Eight: Loaded Language (poetry series)

 

 

 

Loaded Language

 

The housing of Dillard’s vital organs

A compress wrapped to resist untightening

Larded arteries under dress clothes

Slick heels on his buckled shoes

Cocked in a goatskin executive chair

His limbs clench at the camera’s disclosure

Despite he kicks in feeling rancor

He shoots from the situation room table

Remounts his seat in a sluice of warning wind

His black socks pillow

Despite he puts his ankles up

A button just above his belt is off

But Dillard’s Self in its flesh-bound husk

lives entrepreneurial

A loveable fraud like the peddler of Oz

If worse, he never seemed so

His actual wife, thinks of telling this

to the press

Thinks of appearing on a game show

Kernel Junior, dough-faced, pimples bright as tumors

thinks of killing

Dillard, their Helmsman, gears to speak

 

Strangers aggress themselves climbing the compound gate

The monitor Dillard watches on, cathode ray

He believes it, no one can hack these things

Feels smugly retrogressive as to technology

 

From other cameras, chaotic scenes

Sewing machines unused, uniforms half-crafted

Dishes in the sink draw flies

Khaki-sack-clad men and women

Oily-haired, shamed about the eyes

Weep boarding vans and give their names

 

“Let the unworthy leave us…the jealous…”

And he adds, a new address, “My Beloved”

“Let the losers,” he says, “flee to the arms of their

Lying exploiters”

He falls silent and Junior takes the microphone

 

 

 

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Loaded Language

One Day the Rest

Doctrine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2019, Stephanie Foster)