D0T AND DAZY

May I introduce you
to a summer grain?
This is Dot. (Molecules:
What seems small is huge.)

There are, no doubt, millions of us
in this Midwestern field
as there are millions of failed
troubled sprouts in Minnesota.

Wind is thought. We are tongues.
The whole room is talking at once!
Please, one sprig at a time.
Spikelet, what would you say

if gusts used a tongue to reveal
I am the last grain you'll have?
Glad to meet you.
I'm headed for a hidden star--

Silence is my rocket.
Appointed grain, I'm
tired of living as used
misanthropic molecules.

We're not misanthropic.
We just don't care. I do.
I, dew, pronounce you man and life--
Sir Dazius and Mrs. Seed,

tomorrow you'll be breakfast. Yet
Death is a persistent farmer--
Dot and Dazy will spring back,
howdier right here.

THOMAS DORSETT, THOMAS SCHWARZ

The person I was in my previous life
happens to speak German.
So I learned that tongue.

(At the time I didn't know
I was an Anglo marionette
with Thomas Schwarz pulling the strings.)

I said, "Daddy, I've got to
learn German." And I did.
The carnage was recent

and Daddy resisted, but
not like England resisted--
This war I won.

Lots of coincidences (proofs?)
over the next sixty years
which are too prosy to list here

(these lines are plain enough)
Now (2011) what does Thomas want?
May I use an English word?

(I'm translating) reincarnation--
I didn't believe it either
until that day in 1947 when

I saw your face. Where did I go?
I was eighteen years old
when I perished in Dresden

Why did I become a toddler
in a soulless house? Jersey City
would not have been my first choice;

um ehrlich zu sein, it wouldn't
have even made the first hundred--
I was a poet.

I am a poet.
I played Chopin well
I play Chopin, well,

so what? Dieter's name
on the Internet (I was
half Jewish and passed

--forged papers--until
that last year of hell)
convinced me: your awful legacy

was the reason I lived long
not far from the Jersey shore
as a pearlless clam.

"Es gibt nur zwei Dinge,
die Leere, und das gezeichnete Ich"
Don't be so sure.  We want peace;

though after the fire-bombing
we went through terror together,
it's not too late. We're still intact.

Stirb und werde--Yes! The horror has
finally come to an end. We smile.
Why has it taken us sixty odd years?

A CALL FOR REGULATION II

That stuff about derivatives
gave me a case of shiveris

("To shiver" is, of course, a verbal
way of indicating chills)

Too too too bad, the Congress is
bought off by Big Businesses--

Thus a few are jeters--Whee!
while the rest are jittery

because they pay the bills.
Will regulation cure her ills?

No, but our country would improve whose
health is getting poor, a lack;

the best treatment for shivers is:
Citizens, fight back!

A CALL FOR REGULATION

Who have made so many poor?
Bankers who want more and more.

What is their plan for redress?
Paying workers even less.

That's a very vicious circle.
Where are you when we need you, Terkel?

Where are you when we need you, Day?
Honest work for honest pay

is what we want. That's what we'll get;
we'll regulate those bastards yet!