Body Politic

Stan Rogal
From:   Geometry of The Odd. Wolsak and Wynn, 1999

Windchill factor & definite serious drift
Delineate the party limits.
An architecture of crystalline geometry
Falling into forms
As if rank columns could substitute a heart.
Flush with the usual Victorian enchantment with statistics
Configures an endless reproduction of fixed image.
Budgets, deficits or sundry further illusaries
Designed to support
    the duty-free zone of anonymous affluence
       toward the bitter business of annihilation.
Who own zero tolerance for undiminishing uncertainty
    plunge straight
       for bottom lines of lowest common denominator.
What boils down to self-interest
Fails to account
    the long division
       separating have from have not.
Since Plato's Republic no such categorical
akes so imperative
Actions inconsiderate of result
Where desire for uniform structure turns its back
& it is not chaos but order that breeds
Horror.
From the bleating mouths of wooly-headed politicians
Snow flies & one flake piles another in a succession
    of bricks, walls & towers
       arranged to set a thinning band.
How weather the storm given such cold rule?
Being barely alive in the teeth of it anyway
Barely flinches, or, clapped in ice
    the single aspect within this widening frieze
Recalls
To be human is unnatural.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

Stan Rogal's works copyright © to the author.