The Plot

By Fred Pollack

They appear around my bed –
a mattress on the floor, beyond despair –
at an earlier point in my life. But when
I see them, I see the rest of my life,
including this poem, the giggly irrelevance
of postmodernism (which won’t attract me), and
the end. In squalid dark they generate
their own light, and their features
(including those of two heavily, futuristically
armed girls) are those of heroes. With added
enlightenment and kindness – imagine secularized
Piero della Francescas. Any 
intellectual worth anything would want 
to join them, and back then I’m in better shape,
and without attachments. Though still in shock
from seeing my own death, and Trump and the rest,
in the narrow clarity of shock I try
to say something. The friend one always seeks

warns me they’ve little time. “We’re here
to start the war against the Demiurge.
You know by now about the Demiurge. 
He has the best lawyers in the business –
Causality, Necessity, and Chance –
and the alibi of not existing. 
Your weaknesses and follies are his agents; 
your guilts serve him. Without us,
the best you can hope for your last emotional meal
is a blanket forgiveness no one will notice.
Will you fight, instead?” In my disgusting
bathroom I splash my face. My clothes 
are those of a guerrilla anyway.  
Beneath a high and clouded urban moon,
the girls take point. We march
diagonally through the walls and cars
of my slum, which soundlessly shatter. People
soliciting, mugging, and fleeing each other

are joined by hipsters from the neighborhood’s
later gentrified years. But they all
seem slowed, stunned by our passage; stilled.
“Are you doing that to them?” I ask. – “No, you are …
I said we needed you.” By now
(there were vacant lots in those days) we’ve stopped
in a vacant lot. From stenciled crates 
they’re taking parts of a weapon, which, they say,
should surprise the Demiurge. I’m out of breath
(not in good shape even then), and mutter,
“You want me to sacrifice myself –
hold them off. I guess being used by one’s own side
is the most one can expect.” “Not exactly,”
my friend says, and turns me around to see
my duty: faces improvising themselves
through time, some known and congenial, fleeting,
poor, some desperately sleeping.
Now what shall I do with you?

Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press), and two collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many other poems in print and online journals.