That Whip Returns

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

 I like it. Maybe because I read it in New York this
January where we are now a frozen city.  Our Mayor a
block of black ice and businessman blue riding his
bicycle against the frigid winds over union labor and
anyone else that gets in his way is determined to
freeze everything and everyone out. Frozen city, not
even a blanket of white snow to keep us feeling comfy
and clean, only the dust from the Towers still
remains, the pain and the closed shops, and the
unemployed, and the lists of names, the faded filthy
frozen memorials. Our economy frozen by imminent yet
immobilized mobilization for cold-blooded war with
Iraq.  That War, that war, it has taxi cab drivers
wearing their residency papers round their necks like
St. Christopher medals while listening for the dying
breaths of their hunger striking brothers on the
frigid winds cross the Hudson. It has young men
marching to recruiting stations and it has old nuns in
jail cells. That war, that cold war that must be waged
in winter to protect the soldiers from weapons of mass
destruction is a home front security scam. And the
cold comfort citizens safe from the long arms of the
law accept and take home to their children like the
flyers on their windshields they don't toss on the
ground that remind them how to do more with less for
the war and where to call to report a suspicious
neighbor to the terrorist police or the INS. Cameras
and cops and soldiers on the bridges, and cameras in
the classroom.  Walking Time Square, where a
mannequin's face is filming me and there I am on a
hundred screens, I stick my finger up my nose cause
the camera doesn't understand what "fuck you" means.
Maybe none of us do. 
Maybe "fuck me" is the incantation against the cold,
the bitter cold charging the city now. 

The teacher's black-stockinged legs are spread wide,
her rubber skirt hiked high up her thighs. As the horn
player mournfully bleats her scales, he hears the belt
whistle through the air above him as he squeezes shut
his eyes….

--Oh, shit, Cleo! That HURT!
He limps out of the building, drops his shorts, and,
to douse the fire raging on the surface of his ass,
sits down in a snow bank under a billboard that says,
NOW, DARLING, FOR THE REAL STROKE OF LOVE! Whew!
Better. He listens to the sizzle as he sinks deeper,
trying to remember something that has slipped his
mind. It's almost as if something got reversed  out
and he can't remember what. Something about the mayor?
The police?  


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