Saturday Night Live, where are you
while doom is assembled and wheeled into place?
What are you thinking
while a few gorge and the rest go hungry?
While poets scream in the torture,
while our country sides against ordinary people to maintain the rich?
Whom do you talk to, where do you go
while we scramble, speechless, on the banks of Hell?
I wish
you would spend a week on the streets
talking with beggars and peddlers.
I wish
you would spend a week in state prison,
in El Salvador, the West Bank, the Gulag.
Subtle, brie-smooth, empty-hip,
what is it you seek?
Do something hard this week:
look at what hurts.
Your hair may be perfect, but blood
leaks from your ears.
Too-close-to-prime-time players,
your hearts are compromised.
Laughter that springs from nothing
leads to nothing.
Begin with the tears on another human’s cheek.
Look to the headlines that sour your breakfast.
Cowboys in subway stations,
prolife bombers, peaceable missiles,
hateful Christians, furious nuns,
crystalline rock stars, plasticine presidents,
children waking from nightmares of World War III,
children in camouflage playing GI Joe.
O speak of what’s real!
Lest you be smug and suave as your enemies,
hunger for a week.
Run for your life to the border.
You balance above us like acrobats,
tinsel stars in a black sky.
O share what is real!
Let your shambling crazies seek Welfare,
let your M.C. despair,
let your fresh-faced sexpots carry unwanted babies.
We hunger – we thirst – we demand from you
what is real.
O you whose luck and talent have opened for you
doors to the lives of others,
care what you take,
for love slumbers in the lives you enter
and what you seek with your whole being
it is possible you will wake.
In the desert, a thousand miles from television,
a black fetus stirs in the mother.
Speak to that baby.
Your voices carry on the winds of Chaos.
Speak what is real.
Alice T4 