Melissa Benham
Civilian Life
I.No longer an excuse
for farmer or pedestrian
A redistribution of the Citizen-
Industrialist Citizen-Artisan
The Citizen-Individual X
forms the external
belief a prisoner like me
would not last as a young professional
woman of modest means
It’s the same old survival
as enduring as the screen
indulging all your love of variety
and experiment
Why did we bother with the lies?
The holes?
II.
Despairing Cities! To make one long for disorder!
We have grown to love irregular sites
cultivate this delight
with The Three Magnets
Velveteen or bright painted flowersLittle bunches of fruit
Gabardine or sausage skin
Agitate our hearts
with the city skyscraper’s bedlam
An allover pattern
You will of course select your yellow slip covers
to contrast with your occasional chairs
Anything at all
if it is rare and receding
“The energy of the world is constant”
excessively forbidding the point
with respect to The Organic Earth and
16th version Earth
well-known to the oldest star-clerks
as a former parasite of the central machinery
for terraforming
Decreasingly swift like motions of birds
overcrowding little moons of Jupiter
as cozy as you please
Most of space looks empty
This emptiness is normal
III.
Without watching over time
no real change presents in the visual model
though rather small cells divide rapidly
into two personal histories
Atoms randomly vibrating
this age of the science park
of miners, editors, tree-fellers, and me
an Eichler Purist!
And the means?
We present the human
skeleton for mass consumption
To be in close
contact with good
traffic the eight-hour day
jazz and cinema
We must touch human beings
and their residential blocks
Serving to keep something from someone
A reduction of our purchasing power
In a New Town
St. Petersburg was a colossal Experiment!
Something close to sunshine
sufficed to topple the faces of millions
brazen and stimulating
taking the path of least resistance
Placeholders
Spacemakers
This developed machine-age life and luxury
I never adjusted to my “life sphere”
to reach pinnacle
Shallow-flooding of the technopolis
Clusters mid-drift rising above
new cravings and red lacquer table tops
You of course were the most obvious point of attack
No Civilization has directly related to
landscape as Real
The tramway has no right to exist
in the Anglo-American Garden City
so far above our hats
