Work With What You Are Given
As Hirschfield said, we work with what we are given
and I am given to so much grumbling I think I must sound
like a freight train clacking and clanging across the tracks,
lurching forward, sometimes stopping, keeping your car idling
in the road as you watch the inscrutable graffiti roll past, or maybe
you're looking at your phone, reading the goddamn news because
you have to know when the bastard's crimes will finally catch
up with him when you read about another mass shooting
this time live streamedas if we always have the capacity for more horror.
We don't, certainly I don't, and maybe that is why I curse
and snarl and snark, as if you need any of that from me, given,
as you are, to your own grief and fear, that which is always
around us, carted in shopping carts if you have nowhere
to set it down, or stashed in the trunk of your EV along with
clothes and old linens headed for St. Vinnies when you're stopped
by this relic from the 20th century hauling God knows what
to God knows where, but graced by some kid's art who was given
flashes of brillianceand sprayed it across these metal boxcars for all to see.
I wonder about that kid, where is she now, alive or dead or is she
looking down at us from some parallel universe, knowing,
as we can only wonder whether all of this gets painted over, erased,
given time and materials, the great leveling, a kind of starting over
I'm always craving, having grown salty, less sweet, with every
passing year, you know what I mean, don't you, how every year
you feel scribbled over by so much noise you can't understand
but you watch for the art you can't stand to miss, it's all so
exhausting, bells clanging the all-clear—What are you still doing here? You're free to go so get going.
Get back to work.
