V i s i o n a r y V o i c e s
Poetry by Carol Tarlen (1943-2004)
From the Editor: Carol Tarlen's description of herself for a journal I was involved with in the early 90s called News From Nowhere, where the first three of the poems below were previously published, went as follows: "Carol Tarlen is a clerical worker at U.C. San Francisco, a member of AFSCME Local 3218, a left-wing sort of anarchosyndicalist, and a bad-tempered pacifist. She writes poetry, fiction and essays." Carol's work was published in anthologies like Liberating Memory: Our Work and Working Class Consciousness, and journals like Pemmican Press and Working Classics. She was politically active in the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, a group whose politics I couldn't quite grasp but which included some of my favorite San Francisco poets: Jack Hirschman, Sarah Menefee, and Jorge Argueta, as well as Carol and her husband David Joseph. Carol was feisty, seemingly tireless, although she always said she was exhausted whenever you saw her, and she had endless reserves of contempt for the stupidity of rulers and endless reserves of compassion for the underdogs of the world. Her life and work are described in an excellent obituary by Julia Stein in the current issue of Pemmican Press. She died a year ago this June and this is a small tribute to her enduring inspiration.
While watching the clock at work, I contemplate the end of entropy And what will the rapture look like?
Will files dissolve into dust devils
and swirl off my desk
leaving piles of ashes beside the phone?
Will invoices melt in the xerox?
Will I have time to fax the kidney of a bat
to an organ bank
and demand an immediate finder's fee?
Yes! And my computer will refuse to backspace;
I will scatter my typos like bones,
While my immediate supervisor and the CEO
nip at my heels like a pack of half-dead dogs.
I will eat the appointment calendar for lunch,
and, in a bulemic fury,
toss it down the office toilet,
dreams of corporate mergers
swimming with sewer rats.
Oh orgasmic ecstasy!
Oh joyous rain falling on my
aching skin!
I am making a personal phone call to Gabriel,
deleting the memories of a
thousand machines,
ripping the chains from my ankles,
kicking off my correctly-office-
attired one-inch heels
my bare feet dangling delicately
above my bulletin board
as I gloriously rise to paradise
and join the angels liberation
front!
The messenger
he sits on a concrete wall
watches the sun drop behind the Ferry Building
an empty orange knapsack
flung across his bike's handlebars
his friends are silent, smoking
he never stops talking
he says he quit school at 14
and no one noticed
says he wants to sleep with the secretary
who never looks at him
says he wants a drivers license
a guinness a letter from his dad
a molotov cocktail a can of spray paint
a street riot an empty bus
neon dreams a copless night
a third eye a bed to wake up in
says he'd like to smoke some weed
says the cold chaps his hands
bones show through the rip
in his sweater's sleeve
he says there's a black hole in space
and he's falling
Walking in the rain to a poetry reading at the luggage store
waiting for a light at Eddy and Jones. three men at the corner. one in a torn brown
shirt shakes pills from a brown plastic container into scarred and bleeding hands
then stuffs five dollar bills into his pocket. supplementing his G.A. with Medicaid maybe
now he can rent a room. a pimp standing under a liquor store awning shouting at his
bitch you better go out there I don't care if the rain cuts your face up bitch. cut your
balls off she yells back her skirt stretched tight across her long lovely thighs. two b-boys
share a pipe in a doorway. an old guy sits on the curb water falling out of his red
rimmed eyes. a line of men against a wall wait for a shelter to open humping their
possessions they're in country all the short timers dead or got a job that's another kind of
dead. the war still undeclared. they know the enemy's face close up his perfect white
teeth his perfect home in his walled community his perfectly balanced checkbook his
perfect grasp of technojargon his dull gray skin and round blue eyes his down-sized soul.
Fire
For Jean Toer-il, teenaged South Korean garment worker who in 1970 committed suicide to protest the lack of enforcement of existing labor laws
His clothes soak gasoline
his face sweats gasoline
his hair shines gasoline
he flicks the lighter
flames surge up his arms and back
illuminate the dark alley
of his labor.
we are not machines he cries
fire consumes his flesh
we are not metal he screams
we eat dust, we cough blood
fall asleep at our sewing machines
they inject dope into our veins
our skin burns with each stitch
we beg for time to eat
we beg for time to sing
we beg for time to strip naked
we beg to see the night
to see the sun rise
we beg for time to piss
we beg to eat
we beg for work
we are flames
we are not machines
we are not the engines that feed our dreams
we are blood and flesh
I burn
I burn for the small chest bones
of the girls bent with tuberculosis
I burn for the days and nights of constant work
I burn for the laws that are pissed on
I burn for my mother and sisters
who sleep on torn blankets
spread on the bare floor
I burn for all my sisters
who spit blood into their cupped hands
I burn for my brothers
forced to die in Vietnam
I am a monk who burns for peace
I am a woman burned by Christian priests
I am Joan burned for liberation
I am a workers burned as she pounds
on the locked factory door
I am the Russian Jew burned in a pit at Babi Yar
I am the child whose burning hands
are thrust through the barred tenement window
I am their flesh, I am their dreams
I am flames
I am not a machine
I am not a machine
I am spirit
I am light
I am love
Previously published by Pemmican Press, Summer 2005.
Believe In My Hands (Which Are Ending)
For Silvio Rodriguez of Cuba
at the end of my hands
is the face of a child
whose right eye is planted
in the center of her pale cheekbone.
At the edge of my fingers
pacing beneath a movie marquee,
is an old man in a red cap on whose
shoulder blossoms a picket sign.
The rain he stands in defines
the limits of my hands. Still,
I trust in the slick wet pavement
where my body ends,
but where my imagination
explodes into white carnations.
I believe in thick, black dirt
that sifts through my closed fist.
I believe in the child whose
deformed face is a luminous moon.
I believe in the hot sun where
a revolution was named for a poet.
I trust in the mystery of future.
which is always beginning.
Previously published in: Modern Poetry Studies, Vol 1., No. 3, 1983. Editor: Jerry McGuire. Publisher: Media Study, Buffalo, NY. Also published in Pemmican Press, Summer 2005.
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