Upstream from the Torrent

by Joel Pomerantz
written 1999, slight revisions 2003 (posted 2002)

This poem was sent to the White House with thousands of other anti-war poems on February 12, 2003, a national day of poetry against the war, which started as a poetry event Laura Bush was planning to hold at the White House.

As described in the San Francisco Chronicle: First lady Laura Bush was planning to host a celebration of American poetry at the White House today. Instead, poets all over the world will read verse protesting the possible war in Iraq. Bush's "Poetry and the American Voice" symposium was canceled after several prominent poets — including former U.S. poet laureates Rita Dove and Stanley Kunitz — declined her invitation....Instead of booking flights to Washington, many poets contributed anti-war poems to a hastily created Web site. The protest took on a life of its own, and now more than 150 events are scheduled for today in U.S. cities such as San Francisco and New York, Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Dubuque, Iowa. Overseas, there will be readings in Guadalajara, Mexico, Oslo, Norway, and Oxford, England....One of the invited poets, Sam Hamill, co-founder of poetry publisher Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend, Wash., declined with a flourish. He urged friends to observe "A National Day of Poetry Against the War" and to contribute anti-war poems to a new Web site, www.poetsagainstthewar.org. He said he planned to present a printed version of the poems to the White House on Feb. 12. Word spread, and more than 5,300 poems were collected, many from the brightest literary talents in America, including Adrienne Rich, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Levine and Diane DiPrima. Hamill said he had expected about 50 responses. "It was never my intention to close down her poetry tea party," Hamill said, "but I had to make a statement. There isn't just a war being planned against Iraq, there's a war going on against the Constitution."

I checked it out. I did some research. I got it all down now: I know what it is, this America thing. I found it out.

I looked where it counts, where it really is. I got it now. I'm all over it.

I just saw it on television. They say don't take it seriously it's not real there, on TV, but it's the answer, the truth, it doesn't lie. It teaches. It tells us how to be. It tells us what we are. It answers and tells. What's America? What is it? What are we? Better figure it out, because we're pushing it on every other place. Making them crave what we are be like us feel the surge the intensity of the fast all phony half answers steering into a blind box cage.

Now I've got it. It's not just a little joke anymore: Oh how charming and what bulging muscles. C'mere and say that, yah pipsqueak. No more joke—if ever it was. No, it's real and it's as viral as mad cow's disease. And ill as to die and we're dying.

I mostly live a life without that thing, without that television in my brain, eating and dissolving my brain. I had to look this time, though. It was my research. I had to know: What is this America thing? This brutal, violent, rotting thing? The TV is its soul, so what I had to do was face it. All I had to do is look at that putrid box and it poured out. All the answers I needed were there in that television.

Flick it on

Cop show. Real. Humiliating poor people.

Switch the channel

Car chase on a show. Ad break. The ad's a car chase, too.

Switch again

Calm voice to a child, shown, "And what do you do if a stranger talks to you?" "I don't talk to him, because he might be bad." Public service message.

Switch again

Explosion, murder for vengeance. Movie wraps up "cutely" with one "hero" smashing the face of the other "hero," his friend, "There, now we're even....Just like in that movie, y'know where the boot—Hey!" (As the other escalates, "cutely" raising a weapon to pummel—a love savaging between men, real men, American men). Cute ending. Credits roll.

There it is. One step back. Get a snap shot of it. There it is. A whiff of us, the grim reaper. The one with the fist. Yeah, that's him. That's us. He's America. Here's the answer.

We're pushing shoving leading following each other into the boiling oil dead dead dead. Worse—on the way there, we're crippling-maiming vomiting the plague all over our children. We're infecting them, getting them to know it, making them love it, then we're moving on, ripping our hearts out and holding them high in the air, screaming at the tops of our lungs because we have nothing else to scream about, zombies that we are, TV watching automotons that we are, and pleased with ourselves too as we belly flop into the cauldron of murdermush stew.

I win you lose. Declaring our personal independence by ripping each other up. Just one poor bastard screwing another poor bastard over. This makes us feel power in a world where power is taken from us, reserved for the big guys with money. Surge of self righteousness without having to justify.

Display our power in a torrent. Anything less we would have to face control by the machine. Juice in our loins. This makes us forget the machine, the cage, never see it. But we never make it out—we just add bars and justify to ourselves being in it there is no other way.

We're bashing each other to bits—and we're loving it. Violence is cute. It's sexy. It gets us out of our meaningless lives, gives us something to be hot about, if not live for. Be awed by, if not die from.

Thinking there's no other way. Y'see, violence is called for in some situations. Like this one and this one and this one too. Here's another. That's my way of solving problems, we say, whatcha gonna do about it.

Even the weak, the mild mannered and farthest from testosterone. There's no choice. This is how we know to do it.

The woman on the bus says, "No ya gotta wear it," puts the hat back on the overbundled child. The kid says nuh-uh and takes it off. Momma hits, hits again. "Do what I say." I tell her violence teaches violence. She says, "I know how to raise my daughter." Oh, so you're teaching violence on purpose. I see.

We're in America. I forgot.

Switched the channel already. This time cut the cord instead.