What I Have Not Been To The Few I Loved
And I remember the little wet doctor's sons
who used to remind me of who
they thought I was, asking me, at the end
of an advanced Shakespeare seminar,
at the end of a creative writing class,
after a three hour oral exam on Marlowe,
to sell them heroin I didn't use or deal
to make them feel, like the postcards of Auschwitz
that showed the skulls in the furnaces
and read Arbeit macht frei,
they were slumming with reality, lest
I forget despite how well I did in class,
where I came from. And the difference
was obvious and lasting. So many things
I had to master just to wear a plausible lifemask
into the golden future of the middle class.
How to sit down at a table and eat
with cutlery as if I were doing surgery.
How to relate to the trivializing of the poor,
listening squeamishly to the screening myths
of how the rich suffer at their hands.
How my mother with hands and knees,
cracked like lobsters boiled in bleach
was leeching them dry on welfare.