Category: Poetry

“No Names” play the hunger games
(not movie stars, not athletes, nor
heroic challengers). Forget about Hollywood
and its glam girl/glam guy health club figures,
who can hurl spears, throw knives, shoot
arrows, with the aid of their doubles, and
face down trouble without out a blink,
because,
after all,
victory is written in the script, or there
would never be a popcorn selling sequel to any
of this idiotic Rambo bullshit.

Down and out ghetto dwellers are the real
hunger sufferers.
Slum, barrio, hood, backstreet inhabitants,
trying to put a meal together, pay the rent,
are the actual hunger games combatants.

Crouched in fear, as the latest purge draws
near, the child, mother, sister, brother,
father, uncle, aunt, grandparent, waits
for the next cuts in Medicaid, unemployment
compensation, whatever else can be withheld
or eliminated from the less fortunate of the
nation: food stamps, educational grants,
raising the minimum wage to something a
family could live on for a change, as well as
that distain for the hard times that come
to those living in a slum – crime, fires,
random dangers, sweltering summers, deadly
winters, denial, destruction, as if poverty was
a justified punishment.

No name, no face, no voice, no choice –
no heroes in this hunger game.
OK, now and then an Orwell, London, Spinoza,
Van Gogh, Gauguin, innumerable other
luminaries ahead of, or out of sink with, their
time, who are famous now but were, and
sometimes stayed, starving nobodies. Like
Nietzsche who lived in a cheap room and died
in an asylum without a nickel or a friend.
(One could go on and on about these genius sad
sacks who, through no fault of their own and no
dearth of effort or talent, couldn’t feed their families
or pay the rent).
Like Pissarro, my art teacher’s favorite painter,
who would have died impoverished and unknown
if he hadn’t become, by chance, a key witness in
the famous Dreyfus treason trial and painted,
in his 19th century French witness protection
program, Paris street scenes from the second
story window of his government supplied cheap
hotel room (actually more like a prison cell
because they would not let him leave it until
the trial was over) – a viewpoint that had
(oddly) never been done before and instantly
caught on, and made him, in his last years, a
small and totally unexpected fortune –
everyone had to have one – just people who
suffer misery and pain and shame, and oddly
from many, blame.

Today the summer sun sparkles across the
land, oceans, rivers, lakes and ponds.
A soft breeze blows. White clouds float.
Tree leaves rustle. Life is beautiful in the
other America – like the dazzling shapes
and colors in a picture book: the majestic
purple mountains, the amber waves of grain
Those who live here are the winners of the
hunger games. They never had to play them.
Bad luck has never visited them.
Yet.

Then there are those who forget or are
egocentric enough to actually think that they
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, or
have bought into the Hollywood-style illusion
of heroics. Especially if they can, in this
Romantic view of things, use it to puff out
their own little chests.
What saps!

My military stint in D.C. bordered on Twilight
Zone lunacy.
Federal agents shadowed me. There were 3rd
degree interrogations by the C.I.A. as well
as background checks, psychological tests,
interviews with the Pentagon’s assorted
military brass.
I was just a draftee. They wanted to train
me for a job that required a Top Secret
security clearance, absolute loyalty, and at
least a year of specialized and complex
studying.
Better than ‘Nam & getting shot or
bombed. I was against their war. I resented
being a prisoner. It was that or jail. D.I.A
was better than sitting in a cell.
I lived off post in a downtown D.C. flop
not far from the White House.
I couldn’t live on post with all that
spit and polish.
It was a sleezy cluster of backstreet dives
and dumps, by the Greyhound station,
filled with cheap rooms, pawnshops,
seedy bars, strip joints, porno book
stores, winos, druggies, muggers, pimps
and whores.
On army pay it was all I could afford.
Below the Mason, Dixon line it often
was too hot to sleep. I sat one night on my
tenement rooftop smoking cigarettes, sipping
Jack hoping I would crash. I had to get up
early, catch a bus to my post, change into
my class A uniform at the barracks, report
for duty, study photo images shot from space,
try to decipher what they meant in the scheme
of things.
Suddenly military choppers filled the air.
You couldn’t do this in Chicago, the buildings
are too tall.
They swept the midnight streets with their
spotlights.
They circled, crisscrossed, went back and forth.
Below them was a swarm of cops, chasing
through the deserted blocks.
Five floors below and two blocks down, I
spotted the Running Man – that’s how
I always thought of the guy I saw futilely
fleeing for his life – arms pumping, head
thrown back, chasing back and forth like
a rat in a trap. He was a husky man, athletically
built, dressed in a gray, three-piece suit.
Was he a saboteur? A spy maybe?
An informer perhaps? He didn’t rob a
Seven/Eleven to create all that
commotion.
I wanted him to get away, drop down a
sewer, disappear behind a secret door.
I wanted him to do a vanishing act. He was
running hard, but he was running out of gas.
Was I rooting for the underdog? – Maybe,
but we are all Running Men aren’t we?
Running for our lives, running from our lives,
running from the Man, running from death,
which will get us in the end.
Suddenly the choppers flew away.
The cops went away.
There was nothing about the Running
Man in the news the next day.

Slum streets, cracks in the concrete to break
your mother’s back if you don’t watch your
step.
But you do watch your step. The slum taught
you early on how to live in a war zone.
Your mother’s back will break anyway, as well
as your father’s heart, and your siblings’ spirits
and any dreams you may have had about living
a better life.
Slum days – tumble down tenements, rubble and
weeds, hunger, danger, misery, poverty.
Slum nights – gang bangs and drive bys,
loneliness, helplessness, hopelessness.
Slum delights – not very many, in fact hardly
any. Not until I got into a television contest
and answered a number of extremely simple
and useless questions which any moron could
have answered and won millions of dollars –
plus saved my true love from the neighborhood
gangster/drug lord/pimp master, just like in
the acclaimed novel (Q&A) and the blockbuster
movie made from it which was a big crowd
pleaser and sold lots of popcorn and won
many Academy Awards and made everyone feel
better about poverty except the poor.
Well OK, that story is impossible. I got out
of the slums and made my billions because I
eventually discovered, when I was fifteen,
that I was born with a brain that rivaled the
greatest living scientists and mathematicians,
and Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Brown
and all the ivy league schools offered me
scholarships to study with them. The rest being
history of course with the money I made from
technology and engineering.
I’m kidding. I made my billions through my
athletic talents – boxing champion (like Rocky)
basketball superstar, football hero, baseball’s
“best player.”
Yeah right.
Just like that movie I’m pulling your leg.
What would help me and my friends get out of
this ghetto is a raise in the minimum wage.
That would be a miracle.

The homeless vet

bums a cigarette

as he leaves the

public library,

wondering,

while he smokes it

and enjoys the small

comforting glow.

of the burning tobacco,

where he’ll go next,

to survive the blistering

cold of Chicago.

Death like a bullet

shot from a gun,

is coming for him,

and everyone,

jobless, roofless,

hopeless – thousands

just like him

in every city.

His comrades in arms,

now missing in action,

abandoned by their country.

Dead on the sidewalk,

dead in the alley,

dead on the asphalt –

the vet knows death. He’s

seen enough of it.      .

The night is a war zone.

You survive or you don’t.

“Out there, beware, lost souls everywhere,
misery, poverty, murder, robbery.”
The Fat Cat said to Stray who happened
to pass his way. “In here, good cheer,” he
gestured toward the high, arched door he was
about to enter, “nothing to fear, nothing to
long for, comfort, camaraderie, peace and
prosperity. The way life should be.”
He tipped his top hat and wished Stray a good
day, not without irony. A door man bowed
to Fat Cat, ushered him inside, and went back
to guarding the entrance again.
Gender? No. Race? No. Nationality? No.
Country? No. Neighborhood? Social status?
No. Heritage, family tree, parents, siblings,
anybody good for anything?
“Curiosity killed the cat. So what!” Stray
thought. He was half-dead anyway.
He sat “out there” in a seedy bar and made
a list of what he was responsible for in his
life and what he missed when things were
handed out by God or Fate or the Force.
Whomever dealt the cards and got him
into his mess. “Looks? No. IQ? No.
Talents? Math, science, art, music,
athletics, no – like everything else
worth having, money and influence especially,
talent had to be inherited, a gift from lucky
gene combinations Education? Sure,
Harvard or Yale. Ha! Lucky he didn’t end
up in reform school. Not much came with
that birth certificate. Stray brooded. And
then you died at the end of it! Stray felt
gypped, cheated. He was a patsy. Why was
he handed the short end of the stick in
everything? Why was he just another mangy
alley cat, and an unlucky black one at
that yowling in the darkness? It wasn’t fair.
He was just a workus. When he could find work.
While these whosits were blessed!
“The fat cats feed off the nation”
Stray scribbled on his bar napkin.
“The strays their hope for salvation.
The hip on jubilation.” He continued.
“The cool on calculation.
It’s a dog’s life.”
He finished.
Hey! He did have some talent! Stray reread
the poem he had just written. Not bad. He
was a poet and didn’t know it. A lot
of good that would do him. Just another
useless occupation. Thank you Lord, Stray
sighed, once again for nothing!