Longing to Commodious
This is where it gets pretty personal hemmed in
- side acts enclosing sense eroding all my needs
For warmth & honey common phantoms things
Sing of use not being on our side they press again
- st my limit being a swarm becoming corralled
Inside the same nonsite falling to a cop’s baton
Not failing the place property erases you see for
- ce shifting lines converging undoing time
The way we make it deep how deep the ground
Dreams futures not being bound to rates rent
Open squares under private siege a coup
Like common sense undone the library itself hi
- jacked commanded dumped by armed pretenders
Say the commode goes up in smoke say what
You are has been revoked utopian imaginary
Say whatever you want has been unmade
& ready to be made again with
- drawn people arouse
— the place itself, this hole in the goods.
Copyright © 2013 by Rob Halpern. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 18, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"'Longing to Commodious' was written for the 75th birthday of my friend Peter Linebaugh, a radical historian whose research on the commons in books like The Magna Carta Manifesto and, more recently, Ypsilanti Vampire Mayday (written under the sign of Occupy Ypsilanti) has made a deep impression on my thinking."
Rob Halpern