by Sam Friedman, illustrated with commons images
Love at the Workplace
My stomach knots with hatred
of bosses’ sneers;
my tears transmute to spittle
in defiance,
eyes glare red and ugly,
bloodshot at bosses’ deeds.
My friends’ fears twist my hands to talons
that lust for revenge.
Professor Stegosaurus
Steggy drags her tail out of bed
in Highland Park, New Jersey,
some miles from the swamps of Secaucus
where she dug her way out of a half-life
of drudgery and soil.
After polishing her bony shields,
she staggers over the Raritan River bridge.
Her 8-foot, 2-pronged tail
clears the cloverleaf off-ramp so students can walk safely
to classes.
As she swings her steggy hips
towards her Rutgers lecture hall,
no chauvinist right-brained full professors give her
any faintest sneer of lip.
In the morning, she teaches her graduate physics seminar
on unending elongated time
with her head-brain,
and after chomping some trees for lunch,
she lectures junior lit majors
about Jurassic pentameter
with her hip-brain.
Last weekend, she rode the 9:10 train to New York City,
swayed in the aisle as she read Gramsci on organic intellectuals,
then orated B.J. Ward’s poems on grave-robbing the dinosaurs
in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
She strode from Penn Station up Central Park West
scattering pigeons and four-piece-suiters,
and smashed every gas station
for pumping her uncles’ remains.
At the Museum, she adorned every shield of her hulking back
with a picket sign against grave-robbing, double-talking ghouls
who stole the bodies of her two-minded relatives,
and pranced nimbly up the steps.
Her hips swayed as her tail smashed through turnstiles.
She scorned the donation box,
and demanded that the curators un-display her lover’s bones
so she could hump them back in Jersey.
An oft-repeated tale
Another movement becomes
cliché.
Everyday activists, heroines,
famed leaders, their bravery unbent
discover second thoughts,
orate breath-taking strategic innovations,
kneel before pragmatism,
laud the progressive values of the
electable Party.
These realists rise high, high, high,
soar above those they now call
sheeple,
get toasted by World Leaders
for upholding what they once held
vile.
Who? When? Why?
Generations of “practical thinkers,”
tweedle-dum copies of tragic loss.
“But . . . who?”
you repeat.
Why, maybe me,
maybe you,
if our rightful rage grows impatient
and breeds despair.
