My Poem: Never Should have Left the Holler

                                                  picture by me 

This poem was written a few weeks ago. If I publish anything, I probably will have to take it down from here, some have told me I should get poems into chapbooks. This poem was written during the time I was leaving the Unitarian Universalist church and has the theme of "class issues" in my life. It also concerns Covid. I almost titled the poem, "The Woke Don't Care About the Broke". which is one of the lines. My husband has stayed in the UU but I understand. Leaving wasn't easy for me and I have the change in belief to contend with from everything that has happened in the last few years......

 Never Should Have Left the Holler.

I came back a second time

among the Boston Brahmins
it was a mistake

God had let me down

Heaven was too far away

We all wanted to save our world
The prison planet bars grew too thick

I saw the psychopaths in the room.

They didn't.
Flames licking on the ceiling,

racing to burn our lives down.

An Opera Singer, a magazine writer, and

editor of text books

sipped their Green Tea and dipped

their Pita Chips in Olive Hummus

Smacking their lips

as my peasant body grew into

a mountain and slid into the gutter

in 1997

The professors and their piles of books

lured me away from 

the fog of the barn
Robert Fulghum insisted on joy

Davidson warned freedom would be lost

among Utopian dreams

with no center.
Thandeka knew

the limits of feigned Original Sin.
Thoreau's nature 

crumpled, folded and squashed into a box

My walks to nowhere stopped

Bell Hooks still cared. 
Sally counted her 3 million like
Hetty Green.

Macrobiotics, New York Times

and white covered art books with

filmy inserts on the shelves.
Sampling Feldenkrais, Cranbook and caviar on pasta

at Hudson's. 
I was trying to leave my station

Should have never been an artist

since artists starve.
I could have been a contender,

Maybe a nurse, or a secretary, 

But there's just one hitch:

I've never known anything else.

The academics are pressured to all think

alike or receive censure.

The scientists all set aside feelings

for corporate desired results

Who care if things work anymore?

Almond milk in a blue crystal tumbler

vs Kool-Aid in a chipped plastic

J.D. Vance praised the successful 

with jobs that paid the bills
Grandma abandoning her small town

rose up to global travel, suburban house

and dinner parties.
I sat on the curb with the bags

waiting for the bus,

an orange package of Ramen at

the boarding house hoping for a

boiled egg at White Hen

Crystal glass hutches filled with

blue line drawing plates and goblets on place mats

and silverware out of a wooden box.

Trimming lawns with the hum of the mower on

landscapes of bliss, stone fireplaces and granite

birthed from home additions

as I slinked back to my milk crates and cracking grout sink.
Reiki never bought the green

Failing to reach 6 figures 

I was out of the family

I sold off prepper's silver for gas.

Old shoes, dry wiry hair, smeary glasses and 

piles of bills came roaring back to drown me.

Public life destroyed for the screens
Gentility disappeared, along with civility

there simply was too few to talk to.

Japanese netsuke,

an ivory hare held in a palm

with towers of purple Aphrodite crystal filled

rock

resting on tables in rooms

with smooth yellow floors of 

bamboo

No chips in plates

Gilded cages behind the wall

no human contact behind 

the muzzles (Perhaps I was a fool to fear the germs)
The reticent told me nothing

The circle was closed with me outside

Thin limbs, ease and smiles

while money flowed

like the River Nile taking them

to lands of sweetness and honey.

Never should have left the holler of the north

grasping for the ladder (They died young anyway)

16 years fading

The woke don't care about the broke

The eugenicists interfered

and took my world

of color and faces away

Pick the honeysuckle off the wire fence

and taste instead of life in drywall.  

As my world shrank, their world stayed an oyster

Bucket lists filling with checks

My grief came alone.

The technocracy disgusts me

The New Normal just feels like the New Insanity,

reheated like death and spaghetti

once or twice removed,

too many times warmed over

God broke down the door

Break down the walls of the 15-minute city 

Bukowski wrote "Wherever the crowd goes, 

go in the opposite direction."