Dear Dirty America

ERIC CHAET

In classical music
there are the sweetest, most touching, little melodies
& harmonies so profound
they pull me down beneath my busy surface
for I don’t know how long
& surprising, stunning rhythmic
& instrumental juxtapositions
that break routines in which I become bogged down
sometimes, alas, for decades—
but all of these are damn near negligible
under the avalanche of pretension & imitation
generation after generation of noisy posing—
that’s so, too, it seems to me
in all the arts, & politics, too
& engineering, manufacturing, commerce
& damn near everything humans ever do or say—
I seem to be a judgmental sort of person
& there’s danger—
people judge judges, & why not?
sometimes—rarely—
judges manage to introduce justice
among corrupt, lost, oppressive, suffering humanity
but all too often
we’re just acting out our “Your Honor” roles—
& part of the very mess we’re charged with sorting out.

Eric Chaet, The Turnaround Artist, born Chicago, USA, 1945, raised on rough South Side, pre-computer factory, office, & warehouse jobs. Some teaching, some independent self-taught technical consulting. 1974, Old Buzzard of No-Man’s Land, poems, Toronto, Canada. 1977, Solid and Sound, vinyl LP of songs, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, USA.  Mid-80s to mid-90s, silkscreened, hitchhiked, & stapled 1500 cloth posters to utility poles along American highways.  1990, How To Change the World Forever For Better, brief prose philosophy, Greenleaf, Wisconsin, USA; 2nd edition, 1994.  2001, People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways, mostly narrative prose, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA.  Lives in Wisconsin, industrialized dairy farms & cows, remnant cheese & paper factories & factory hands & outlaw mammals & birds, post-construction boom, reactionary politics & obsolete machinery, a smattering of professionals & millionaires.  Poems published, over 50 years in many USA states, plus Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Nepal, India, China, Singapore, Korea, & Taiwan, often in translation. 

You can contact him at the Leave a Reply box on each page of his website, 100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems, <http://www.ericchaet.wordpress.com>.

Find Chaet’s book, People I Met Hitchhiking USA Highways, and read a review written here. See also, There’s still a little breath in the old American Revolution, On Job Creation, and Stalin.

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