
how she'd studied with the National Ballet.
That when the lights go on, you don't pretend.
You're alone.
I love you."