What you are doing, and I am nothing if not an
Aficionado of alienation as the once-a-year Civil War
Reenactment happens today it just so happens
And we are forced to contemplate how Peter the Great
Saved us from the Rothschilds, the Haze Hazel
Conundrum, as usual, Holderlin's roomie Hegel
Drew up the whole charade: people can be made
To fight for opposing sides, and whoever wins
Gets to vie with a brand new shadow. It works
Every time ... at Haymarket, where they doubled down,
The bankers, on no happy May Day
In the fetid cities that circled their factories,
Where the kids ate sweetened kibble so that mama
Could staple cotton onto a dyeing tool -- one day of flowers
And fertility poles would never be alloted
For populations that had known it in the homeland,
Before the entire world took a refugee boat to the alien,
Fragmented like they let you have your old lives,
Full of fermentation yes but never the blessed,
The icons one must hide away, to acknowledge there was
Once at least a memory before the construction of new ones
Was decreed, which only really meant they had to take back
The old ones, the figurines of no material purpose
But that's never the point of such interventions, there's only
So much loosh available in any prison population at one
Time, so the restive horses must be dewormed, and they used
The Frankfurt philosopher, those burghers
To capture the universe of opposites microcosmed microscopic
As below so above, in their puppeteer strings, in this case
The thresher and the kerosene salesmen, after Haymarket
In a smoky cafe cave they doubled down again
With Pinkertons "Workers are denied a right to any days ...
It's what the traffic will bear." Why not a Russian one
To play with, where, if the rotten spoils were shared each to his
Ability each to his bitter remorse: let's close the churches,
Stop all paychecks, let the government be even worse, in some
Central office with no fixed address, no phone, no way to
Appeal to the void, waiting endless for the electrician to ring
Or the beets to return to the market with eyes, who would mind?
Something like that was prophesied
By the partners in crime in the room, when territories
Were drawn, and Russia still red from that Abe
Lincoln business came up short ...
And the way to make all the goombahs
And fly-by-night peddlers of cheap medicinals look good,
Almost holy, was to create a world that would endure
What it was created for, our indifference
For long enough it finally stopped, deals opened up the curtain
Where what was on the stage was always more hat than cattle --
The thought that it's for us, all of it: the landings on the moon,
The mysticism introduced to meekly cede the earth and its Vietnams
And polio vaccines rendered unto Caesar, once again,
As the alienated intellectual finds cause again in opposition,
That is, he is part of the scene, where he can be tight but right,
Pressed-in yet destined ... and he will be redeemed.
And he will be, in the end, let's call him Harry
With his Haymarket maps and anarchist's cookbooks
Of Molotov cocktail recipes, for scholarly reasons of course,
And now he has a brand new tome, taking stock of
What the Situationists once sussed: the system was rigged,
Crooked at every cross-joint, impossible to get the attention
Of its vast, multitudinous voice -- he never did think of gratitude
Even though there is no May Day, and never was.
