Dream of Chocolate City
by Richard Hamilton
Political will, street urchins
flow in both directions
a ravine the unhoused
bathe in an elementary school a shitter
adjacent park 0.4 miles away.
What some might
say is hankering for a clean witness
red phosphorus burns in an upper room
cauterizing lips, the way a mother never
showed up for PTA meetings, competing
interests. Once she coveted Bo
recompense in her shot glass,
she got hard instead.
Government cheeks
stayed painting shitty views:
Welfare Queen blues.
Systemic failure is not imagistic enough
to a disgruntled child.
It’s poetry, so its reach is colored, in part,
by the company I keep—all things close
as generation-old trees, gnarled roots
mangled trunks that, in the abstract,
to the colonized mind, is like fucking
female and male parts— clit, hollowed
branches vulva, Dick, white analysts as
in anal positions. When language loses
you or me,
I stress:
stressed workers, couriers in the gig
economy—nightcrawlers whose arms
of verdant green are burning bushes.
What’s with the parakeet on your sleeve,
the Safari
Jim’s uptown in broad daylight? Is that
your service animal?
Are your people creole
Louisianan? It does not mince words
light-skinned,
as in a generation
not yet removed.
No one suspected a silver fox
underneath the clown
wig, she says, zip up your lace,
your views lost
me. Your face mask is letting run
all chaste parts.
The neighbor OG blares Ready for the
World from his speaker, egregious
odor beneath the door does not
suggest he cares
to fuck the system. Yelling fuck the
system will not do, a friend recalls.
Catharsis is not revolution.