The Brooklyn Rail

We do not resemble this world—
the armored vehicle that lurks, washes us before we undress,
this complacency means little as we pierce the world’s eye with a needle,
the world that jumps like a joyful clown
aiming its nuclear heads and napalm fatally
while corruption gallivants in its guts without doubt or hesitation.
What would happen if we swapped our halves, attempting confrontation,
and said that butter is half of society,
and with a mural brush painted our upper halves green to support environmentalists,
and I replaced my legs with lamp posts to know the plight of the betrayed,
while your legs become a hammer in the hand of an apprentice?
What would happen if we said: Nothing outside the script!
Nothing inside it either!
The egg is still an egg,
and poets are foolish brokers between reality and art.
Should I lend you my bra now in the name of equality,
take a photo with your pipe as unjustified nostalgia for a bourgeois ritual?
Between “Trotsky” and “Lenin” we could reverse the sickles upwards, splash them with blue
in a surreal effort to pull the sky down,
to explore the metaphysics of the next twenty years,
and strategies to face wars, labor strikes, and bear flu.
Organize carnivals for relief, elections, and attracting investors from Tibet.
When your cell phone rang as you slaughtered two white pigeons,
I did not mean to prevent your hands from being stained with blood.
I was just going to say:
It is not only contradictions that disturb the world’s order,
It’s you and me too…
Despite us being as similar as the blades of scissors!