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highlyeccentricI am so glad to be moving
away from this prison for black and white faces
assaulting each other with our joint oppression
competing for who pays the highest price for this privilege
I am so glad I am moving
technicoloured complaints aimed at my head
mash themselves on my door like mosquitoes
sweep like empty ladles through the lobby of my eyes
each time my lips move sideways
the smile shatters
on the tin thing that races
dictator through our hallways
on concrete faces on soul compactors
on the rhetoric of incinerators and plastic drapes
for the boiler room
on legends of broken elevators
blowing my morning cool
avoiding me in the corridors
dropping their load on my face down 24 stories
of lives in a spectrumed madhouse
pavillion of gnats and nightmare remembering
once we all saved like beggars
to buy our way into this castle
of fantasy and forever now
I am so glad to be moving.
Last month a tenant was asked to leave
because someone saw him
wandering one morning up and down the tenth floor
with no clothes on
having locked himself out the night before
with the garbage
he could not fit into the incinerator
but it made no difference
the floor captain cut the leads to his cable TV
and he left covered in tangled wires of shame
his apartment was reconsecrated by a fumigator
I am so glad I am moving
Although workmen will descend at $100 an hour
to scrape my breath from the walls
to refinish the air and the floors with their eyes
and charge me with the exact amount
of whatever I have coming back to me
called equity
I am so glad to be moving
from the noise of psychic footsteps
beating a tune that is not my own
louder than any other sound in the neighborhood
except the blasting that goes on all day and all night
from the city's new toilet being built
outside the main entrance
from the spirits who live in the locks
of the other seven doors
bellowing secrets of living hells revealed
but not shared
for everybody's midnights know what the walls hide
our toilets are made of glass
wired for sound
24 stories
full of tears flushing at midnight
our only community room
children set their clocks to listen to the tissue walls
gazing upwards from their stools
from one flight to another
catching the neighbors in private struggles
next morning it will all be discussed
at length in the elevators
with no secrets left
I am so glad to be moving
no more coming home at night to dream
of caged puppies
grinding their teeth into cartoonlike faces
that half plead and half snicker
then fold under and vanish
back into snarling strangers
I am so glad to be moving.
But when this grim house goes
slipping into the sewer prepared for it
then this whole city can read
its own obituary
written on the broken record of dreams
of ordinary people
who wanted what they could not get
and so pretended to be someone else
ordinary people having
what they never learned to want
themselves
and so becoming
pretension concretized.
I googled to see if anyone had typed this up anywhere that I could copy it from, rather than typing it myself, and was amusing to find how many housing co-ops are named after Audre Lorde.
away from this prison for black and white faces
assaulting each other with our joint oppression
competing for who pays the highest price for this privilege
I am so glad I am moving
technicoloured complaints aimed at my head
mash themselves on my door like mosquitoes
sweep like empty ladles through the lobby of my eyes
each time my lips move sideways
the smile shatters
on the tin thing that races
dictator through our hallways
on concrete faces on soul compactors
on the rhetoric of incinerators and plastic drapes
for the boiler room
on legends of broken elevators
blowing my morning cool
avoiding me in the corridors
dropping their load on my face down 24 stories
of lives in a spectrumed madhouse
pavillion of gnats and nightmare remembering
once we all saved like beggars
to buy our way into this castle
of fantasy and forever now
I am so glad to be moving.
Last month a tenant was asked to leave
because someone saw him
wandering one morning up and down the tenth floor
with no clothes on
having locked himself out the night before
with the garbage
he could not fit into the incinerator
but it made no difference
the floor captain cut the leads to his cable TV
and he left covered in tangled wires of shame
his apartment was reconsecrated by a fumigator
I am so glad I am moving
Although workmen will descend at $100 an hour
to scrape my breath from the walls
to refinish the air and the floors with their eyes
and charge me with the exact amount
of whatever I have coming back to me
called equity
I am so glad to be moving
from the noise of psychic footsteps
beating a tune that is not my own
louder than any other sound in the neighborhood
except the blasting that goes on all day and all night
from the city's new toilet being built
outside the main entrance
from the spirits who live in the locks
of the other seven doors
bellowing secrets of living hells revealed
but not shared
for everybody's midnights know what the walls hide
our toilets are made of glass
wired for sound
24 stories
full of tears flushing at midnight
our only community room
children set their clocks to listen to the tissue walls
gazing upwards from their stools
from one flight to another
catching the neighbors in private struggles
next morning it will all be discussed
at length in the elevators
with no secrets left
I am so glad to be moving
no more coming home at night to dream
of caged puppies
grinding their teeth into cartoonlike faces
that half plead and half snicker
then fold under and vanish
back into snarling strangers
I am so glad to be moving.
But when this grim house goes
slipping into the sewer prepared for it
then this whole city can read
its own obituary
written on the broken record of dreams
of ordinary people
who wanted what they could not get
and so pretended to be someone else
ordinary people having
what they never learned to want
themselves
and so becoming
pretension concretized.
I googled to see if anyone had typed this up anywhere that I could copy it from, rather than typing it myself, and was amusing to find how many housing co-ops are named after Audre Lorde.