riots in the spring

in the fall they built their houses thin and elegant; they stood immediately upon the tall track embankments so we hapless train-bound souls could see their wealth and long for better things. then it was not our own impoverishment, but their great luck and luxury, what drove us on to riots in the spring. we gained nothing through our violence, except a narrowed scale: had we known these neighbors ranked upon the social stair much closer to ourselves than their own betters, we might have stayed our hands--but mobs are never easy once the murmurs start to boil. thus they paid for building palaces next to rails.


by the end you could say i got through it fairly well: no major scars or marks upon me, only an incessantly ironic face. but i've found that typical of my generation, so you could say i really escaped it all for free.


or nearly so. men tell of losing innocence, or childhood, though by then i'd much of neither left. what i lost was a freckle rage in beauty, a violent cleverness in the gills--i saw her in nearly everything, from the wrinkled eyes and rheumy face to the newborn's knowing grin. but after we burned those houses i turned to grimmer thoughts and worries in the hand--the thought of what to eat and how to budget poverty. it seemed so frail, our everlong resistance: so frail and un-believed. the true Oppressed will never strike, for they are starving, nearly dead--what makes us, then, such bitter malcontents?


so then i staggered forth unscathed in form, but not in use! deprived of even bitterness by logic's mocking irony, i left my comrades, abandoned all my bright riots, and in that silence faced the bitter, sleepless foe of solitude.




may '11