6719. ARTEMIS

ARTEMIS

(my mad history)
There are just too many things I don't understand :

I want to talk fast but I can only talk slow; I want 

to stay in place but things keep moving. The house

at Pendicott Lane they tore down today, after last

week all week shredding the yard to smithereens,

one-hundred-fifty year old trees mean nothing to the

bastards who deal. History is a smokescreen for lies  -  

It was told to me that the guy who had this built,

in 1897, was a small-scale steel-mill owner in

nearby South Plainfield  -  Harris Structural Steel  -  

the place is still there. No one ever steps in to stop 

  anything  - just now the usual Historical Society geeks

will have something new to wilt and wallow about as

they review how 'things have changed.'  What's the good

of any of that, ladies? What's the good? You used to use

a rag-to-be-laundered for your monthly terms; was that

good too? Things have changed. Mao said 'change comes

out of the barrel of a gun.' I think I knew what he meant,

and I like it better. My little red book is bleeding too.

-

There no sickening bottom to this sickening mess, and I

only get angrier with age. Sand-blasted fake stucco homes

with grandiose entryways to nothing at all and a flat-screen,

large-screen you can see from the street. Your false-blue-light

doesn't beckon me. Interesting immigrants don't happen around 

here. They build and they mow and that's that and that's there.

-
The National Anthem is embroidered on the towels

with the Fires of Freedom pictures engraved on the porch. 
Experimental permafrost, doctors with sutures where noses

should be, the she-men mount the he-she's in the gloaming.

Oh it's so sweet, sure it is. Give me Liberty, or give me crystal 
meth. It's all the same, it's really all the same, and my little 
red book is bleeding and this land is down for the count.
-
I am green with macadamia nuts and furious with envy.
I have two dozen suitcases filled with my love, two dozen
buckets filled my blood, and I am heading without fail to
that place at the corner where I can be myself. This is a
new world for a new land and a new language. I am speaking
to the world : I am at large, the criminal you never imagined
the good person your mother never warned you about, seeding
the ringlets of dawn with my passion for living and saving.
-
Just today at the corner of Park at the Avenel Street light
with ten layers of instructions about when and when not to turn 
and how, I waited and Avenel's own mad woman came screaming
 up to my open car window. Surprised in turn by the face of my
dog, she stopped short and then came forward still - astounded
by eye contact and yelling shrill, to me she said these words
as if said from Park Steeple : 'It's all about saving the 
people, it's all about the people!'
-
I pulled her aside right close to me and said : 'First things first
when you get to the moon; and the future ain't all it was
cracked up to be anyway.' That put a damper on that.
I wondered if she had a love life
and went along on my way.