from SEVENTEEN ANDYS
ANDY WARHOL (III)
When you’re young, you feel superior simply
because you know more people.
And when you are young you have the alcohol
of first information; the sunset is never
so uniform, but it is like the fried egg
over rye, universal difference or a kind thing…
I know what we call knowledge according
to a patron breaking the yolk
and not clientele, men
discussing the fourth power of cream and
sugar where the poor are condemned to days of
begging for coffee. When you’re working
(no one is rich) you never say,
“I don’t do your job,” and imagine the town
on fire, adjacent, when the sun sets,
faking ennui, billboards
and movie houses burning. Famous people
have more organized lives, but we
in the public organize them. They were
never better than us because we said they
could be great; but not better or worse
because we don’t like people who are.
I could draw a picture twice of the person I admire,
the Coca-Cola bottle, Mao or Nixon.
from SIX COMMODITY POEMS
STEEL
1
Nothing written in freshman blood or
senior ooze – it wasn’t, yet –
or pyrotechnic fire. Steel touches all
untranslated feathers
of our American Fourth of July
sky, and drowns heart-heavy in
the mid-night black of a
lake, later. Blown up once —
in the trade towers, and shown failed, on
film in
melting bars; killed in another domestic,
democratic state; war.
Steel: lattices that will grow
up, and dimensions of beams
of forecast eras I have already
augured….a new century of movies;
steel striking the air hard: the sky’s
balance beams.
2
Formosa to the Faroe Islands —
men lift blood types
of children and beams of rust-
proof homes — fortune, struts.
Pulverized, liquid hard, unclass-
ifiable blue iron
and perfect, human-made product.
The egoless stars, the stars
do not see steel, but a glow — glow of
orange; seen too, from the view of airplanes,
from laboratories in space, and in
Time and National Geographic magazines;
glow of yellow —— from sidewalks
where delusions and deliriums verge
into fresh poetic blood, and
smells of city waters and trash
clogging iron. Non-traditional projectiles
are thrown through buildings
with steel;
bricks, cinder blocks by a man,
or lewd magazines strung with twine.