Zachary Chartkoff

The Dead

I love cafes! "I'd only cheat on you
with the dead." Where else could I overhear
that but here? Who wouldn't want the dead? Who
doesn't feel sorry for them now? Like we're
so sure, we know. We know and we all sneer
and scoff at the dead. No sex! No passion!
They just watch us. Endlessly! Death makes mere
voyeurs of us all … unless … everyone
dead has so much wild hoopla, corporal fun,
cheap thrills, that they can't be bothered with us.
We, the Whining — I mean, Living — who shun
the dead. We who cannot even discuss
love or what happens next without making
things up. We who claim to love everything.

Kafka Lay In Bed

Everybody I pass by has the burden
of potential. I love potential; the potential
of potential, the hunger for all things
I can't have. For all the things I will
never know. Not in the Biblical sense.
Not how William Carlos Williams knew,
sad and pathetic; confessing on his
deathbed to his legions of affairs. No.
I do not want to end in a smear of ridicule
but I love that Goethe never had sex
until he was 40 or that Kafka lay in bed,
night after night, writing "so alone, so
all alone" in his notebook with doodles.

Whale Boat Slaughter

There are unpardonable crimes; to kill
a whale, our "survivor of the seabed."
And yet a hundred years ago Melville
just saw oil and exploit. And a hundred
years from now? There will be no whales. My grand
children will ask: "why didn't you do some
thing when you could?" Ai!, my child, what? Demand
all our poor to consume less? Welcome
whale boat slaughter? Our civilization
calls for us to take up poetry, not
weapons, against unpardonable crime.
And then at last, I tell you, I reason,
while we rhyme, the last whale will be caught;
what a price for our damn poem, damn rhyme.