The Commonist Manifesto

Eliot has come and gone
and no love song of any
language will bring him
back. The elitist is dead
and buried in the back-
yard beneath the budding
lilacs.

Inside, the party
is wasting away—flat
champagne; flatter
conversation. The fat cats
have retired. The help
has quit. A storm
brews outside of town.
We race home to
escape it.

Upon the first thunder,
the heart stops—fearing something
massive, something more
destructive than any tempest
within our horizon.
We are mistaken.
This is home.
This is safe.

We are fools.

The world now fits in
every pocket and witness
the result: desolate
tables, empty chairs rusting
along the sidewalks
of Paris. In the lofts above
Manhattan, the lights of vacant
homes are off for good. The law
of London burns, police
car by police car.

Together,
we are
apart.

There will be a time
when those lilacs will bloom.
We'll stamp them beneath our boot.
No longer will we be the foot-
notes subjugated to the bottom
of the page, as together we
infuse the narrative with the lines
they can't forget,
with the lines
they won't forget—

The lines that everybody will understand.