Hard Times
It's hard times for us, splintered and recessed like a basket-ball without air, shattered like a window and staged like an exit into nowhere, they're laying people off, money is tight, fist full of pockets and mocking advertisements of the dead tattooed like some naked newspaper, shouting out obscenities from behind the Welfare Office, these kids ain't got no sense, weird flowering of drugged windows, every man for himself, hugging darkness while drinking a beer, tortured on the flag that is made into a robe from past wars, a soundless slam of the door that robs us of our freedom, the key won't fit into the lock no more, and it's hard at times for all of us, don't look, here he comes hard up drinking from his fist, sleeping in alleys and gutters, carrying a wet back-pack out into the streets, nobody sees the black dog barking, nobody understands the World's lousy luck, only the backdoor policemen can patrol it and sing in the streets like some siren that announces: "Poverty, and depravity!" that there is no one here to receive the gifts of a logical recession, look if I don't get my paycheck I can't eat, man and that aint funny, so we turn from the closet and look into the rich bank-accounts of the overfed, bombs overflow, like a plethora of buttered roses, mime inside the doorways of the rich, sad reclusive manners and the straight and narrow, hard times, yes sir, and the bankruptcy of Statehood is the shy upheaval of a revolutionary fever, stood banked at the door of a factory of migrants who cannot sell their names, hard times coming, and yet the World is finally satisfied with its poverty, stretched like an endless and overpowering hunger of cold dust, longing to be free.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray