Decade

It is the end of May Day

And people flood the streets

While making a howling
Sound they have flags that gutter 

In what wind there is at night

They are wrapped in them

Their mouths open onto throats

They are raucous because

There was no planned march

Called for by an organization

They put their hands in the air

They flood the streets on cue

They kiss each other

Like sailors after the war

Their faces are flushed red
Or chalked white
 

They take photos of each other and

The crowd of those they do not know

It is the end of May Day

But they are not in the street

Because they have to work

Or because they do not work

Because there may be something

To insist upon in how this has

Been loathed and made a principle

Of trying to become an other crowd

Because the bodies that would be

That crowd get busted and mocked

Exhausted and broke

Before they can fully open what

Like their dragging out

Over owed and into the years

Would have been said
With hands

Which now merely is: 

It is the start

Of May and the crowds 

Have gathered

Because a man has been killed

And blood seeps into a carpet

Because one yarn of

The Gordian knot

Of the last ten years, in

The pursuit of which,

The knot was drawn tighter

And varnished and

Took to the air

Spread itself through arid 

Mountains and over villages

And dropped, whistling small

Like a whole flock

Of glass kites

Into those villages, because one strand

Has been unwound and is

Now frayed across the world

And gets into the lungs

Of the howling crowd

In whose joy there is the case

That red and white greasepaint

Is put on and smeared as the shouting

Is a heat, not just a volume

It was not a decade yet

The decade snipped

Four months ahead of itself

Two and a half months before

It had been ten years since Carlo

Giuliani was shot and run over

Twice for being part of a

Crowd which is not this one

It would have been ten years

In December since Corralito

And the crowds that went

Into supermarkets and took out

What everyone needed

But this is not to be the case

This has been the shortest

Twenty-first century possible

Less than a decade in

Before it, finding its

Closure, rewinds itself back

Over these years and

The terrain that is not

Flat but is made up

By wearing down and of 

Other people filling space for

Wanting the end of the
Arrangement that ruins

The rewinding scratches the

Tape and when we will drag

It back forward we cannot

But see grooves scored

Into it like a kill

And the valleys, seen

From above, that chart out

A thin line between mountain

And village

We do not have the thought

To do the mathematics

That would calculate the distribution

Of the many fields of the dead

And the ravenous time

Of those doomed to not yet be