May Day 2009

All day I stared at the blank world And could not tell The words invisible in my hell I waited for the sounds of emergency The blinking eyes and flashing red The petals crushed upon the ground I waited in vain Excoriated by pain Carrying the debris in my brain Of great structures of falsity Crushing indescriminately the workers Of Chrysler, GM and the hollow economy Splintering their dreams Into shards unjubilant And I could not understand the world Without smoke The silence of the mighty Pele The river a toxic brown not red And this is May So marginal to the memory The horror that workers saw When they begged justice for bread What May is this That does not cry everywhere For workers and their leaders dead? All day only my pen Dared march the white edge of history The fragrance of teargas The fumes of petals crushed Under the boots of my poetry. All day they invented a virus To scare the world inside But I am a steel man And bring no flowers to the deal.