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Manifesto of the Spring
by James Capozzi

July 21, 2020 Contributed By: James Capozzi

Image courtesy Jeremy Yap

You do not have to choose.

At least not in any ultimate way.

 

If I unpack the poisonous black seeds

wine, menthols

humming in their tray in the dark

 

it has grown late.

If we are sitting at a kitchen table waiting, talking

 

our one life

deeper into evening.

If we broadcast it straight through the walls.

 

Whereas each day spring refracts

and stokes unrest

 

in Paterson’s communists and toxins.

Also deep in the heart

of industry, though to what extent only

 

the shop stewards know

and maybe not even the stewards

 

if we’re saying the same thing.

If the film projected all over these walls

has its perfect moment of time

 

catching the doomed traveling of the farmers into it

by wagon, an entire season

 

of dignity and struggle

one much stronger than I, I think.

I think of you, strong but bronchial, tossing in a squat

 

watched over by god knows what

dream in which we turn

 

together and disappear

into a great striking mass, channeled into history

 

where you say what you need to say to me.

 

–

 

Soon proper sleep at your mother’s house.

Soon the proper sleep of eternity

 

in which I am stuffed

and mounted in a foyer.

I look so lifelike, another angel.

 

I am trying to make our one thing come true

simple as that

 

load of gravel shoveled under-the-table

for months on end in a parking lot.

That master perfumer at work, in Vermont

 

surrounded by the fields and god.

Sunlight filters down through cloud

 

canopy to touch god’s workers

who are in turn entitled

to all of it.

 

Whereas in the museum we take what we need and leave

the rest, drifting in final long hallways

 

of anonymous masterwork,

feeling alien, stultified inside history.

Entry should be free.

 

Whereas the old stadium, since demolished

was filthy, loud, and cheap.

 

Whereas I saw the rich

behind their partition, right where you could put a hand

to them

 

their motives, character

everything despicable.

 

A union or a family, sanctimony can produce a crowd.

If it’s marching, more dancing.

 

When dancing, always demand more spins.

 

–

 

If spring stands in memory over all

other seasons.

 

If Easter stands in memory

over all other days

its bottle of Pepsi warm and flat

 

on the sideboard

beside a vase of lavender.

 

If grandpa tells his astonishing story

his brother goes to work as a scab

by canoe through the marshes for years

 

until the striking workers catch him

and “split his head wide open.”

 

If now, as then.

When or how this logic upends

no one knows.

 

If a love I take to be ours is not our own

is afflicted, affected with false duende

 

I haunt foggy tides at Monterey, soar over a field

with sheep. Merely air, I am.

The pack breaks up as I move over

 

rocks breaking

the water

 

as it’s forced

through a membrane and piped by capitalists

everywhere in the desert.

 

As the lighthouse keeper, run out of food, disappears

picking pears in a grove near the shore

 

and the members of his rescue party

die one by one, all alone

 

and in search of each other.

 

–

 

Boil the ackee, bust the seal on another pack.

Tell me what else is too good to be true

 

becomes three things at once

in a strike, in a strike

in another strike.

 

The heart needs bitterness

but do not wallow in it: It will hurt the heart.

 

The stomach needs sweetness,

but do not wolf too much sugar.

It curdles the stomach.

 

The lungs need spice, but do not wear out the lungs,

which oxygenate the blood’s red cells.

 

The kidneys need salt, but do not fall

to your knees and drink the sea in

a fit of romantic despair

 

which can ding the kidneys.

The liver needs acid, but do not go into the past

 

go into the future.

One, it will be better for the liver

which has suffered. Two, you’ve got no choice.

 

If history is an acid litany of atrocities

and debts, handed down to us by landlords.

 

If we don’t know where we’re going

and we’re getting there faster and faster, hurting all the time

like Keats or the Hulk.

 

Get up in the dark.

Stomp to the chamber in your frock.

 

Make your way to the enormous lot

where cloth piles fill slowly, swelling, with elegance.

 

People want to feel like that.

 

–

 

Every balloon has a crew on the street.

Every year someone dies hung up in the wires

 

landing someplace unsafe.

Whereas the pilots tie down and light up the gas.

Whereas the hiking masses still go up

 

if this band of weather stretches to Richmond.

If we are still connected.

 

I had the dream of the snakes again and was afraid

The good snake ate the bad one

I sailed through the valley

 

half-formed, in potential, but giving over everything, my entire life

which can end in only one of a few ways:

 

as the lower part of a cycle

as the end of a precedent

rendered unto us.

 

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 21, 2020

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