The Forward
Momentum of Dreams
—after Günter
Grass
Careful, you say, Be Careful.
Blame the
recklessness of reason on changes in the weather.
Funny, how the
shifting atmosphere turns words into traitors.
Cloudy day Judas:
peculiar, how stories are passed down through time
and change,
evolving with the skill of the storyteller.
Each new draft, a
sign of the times.
These days,
Cassandra is a hobo,
drunk on malt
liquor in the alleyway margins of progress.
She’s slurring
out a prophecy, says she’s seen runes written in the sky,
folded out like a
deck of Russian tarot cards.
With a Sharpie
marker someone left behind, she graffitis
the subway walls
all the way to Zocate Park:
Listen to me, Oh God, someone listen!
Occupy
encampments, the collective will of the broken:
every unkept
promise of the American Dream.
Fear, stitched
into the suits of businessmen,
straightening the
seams of this cloth: Have and Have Not.
They’re right not
to look at the clustered tents of the enemy—
to see someone
gives them a measure of power.
Only the
subjection of the serf allows lords to keep their fiefdoms.
Keep the peasants
hungry and at each other’s throats.
It’s the only way
to distract them; to keep them from storming the castle.
But it’s the cold
that makes all the real decisions:
sparks the revolt
or sends the rebels home shivering.
The suits have
got your number and are just waiting it out.
All those dreams
of change, all that forward momentum—
things starve and
peter out, just like anything else,
in a city under
siege.
Every ideology of
the young,
naïvely fighting
against their future—already foretold
in the hour of
their birth—is an incomplete triumph.
Don’t rock the
boat, their parents tell
them.
Be grateful
you have a job, Boss Man
says.
Quit pushing
your luck, the Golden
Fish advises,
You were never
meant to live in the castle.
As long as we’ve
got something left to lose,
they’ve got a way
to control us.
Allie Marini
Batts holds degrees from both Antioch University of Los Angeles and New College
of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform
simple math. Her work has been a finalist for Best of the Net and nominated for
the Pushcart Prize. She is managing editor for the NonBinary Review and Zoetic
Press, and has previously served on the masthead for Lunch Ticket, Spry
Literary Journal, The Weekenders Magazine, Mojave River Review & Press, and
The Bookshelf Bombshells. Allie is the author of the poetry chapbooks,
"You Might Curse Before You Bless" (ELJ Publications, 2013)
"Unmade & Other Poems," (Beautysleep Press, 2013) and "This
Is How We End" (forthcoming 2014, Bitterzoet.) Find her on the web: https://www.facebook.com/AllieMariniBatts
or @kiddeternity
on point Allie, great piece.
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