So what?

 

Der Duft des Sommers - The Scent of Summer 3 x 10 x 10 cm - acryl/shellack ink on canvas - available!

AN UNATURAL HISTORY OF PROGRESS

There’s jazz in the courtyard, moonlight espresso, grandma

issuing dire warnings in archaic dialect, grandpa

sneaking off to the boiler room, to conspire with tobacco.

The streets are without porn.

Bump and grind if you can find it, yes, but no porn.

A manhole hissing fiercely nearby. Kids playing stickball, but gingerly,

for it is Sunday, and they are wearing their best.

Plague germinating on rotting hulks in Sythian ports,

sailing on to Naples and Palermo, devastating Rome,

depopulating Florence, shutting down theatres in London.

Peasant and lord scarfing raw garlic and, as if longing

for their bacterial beginnings, washing neither bodies nor garments,

a mad flurry of Ostrogoths or Visigoths

spilling over city walls, smashing monasteries, no one bathing

for hundreds of years, Donald Trump always

coming back to take more, castor oil, chemo therapy

which just kills you more slowly than cancer, it seems,

public executions family reunions Hitler and his Huns

Bush #2 and his version thereof, chronology a side issue at best—

   shit just keeps happening—

until: a shriveled, oily hot dog in a soft bun at Woolworth’s

on a Saturday afternoon, circa 1968, Concord, California

one hundred degrees outside, not much cooler inside,

the air salty and dark, an odor of rancid butter

coming from the pop corn maker, add to that a

purloined copy of “Ring” magazine,

George Chuvalo and Buster Mathis

pounding each other on its front cover,

snug and damp beneath t-shirt and jeans, and I feel

well-fed, with half my “dog” in hand, and as cunning as a gangster:

thus progress makes its belated appearance in human affairs.