you think i walked to this country across the beans?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


so, the daily. the factory. the pushing
thru of machines to take
jobs from actual humans
continures. it's ok though, i convince myself
that no one would want to make sure
the damn sprite bottle is full or for that matter
the label's on straight and cut at the right place
so that you don't buy oca-cola c~.

we're talking financing, car sales men used
and otherwise, the bottom lines. she says
"so i told him show me on this paper where
the rebate is show me the trade in value"
just because i can't speak a the good english
don't think i'm a stupid! numbers are the same
across ALL languages"

i think of this latest war, begin to wear only
black. the four thousand of ours, the x thousand
of theirs. how many hours
of electricity in baghdad
today, what's the telephone number
on the fifth cell the first seargant retrieved
from the tenth pile of rubble this week. how

many rocks does it take to stone a woman, how
many marines to liberate her? my head
begins to spin, the coffee wears off around
this time of day and i could swear she said
something about the 90 miles between cuba
and miami, the fourteen months in chicago
at forty degrees below. every day's a new
battle, and all she means, in her own
idiom, is she didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday.
she knows how to walk away.