Criminal
The sky has the greenish pallor of tarnished silver. I can feel in my joints it’s going to snow. I’m what you wouldn’t want to be – an old, achy, white male, a hated artifact of patriarchy. How others see us affects how we come to see ourselves. Just a week before his suicide, Van Gogh admitted in a letter to feeling like a “broken pitcher.” Today, as usual, the radio in the kitchen is tuned to opera. My wife is the opera aficionado. To my ears, it all sounds like the howling of a toddler who’s missed a nap. I think about it sometimes, whether being me isn’t excessive punishment for the crimes I’ve unwittingly committed against ordinary everyday things.
WWJD
In Amsterdam they refer to a pedestrian crosswalk as a “zebra” because of the black and white stripes. It’s funny the odd bits of knowledge you pick up in passing. Did you know mahjong is Chinese for “chattering birds”? Me neither. I wonder what Jesus, if tried and convicted today, would choose, death by firing squad or lethal injection. The more you seek to evade a burdensome choice, the more of a burden it can become. Pallbearers, creased, stained, stoop-shouldered, slowly enter, surveilled by agents who, encased in helmets and body armor, look like insects that eat dung. Birds go on chattering in the trees regardless.
A Daydream
I’d like to live in a place where bicycles are as common as cell phones and a major mode of transportation, where there are museums and concert halls and cafes all in a row, where window boxes display brilliant flowers and the façade of the royal palace undergoes necessary repairs behind a black veil, where the pigeons in the square are accorded the kind of respect usually reserved for visiting dignitaries and old couples cross the foot bridge over the canal holding hands, where I’m far from an America at war with itself, the teargas and smoke grenades, the shrieking of the media, the public buildings renamed for a tyrant, the canceled dreams.
Ode to Joylessness
I heard them storming up the stairs. They were coming for someone. She had logged out of the system by then. I happened to agree with her, children are the future, the prototypes of tomorrow’s uranium-enriched consumers. Consider the exponential growth in screen time and the temperature at which the human body incinerates, and you’ll have some idea of what I mean. The news from the nation’s capital is bleaker than ever, a kind of ode to joylessness. But there are strange moments of beauty, too, as when at sunset the people foraging for sustenance cast long shadows among the stubble.
-- Howie Good is a widely published but little-known poet.