The last Tony Hoagland poetry collection sells for $9.49
on Amazon and I doubt Tony ever kept track of the
words per dollar or the hours per poem to calculate
value, but those who sweat underground for a living
hold every moment to account. Their hours are
devoured by the Publix, where they don’t give away
groceries and the children at home can’t fatten up on
the air in their wallets.
Every time I spend an hour pondering a noun, I
think of the mother in the manhole at ten degrees
below, how she earns her fifteen with raw knuckles
and feet that throb through the Epsom salt soaks,
while I make a note to buy a cushion for my writing
chair and a floor heater for the draft in my office.
This is a broken world, I understand that, but I haven’t enough
left in my checking account to sooth my guilt with charity,
once I’ve paid for Bread Loaf. The shit on her socks might
serve here as a metaphor, perhaps played against my
mother-of-pearl locket with the picture of Walt Whitman inside,
but that comparison evokes uncomfortable images of 1917
and who wants to go there, when the people of privilege in the
onion-dome towers were used to paint the streets red?
All I ask for is peace to enjoy my croissant and Kaminsky,
while all those in the sewers want is a larger slice of my
America.
This might not end
well.
