The Street Vote Arcane (excerpt)
by Jack Hirschman
I’m neither an elephant
nor an ass. I love infant joy
and the happiness of socialist
dreaming. My eye sees
PARTISAN and my I says Yes.
But for that we go deeper,
we go under the ground
of any splinter in the wood
of this tunnel.
We want death out
of the eyes of the child,
out of radical mind.
We want people
to unscrew their heads,
lift out the bomb,
to a man, to a woman.
We want people,
from top to bottom,
to doff their White House
for the first time,
take off its car,
steal the steel
from under
the sickeningly
deranged gaze
of the munitionary
powers. We want
the hearts of the People
to lift off into the space
left by their throwaway
duds, and leave behind
the whodunit fixations
and foolish accusations
against their very own
selves.
Jack Hirschman is a labor activist and poet laureate emeritus of San Francisco. He is appearing this month locally at two events at Beyond Baroque in Venice. (See calendar for details).
