By Michael Derrick Hudson
To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops
and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I
get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along
ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds
when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!
Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit
of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over
the busted glass and merchandise of America …
But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities
separating what’s being alive from
who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that.
Next learn how to want one thing over and over,
night after night. Most of you
are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough
into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand
by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch
at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.
Source: Poetry (February 2015)
Poet Bio
More Poems about Living
Meanwhile
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
More Poems about Social Commentaries
From the Sky
When I die,
bury me in the sky—
no one is fighting over it.
Children are playing soccer
with empty bomb shells
(from the sky I can see them).
A grandmother is baking
her Eid makroota and mamoul
(from the sky I can taste them).
Teens are writing love...
Poem with Human Intelligence
This century is younger than me.
It dresses itself
in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking
despite the disappearing winter.
It twirls the light-up fidget spinner
won from the carnival of oil economies.
In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick...