To Austin
The Rag, September 14, 1970, Volume 4, Number 40
Sweet Suck City,
You never turned me down,
Except when it mattered.
You always gave me shelter,
Except when I needed it.
You never locked your doors at night –
But how your daytimes devoured me!
I am surfeited
By your table-crumby largesse;
Satiated
With your casual affairs and one-night stands
In love and revolution.
Austin, you never wanted me to be a poet,
Or anything but your
Symbolic Supergirl,
And as for my Womanhood—
You made me wear a mask to my own parade
And now that the Ball is over you’re
Surprised! That I didn’t have one after all –
Much less two of them…
Austin, you may say that you would have
Followed me into a lion’s den
Maybe so but
What kind of trip is that?
Austin, you
Embarrassed me with your
Middle class hip sophistication
Don’t you know
That what’s gauche for the shoes
Is gauche for the sandals?
Here’s a laugh for you:
I haven’t paid for any weed
For Four Years,
(When will Lee Otis be freed?”
Here’s another:
Eastwoods Park is Doomed.
Doesn’t anything shake your
Fat Smile?
You really Paint It Red, don’t you
(Boogie!)
With that paint that washes off in your
Morning coffee and flows bloody and
Invisible down your slumside streets…
The tide is rising, Austin,
I am tired
Of our guns and butter rhetoric
And your crutch and concrete reality.
“This doesn’t mean I don’t love you,
I do, that’s forever…”
Sometimes you
Got me off and I
Believed in you and
Called you home and
Kept the faith and
I wouldn’t bother if you were
Just New York.
“I ain’t saying you treated me unkind,
You coulda done better, but I don’t mind,
You just sorta wasted my precious time,
Don’t think twice,”
It would kill you.
This poem has taken six years to speak my mind;
Today is August twenty-sixth, nineteen-seventy;
Today my sisters are on strike
And so am I,
Good-bye.
Much love, believe it or not,
mvizard
