If Anyone Sees Your Anger
by Nadya Pittendrigh

 
Mostly it’s not helpful if anyone sees your anger,
but I have a hard time not raising my voice when people don’t understand my instructions. 
And, as it happens, the soundtrack to fascism involves escalating insect noise,
while a railroad boss directs multiple bodies to hammer at a single spike.

The work of connecting lines of transport to send products of the factory to distant cities, 
as if distance were non-existent,
to build a railroad to the contours, to build a trestle or a viaduct,
everyone must hammer the same spike.

So I took it hard when I spoke in the meeting and no one listened. 

Every day I’m tempted to conclude you have to intimidate people to be listened to.
But in fairness, 
sometimes I put an idea out there so tentatively
it’s like I myself would have needed to have been intimidated
to appreciate the importance of my thought.

Once upon a time there were two thoughts: 
A fat rat tips over a bowl of milk 
but doesn’t seem to mind that now he’s standing in a puddle;—
vs. a dog statue displaying, in rigid profile, a strict formality of face and limb, 
all pointing in one direction.

The morality of which is simply: You are not allowed to be angry, 
or you are only allowed to be angry.

Will we get the correct message from the sphynx-like dog, 
who squints his anger at the ticking clock? 
(His shadow is there to repeat the message of his body, 
but without the scowl, in case you’re intimidated by anger.)

Once upon a time, everyone on earth made a vegetable soup
to share with someone called brother,
under the eaves, after a long trip, on sick leave.
Because, once upon a time, brother didn’t mean sibling.

Once upon a time, a ship set sail 
in an attempt by everyone on board 
to return to some kind of shared memory 
of drumming blind in a rainstorm.

Once upon a time, the Industry and the Button made a pact with one another,
and that too was called industry. In the backyard of a joke, 
there’s always a chicken coup, and the whites of the eggs of those chickens 
are supposed to be nutrition for the chicken embryos, 
but there’s a lot more that goes on in a henhouse than laying eggs.

Once upon a time, living in a city meant inhabiting a living replica 
of a fold-out rendering in manuscript of every simultaneous physical angle of the kingdom at a glance, 
from the meandering sides of the fence around the palace 
to the fronts and sides of donkeys’ faces. 

The image was commissioned by an ardent defender of Faith, 
relating the story of revelers taken by surprise in the middle of the town square,
as one supporter of Faith, dressed in orange, took on the army of unbelievers, 
who immediately turned against one another in confusion.

The drama-filled story was a favorite of the Emperor, 
and took nearly one hundred artists fifteen years to complete.
Yet to me, the painting also commemorates the fact 
there were unbelievers who existed at all.

Once upon a time, living in a city meant inhabiting a living metaphor 
for the endless complexity of the world.
Inside a courtyard with a soft curtain moving in sunlight between porches, 
one is fortunate to find a nest on the jagged fence, near the alley, 
by the street, in the endlessly fancy city.

What is the fence there for? It’s to stop people from looking.
If it stops us at the busy surface, the extravagant wall made of sequins,
it guides the feet of a listening crow.

The crow follows a kid on a trike. 
The kid on the trike finds the people having lunch.
And at this rate, we’re all at risk of missing the unprompted assembly 
right now forming in the town square.

I say: Destroy the fireworks without exploding them. 
No more shooting. No more running up the steps.
I say: Destroy the philosopher king,
the shooting star of which produces the metallic dance team, 
running in a trance.

Behold the metal hat and white whiskers,
lit up under the approval of fireworks.

I don’t like the question of deserving.
How fortunate to have a steady income,
to be able to take care of your team, 
and to bring them lunch on the oil rig. 

I say destroy the oil rig.
When the red admiral butterfly cleans the windshield of its own face, 
it rectifies the oil. 
I don’t like oil.

I say: It’s all right to call for destruction, 
as long as you do it without anger,
and I don’t like the question of deserving.
I’ve talked about this elsewhere,
but now I have a new reason, 
because all discussion of deserving puts me in a position 
to have to suppress my anger.

But when they tell us 
not to put all our eggs in one basket,
they’re suggesting, without intending to, 
there’s a chicken in the yard who’s dead and deserves it, 
because, faced with a fox, 
it didn’t know instantly what to do.