Santa Fe Poetry Broadside
Issue #9, May, 1999 : -- 1  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Andrew McCord

                 

Out from Under

I was a fish among the people then.
From the vanguard, I became a warehouse
Worker, a sous chef, a shopping center guard,
A carpenter living in a trailer
In southern Indiana. The revolution
Treats its revolutionaries like
A cardsharp parceling out his cards and I
Was nine of diamonds in the slit half-
Sole of a broken shoe. The phone tree died.
The only places I could find to hide
Were in high desert among survivalists
And ganja-addled freaks.
                              In Idaho
One March, we took chainsaws to a frozen pond,
Piled up block on block like fishtanks in
A petshop in Chinese San Francisco.
We were harvesting the winter, someone said.
It was a long way from "The Eighteenth Brumaire,"
But tedious detail was nothing new.
I had lived a brutal step-by-step
Of pipe-bombs and hair-triggers, yet as I
Became adept at keeping butter fresh
In a tepid cedar box, washing my socks
In the stream and setting them to dry on rocks,
Living instant by tormented instant
In the flesh--it grated. Ways of life
I wanted war on were what hid me best.


Copyright © 1999 Andrew McCord.

About the poet.

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Issue #9, May, 1999 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.