Emily Sieu Liebowitz

 Emily Sieu Liebowitz

Goodbye 12

How you are doing on a day to day
basis, once put up to the party for
debate, will leave to go where the jobs are.
Industrial spirit snatches you up
but underneath is simple haste & ballyhoo.

The telephone lived once on a switchboard
& strangers would choose with whom you would speak
after you laid bare your intention.
“I have found it, I have lost it, I have
slipped in the tub.”

Transposed on top of task, does one
then gallop out the window, settling down
with the first leisure class comfort they couldn’t
say no to? The surest thing to do vs.
forced together as a whole, prickly

to the content vs. prickly to the form.
When Pompey’s head was presented
to Caesar, history reports he turned his
face away, but more sensibly he wilt
not feel it long if he feelest it too much.

& I too have found even after death,
man is a hierarchy, to control
what I feel when the telephone rings, I face the
humdrum: not hot & bothered, but head on
without a match in the house.