City Belt

POEM: AS THE PRESIDENT SPOKE

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Someone hung dolls from the chandelier and
a nun fingered an abacus in her mind.

Prisoners giggled in their cells, watching
a pederast pass cigarettes between the bars.

Grandpa wiped his glasses with a dishrag while
a sophomore solved equations with a cheese-slicer.

An amputee said he "didn't see it coming," and
a mother of three said, "Who uses a car as a weapon?"

An estimated two million illegals flushed toilets while
an emergency-room janitor mopped up blood.

It began to pour, and
citizens ran for shelter.

-- Michael Gates

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POEM: POLITICAL POEM

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Heavy eyes, crawling
over pavement cracking,
broken sweat,
breaking back,
sunk shoulders,
chin to chest,
inwardly ferocious.

What of your politics,
what of your inciting,
what do you penetrate
flinging your fecal forms?

People, listen!
Conversationally inept,
jittering jaw,
abraded breath,
nasal, hurried
healthless.

Should all your tenured priests howl,
preaching in unison under the full moon,
the darkness will lift not,
from the age that thee begot.

-- Lee W. Jenson

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Lee W. Jenson is a graduate student at Rutgers Business School. Besides writing poetry, he also contributes articles under a pseudonym for www.wsws.org, a Trotskyist online newspaper.

POEM: UNTIL ENCORES ERASE

Surprise with an unrehearsed split
After so much razing and rising
Like a predictable phoenix
This time, though
Retire your name
And let the ashes gather

Start in 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin
As uncomfortable bellwethers
Armed with instruments and intelligence
Scavenging below earth, sediment, clay
To develop a loamy new sound
Just three letters long

Follow the midwest, join the coast
Lose some authority and move on
A titular sovereign still trusted
Beneath a dyed, damaged crown
Roots recover and hues strengthen
Both return, improved, once more

End and begin without fumbling
Play songs older than any set list
The first ones now relearned
So that you get through, unruffled
Until encores erase too soon
The reason we kept cheering

-- Daniel Morris

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POEM: COUNTERFEIT CAB FARE

The pattern woven
was loneliness
on boredom
stitched with the finest
silks of greed and want
for a quilt called a
Calling.

POEM: MODERN DANCE IN CALIFORNIA

In Peoples Park I meet a girl.
We talk. She’s been to Harvard
for a Bachelor of Arts and now
a graduate student at Berkeley
studies modern dance
in China.

Studies, mind you, she
doesn’t actually dance.

For this she gets a stipend
of more dough than I claimed
on my taxes working full-time
all last year.

Later on, down Telegraph
a bum approaches
smelling of urine
(probably his own)
asks for some change to eat or grab
a bottle or do whatever it is he does
with his spare time. I direct him
to where the student admissions office
is located and tell him if he’s really
hungry he should sign up to study
something completely useless.

He does a little dance in the street.
He shakes his money-maker.
He must be overjoyed to hear
the good news, either that
or he has just crapped his pants.

- Daniel McNulty

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Daniel McNulty is a founding member of Raconteur Publications who's first book, The Raconteur Reader, is due out in June. He was the general manager of The Raconteur's Word Fest, a four hour literary event held at Metuchen's landmark The Forum Theatre. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

POEM: STONER'S SONNET

A dissipating cloud of dark gray smoke
Unobscures in grades, unveiling the lost face
of a misled man, the butt of a stoke,
giving orders to logs in the fireplace.
Quite a master in his proud, ashen mind
He is; the logs, to him, the entirety
of nature, one by one, crumbling in kind.
The exhaust, he senses, flows quite lightly
Under the guidance of his breath and hand,
Fills the sky with the broadly visible
message of his presence; the whole land
lies contented, abiding to his glib will.
He- all foes fled fearing fumigation-
Revels, in half-wit intoxication.

-- Lee W. Jenson

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Lee W. Jenson is a graduate student at Rutgers Business School. Besides writing poetry, he also contributes articles under a pseudonym for www.wsws.org, a Trotskyist online newspaper.

POEM: EIGHTH AVENUE BROOKLYN

The brick fronts and
                     jagged roofs
cut creases in the
clear blue sky.
America, end of the century,
new millennium,
calendar pages turned to
something new or --

POEM: BABY, LET'S NOT TALK ABOUT THE RAIN

Let's not talk about the rain
The next world war is waging.
This globe's really beginning to cook.
A flood is rising to claim us.
The old messiah is coming
but it's only to take a peek.
There's not much we can say or do
to change the fate of tides.
So baby, while the ground's still dry
and before the dirt's awash
let us take our fingers
off the windowpane
and wrap them till they knot.

- Daniel McNulty

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Daniel McNulty is a founding member of Raconteur Publications who's first book, The Raconteur Reader, is due out in June. He was the general manager of The Raconteur's Word Fest, a four hour literary event held at Metuchen's landmark The Forum Theatre. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

POEM: AFTER THE FIRST DEATH, THERE IS NO OTHER

No other to speak of
no other to know -

There are bodies, nameless, soulless now,
empty carcasses, profound loss
turning mundane, TV news offering
tales of gunshots and fires and
an air force bombing raid that
incinerates as it goes, the faceless others
(call them victims, perhaps,
call them what you will)
of no concern, of less importance than
the quarterback of a losing team or
a random drug dealer shot
when a bust went bad -

After the first death -
What? -
What do you expect,
a fanfare, a public condemnation,
or maybe some level of remorse
appropriate to the occasion,
the mayor stepping forward, offering
platitudes and observations,
saying how this small child
was just an unlucky victim,
caught in the web by chance?

Just a headline, that's
what you get, in small type somewhere
back inside the paper,
or, maybe, if you're lucky,
there will be 30 seconds of video,
a mother's grief, a neighbor's shock,
but nothing more,
nothing.

-- Hank Kalet

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The poem's title is the last line of "Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London" by Dylan Thomas.

POEM: NO SHIRT NO SHOES NO SERVICE

Out of work
I walk into
the Hindu
convenience store
downstairs from
the crummy
apartment
ask the proprietor
for a pack
of smokes
on credit.