Rob Halpern
TERRY GOU GOES TO WISCONSIN
The inside story of crisis looks nothing like the real
Event whose code-name is Chokehold or Cobalt a kill-box
Being something you can’t really see like a fluctuation
In price point or the value-form itself this is nothing
More than derivative of other situations & questions say
Is it possible to be fascist and not racist but who would ask
Such a stupid question anyway I mean what’s the difference
Between my poem and a free-speech cage at an AntiFa
Action or will the new constituent body ever coincide
With the people’s limbs as my body fails to materialize
Natural wealth now there’s a lame fucking metaphor
Money standing in for tiny hands & diminutive forces
Stringing my cells with dental floss made in Sri Lanka
Sending signals from the earth’s shrinking core to my own
Failing heart across the sea thru copper coils & transistors
Made in Shenzhen and wired to my cochlea so I hear things
Before threading my mouth with black nylon twine the way
Wojnarowicz stitched his lips in that iconic image as if political
Talk were all equal to a dip in Alibaba’s earnings which is just
An alibi for interminable sadness shackled to a concrete floor
On a freezing nite the way my guy died of hypothermia I dream
Of touching his still tender corpse as protests turn violent
From Bogota to Berkeley just hold it up she said & at least
Present the dead
— body to us.
Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Prison. His books of poetry include Common Place (2015) and Music for Porn (2012).