Moulin Rouge Marseillaise

By Norman MacAfee

Choosing poetry was one more evasion
of a hated society, not history softening
into melodrama, not song fingers
plumbing the shallows of the emotions,
not the solitary mind’s dank midnight
alleyways figuring out technical
solutions well enough but missing the
voluptuousness, crucified on some personal
headlines and missing the wonder. But
even if enough people are brought into
the theater so that the race changes,
the machine gun armies can reface it all,
smiling at my comrades the pregnant women
or crucified on their sexual longing,
eyes rolling back into the cave in the
deceptively successful center of
anecdotal American employees,
58th and Madison, B–movie
lives narrated with real vitality,
half–hid in shadows of railroad stations
like the ghosts of emotions or halted
in the violent, disordered, but tempo–
rary suburbs. And the dummies in store
windows are truly dummies, “poor” mutterers
wishing to be antiseptic, and I
a poseur deferring to evasions
of appearing different, “mad.” Why want
to be beautiful, why try to be loved?