for Summer reposed...

 

'The Echo' by Julia Margaret Cameron 1868

at the flea market I thought about how they still stoned women for adultery

(flipping through the channels)

     I wanted to get there early, before the crowds breathed and seethed/ see the vendors setting up shops, tents awnings, tarps and rugs/ wares spread out to attract the eye/ pots of simmering savory and crackle fired sizzles punctuating the air/ the smells of come and get some percolating in playful wafts across the large field designated for such events next to the municipal park and athletic field complex...

     in America comforts on the weekend absolve must direct connection to the calamity that humanity has become outside the machinery/ propaganda, left right in between buy this become clean or without senses enough to call numb the raising of slum to divinity/ everywhere, even in this very town the whole world is a portal down a snow globe attraction/ waiting hands on me to shake and find the fuzzy bits and window treatments of my manuscript, falling exactly where it needs to be...

     we like to kill more and more slowly in America than just about anywhere else you can find on a map or journey, though we don’t always own up to our wielding the whip/ putting ritual on cycled steroids so even death rows know in this free land how the weekend grows on us/ how we parasite on material shine/ how thieving into a less than fulfilling love is the fence part of our distancing ways/ the splayed and paid out installments/ the interest on the loans we took from our captor-creators...

Hypatia

was stoned

and I don't care who

or how many she slept with

we held her to be an insurrection

for wanting to see the dangers

of world that uses subjective faith

as its only form

of passionate intelligence

EJR ©