Pulp Fiction

You want more? You want some more of this shit?

so he puts his weight to his elbow jammed

under the jaw of the other one pinned

there, panicked, panting, his back to the bricks.

The others are loud and jeering and stand

in a jackal circle a spitting-length

away. The cold air is full of bird song.

The sex—sheer sugar—of the flowering trees

turns to powder against the skin, and cakes

the sidewalks pale green, and packs the curbs.

Far away a powerful siren cries.

Someone is about to get his ass kicked.

But now the cruel gang spots someone—okay,

it’s me—who is writing this whole scene down.

It’s so easy to surpass the limits

of the powers of description. What are

you looking at? There are yellow flowers

sprouting from the downspout above their heads.

The powers of discursion are no less

feeble, frail as the least petal. Stop it!

They don’t stop it. The one in trouble is

starting to weep, and the others to laugh,

as the one with the elbow suddenly

slips a white-handled knife from his pocket.

(Is this the big city? Are there dime bags

dropping from the claws of carrion birds?

Have his bad colors taunted the wrong turf?)

No. No. No. This is just my little town,

and the hostile gang is as easily

eight-years-old as twenty, out of grade school

since three o’clock. I’m sorry for my mind,

but the spring has spread a violent seed

and it has taken root in this poem,

as in my heart, in the children beating

each other to a pulp in your city

as well as mine. Is it less barbarous

to turn now toward the beautiful? Once

there was a hillside of white, wild lilies.

The mayapples were spilling there. A first

green froth of spring ferns spread under the pines—

so the pastoral, unperturbed lilies

stand around our absence in the sunlight.

What have we done to deserve the pollen,

the plant persistence of our natures? You

want more? The boys beat the daylights out of

the poor boy and I do nothing to help.

And the flowers are fiction—descriptive,

discursive—designed to suggest my mind

in peace or shame. So are the boys, if

the truth be told. So are the sexual trees.

The knife, you understand, is real. The knife is mine.

Source: Changeable Thunder (University of Arkansas Press, 2001)