A Quiet Afternoon at the Office

When you're overwhelmed at your job
     & the room is a field of consciousness,
     forming first the violet edges
& later the pierced spiral
          of what just happened,
you try to remember events while you
stumble over twigs of the day like a red bee.
     So much anger in the economy
  after too much not enough—
people setting tents in the streets,
          the last of the fruit gives way
on branches you see as you work
  holding the annihilated breath.

Now that the crisis has no locale
          there's a sense of the lively unit
  into which they had placed feeling:
     fatigue & theory, cornice & cup,
links of your spine on the chair…
  what will they do, will they do, will they do
     when labor rebels but not quickly?
It was so much work to cohere—
  a radical hope fills in: revolt
          in the square, thin crows,
     fat capital, the ash, the lists,
the fire you'd been harvesting, for this—


for MM


Published in Occupy SF: poems from the movement, edited by Virginia Barrett and Bobby Coleman (2012, published by Jambu Press/ Studio Saraswati). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.