[New-Poetry] The 20th Century in Poetry

[Anny Ballardini]

I think I already read this poem, and I have loved it.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Monday, February 12, 2007 6:33 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] The 20th Century in Poetry



  Guided Tour of Skyscraper 2000

  We take the elevator to the top, 
  stepping out onto into the full light 
  and ceaseless wind of the high steel. 
  Construction began in 1900 and is not yet complete. 
  Some Native-American workers mutter "manifest destiny" 
  as we pass along a narrow gantry, 
  all around the clank of metal, acetylene blue flares, 
  the push to finish the last stories before the end 
  of the century. We take an unenclosed stairwell 
  down to 98, running everywhichway, loops 
  & coils of computer cable, phonelines, a tangle 
  of computer monitors slung under the ceiling. 
  Spread out over a conference table milled from ebony, 
  chainsawed then dragged out of an Indonesian rainforest 
  by oxen, there's a high-stakes poker game 
  going on in Eurodollars and yen-value derivatives, 
  winner-take-all, but the developing countries 
  don't have enough to buy in. Down another set of stairs, 
  we walk from room-to-stark-white-room, 
  hospital wards where AIDS patients lying on gurneys, 
  emaciated, wrapped in sheets, daub open sores 
  with the newest salves, waiting for a cure. 
  Other rooms taken over by garage bands 
  cranking up huge amps to the point of feedback, 
  full of power chords and lung-busting angst,
  beating on rows of empty oildrums 
  until the fossil fuels run out. Paisley people 
  in palsied dancing, naked in the rain. Dogs let loose 
  on black children. Long cars with big fins funneling down 
  ramps of parking garages emptying onto freeways
  headed for model neighborhoods, many square miles 
  of homes, all alike, perfect green yards without trees, 
  kids playing army get cut down by the machinegun fire 
  of sprinklers, Vietnam, Korea, steaming casseroles 
  laid out on formica-topped dinettes, then flashlight tag 
  'til aproned mothers call them home. Stand back 
  and shield your eyes, there's a blinding, concussive light 
  behind the glass doors to Hiroshima-Nagasaki Ltd. 
  Floors in the 40s are still burning, a fine bone-white ash wafting
  from the offices of the Reich III Corporation, dust blowing down 
  rutted corridors on 33, whole families in trucks moving west 
  toward where the sun fails and falls each day into the Pacific, 
  outside only the suicidal rain of stock traders leaping to their deaths. 
  A speakeasy down two flights, jazz seeping 
  molten under the door, just knock twice, at the bar 
  a man sips a gin fizz, nervously pulls at the brim of a fedora,
  shell casings loose in the pocket of his pinstriped suit. 
  A few floors below, hallways like trenches cut through mud, 
  glint of bayonnets, gasmasks and whistles blowing, 
  light fixtures explode illuminating a no-man's-land 
  of twisted barbwire, bombcraters smoldering. 
  Farther down, in the basement, all of the dead are being stacked 
  like cordwood for stoking a great cast-iron boiler 
  which better never breakdown, because by now no one's left alive 
  who really knows how to fix the thing. The eyes 
  of small animals shine beneath a wooden skid, 
  roaches scatter under gaslight, growing dim.



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