Tag: labor

Debriefing (Purple Chrysanthemum in the Dark)

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Wikipedia Poem, No. 980

purple chrysanthemums when he's locked in currency
Saddle River, 2019

purple chrysanthemums
when he’s locked
in currency

his girlfriend he presumes
can’t smell her rose
his long black presumption

in the dark
it’s nobody’s job
to shine boots

antoni sneaks off
stateless watches
arrange shirts the hour

he’s locked
each day precedes
verde lungs

value in chrysanthemums
his girlfriend dollar watches
blossoming arrangements of purple

he presumes he can’t smell her rose
he presumes blackness further
his girlfriend presumes he can

smell her boots
arrange her shirts
the hour sneaks off

locked in the dark
each day
lungs verde

it’s nobody’s job
to dirty dead boys
in the dark

His Charioteer

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Wikipedia Poem, No. 969

secretive unions
any reason to open
new paths for the collared
movement of reason
open new paths
for collaboration
open new paths
for blacktop and feels great great
the collar he loves lifting lifting
and curtail
secretive
right to the course of America

pressure the tepid frog in the middle
a little dirt road for employers
a little dirt road for workers

reason
opens new
paths focused
on boycotts no
my throat hops
into the industry
which thrives thrives
on its accumulation of memory

Source: Bouie, Jamelle. “The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders.” New York Times, 11 Sept. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/opinion/sanders-labor-2020.html.

Welcome to Lotus Land (after Tony Hoagland)

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

Wikipedia Poem, No. 816

Maker:0x4c,Date:2017-9-26,Ver:4,Lens:Kan03,Act:Lar01,E-Y

Because therapy heals all worlds: 
Welcome to Lotus Land.

The workers
        the proletariat
        the sea-mines
        the TSA Agents of the Mind
                shoot back to zip me away from gnosis.
Their neon swims across my whimsy metrics 
        in the small, air conditioned room.
Whales tornado a hundred thousand phrenology busts.
Warm, oozing cherry wood wands my birdcage.
Me in the center as a campfire. Beeping.

That's why I abandoned the mast for swine.
There's too much good television now. 
A speedboat mustn't consider sails. 

Odysseus' men slither across their barnacled flesh.  
A thousand Athenas for the taking. 
I chase the abandoned speedboat
        then give up the ghost.
Sacrifice can make me whole again,
        says the whales.

The workers — using only her blowholes — tie me 
        to the television above her 
        polystyrene-smeared lipstick. 
The workers tie on her marvelous golden sandals. 

This cool shade sweeps me.
You respond now.

Hourly Labor Rate, Plus Materials

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

hourly-sm

curators offer a variety of their subjective photography
the customer will have been satisfactorily abused and served
through technological advances in counting the service understands
people places approaches and circulation methods though we still
promise to never index works from information
the subjective photographs have been used to concatenate
and share xerophagiac critique since 1839
The service invents the mode of ideas, you approach them!
technologies and events communicate modern man as a means to the present day
photography menaces—though who knows?—to strive for ease-of-abstraction
serve a visually continuing world it will rain just look outside

Woman Ironing

Joseph M. GeraceLeave a comment

"[T]his detachment... gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey." Ben Lerner
“[T]his detachment… gave me a kind of vampiric energy, although I was my own prey.” Ben Lerner

I watch Picasso work
The granite blob of gray-blue
Into a void, if I said this out loud
He would spit in my mouth and
Curse my mother who hasn’t yet been born
Her arms are returning, an honest day’s work, I am quiet,
Sweat, sweet black eyes,
Longing, a gauntness as from a fountain like
Punctuation.