Words for Empty and Words for Full

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down

71 Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down I know a woman about to lose her house. It’s not missing, she’s certain where the water shutoff valve is and which stair squeaks when she goes up at ten to rise at four. I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this, no one listens to this kind of poem anyway, it might as well be a sermon or the side of a cereal box: “The Lord has heard my cry for mercy,” “contents may have settled during shipping.” Now she has to “Self-Store” her stuff but doesn’t have the moolay to do so, and her brother’s stuff from his repo’d house is already in their mother’s basement, so she’s sold what she can and given the rest away or left it on the street for neighbors to pick at through January. Ever watch the woman who backed over your cat hold one of your dresses across her winter coat, pinning it with her chin and turning as if in a mirror before rejecting your sunflowers, dropping them into the curbside thaw and moving on to a pair of black pumps she’d be a fool to wear, given the apples of her ankles? Now caption that image “Redistribution of Wealth” and write down on a piece of paper how you’d change the world. You never have to show that paper to anyone, not even yourself, the god you are inside or pimp, the ax in case of, the glass, to break, if fire hicok pages i-120.indd 71 1/7/10 3:23 PM 72 is emergency, is now. It’s hard being a Wobbly these days, liking the head of Marx if not the fist grafted on, there’s nowhere to go to belt out “Look for the Union Label,” an admittedly crappy, anachronistic song I miss like I miss the sense of being together in this, there was Rockefeller and there was the rest of us, there was Aristotle being right: we are political, we are animal, we are lost. hicok pages i-120.indd 72 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...