Call
An office as tenuous
as fog. Someone unpaid
except in their own youth mans
the phone, the computer.
Never enough
money, time, ventilation, coffee,
understanding or patience,
though the latter is total.
Even the word “client” marks
a defeat somewhere
in deep time, a failure of
relationship.
Lawyers have clients, but law here
is the opponent in a perpetual
judo. And is
the one crying
or barely verbal on
the phone, who is bleeding
(“from wherever”), evicted, hungry,
to be killed for “honor,”
guilty since birth, a client?
Doctors at least have patients,
but how to diagnose
one who calls without power
while the one who answers
has no power but answering?
I who don’t belong here, tired
of Grand Hotel Abyss, wanted
to praise heroes,
and am immature enough
to imagine an armed, confident
man. But all I found,
all anyone can find
are mice in the granary of suffering,
and the advice of Lenin
that, finally, revolution
is an affair of clerks and accountants.
Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Two collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology, Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, Live Nude Poems (2021), etc.
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