Heat Wave
James Norman
driving to work
with the window down
hot breath of an angry God
spewing in my face,
I feel condemned without even
being judged,
the heat is a ubiquitous, tangible evil.
the evil hangs
like a serpent coiled around every
square inch of my skin
as I pull up to work
to find half the street flagged off
by police tape
and a body on the ground,
one foot sticking out under the blanket.
record highs are an understandable
excuse for record violence,
says the guy with no AC in his van
but that can’t be it,
one cop sitting in the car enveloped
by the cool calm
lifeline of circulating air,
if it was murder, half the department
would be standing around loitering,
brandishing guns at the ghost
of a threat.
gotta be another dead homeless,
probably sat there for hours,
still sitting for hours
under a tarp
while the cop waits for a coroner.
nothing I can do
but walk into work.
in this country it is a crime to
be destitute,
punishable by public execution.
apathy is the weapon,
and the ‘only one cop’ proves it.
it took five cops to arrest Eric Garner
for selling loosies on a street corner.
five cops and a chokehold and it
still, even then, wasn’t enough cops
to call the paramedics as
he died on the pavement.
in this magical city dropped in the center of a desert,
they have convention centers that stay empty
while folks die of heat exhaustion,
they got suits that let a man exist in outer space
but not enough beds at the shelter.
what kind of world even needs shelters?
another nasty accounting trick to balance out
the scarcity of a functional real estate market…
would I be less self righteous if the
drive to work had air conditioning?
It’s too hot to live
too hot to lay down and die.
too hot to wipe the sweat off
it evaporates on the skin.
too hot for justice or to make
this poem make sense.
too hot to care about the dead
and especially when your air conditioner
doesn’t work.
I had a cop put his hands around my neck
once, outside a bar in the wild west,
where even the cops get shot at if they
can’t follow the rules.
a hundred and twenty degrees, the news
says,
and the country is on the verge of
blowing apart,
and madness is a sales pitch
for how to save you and yours.
would I get out of my car?
in a hundred twenty degrees?!
when it was already too late?!
all for the sake of a dead man’s dignity?
I stand at the bar asking questions
to kill time between pours,
until a young handsome
kid wearing sunglasses indoors
strolls up, friendly enough,
explains how he wants to write a book
about his life as a pickup artist,
asks me if I have any life advice—
Grace, I say.
what do you mean?
don’t wait for people to earn your forgiveness;
you’ll die a bitter man. and that goes double
when it’s time to forgive yourself…
I think about a cop outside a bar with his
hand around my neck.
I could see the fear in his partner’s eyes,
her hair pulled tight to sheen in a neat
ponytail as the moment became disheveled,
fear at moving so casually outside the law
in a such a wild place like
those last gasps of the wild west.
but that’s not what I’m remembering
it was the fear in his eyes
that snuck up on me.
I see it in the homeless all the time,
ignore it half the time,
look down,
look away,
did the cops see it in Garner’s eyes?
did they see it in each others?
was that before or after?
it depends on so many factors… like
civilization goes right out the window
at certain temperatures.
a boiling country hovering over the open
burner of content,
of media “content” or “info” -tainment—
it’s not content if a homeless man dies
in a heat wave, no one wants to see it,
and no one wants to hear about it so
it’s not news either,
but a young boy in sunglasses inside a bar
asks what the world has in store
for him, and I don’t want to break
the mirror contained in his question,
make the bad luck explicit,
just tell him that a fractured reflection
has as much to teach us as
any other perspective.
I read Andrew’s article about the homeless
struggling in the heat
right before I left for the shift,
folks he talks to every day,
since its his neighborhood,
I just work here now.
I think about him running in the early morning
with his beard and his smooth
Buddha eyes,
and I know he would have stopped.
would I, though?
as furious as the drive makes me
in a hundred twenty degrees
only to watch handsome boys
who know
nothing
spill enough confidence to water
acres of golf courses
but not a drop to spare
to wet the lips of a dying
Eric Gardner.
five cops.
could I take five cops?
could I reason with five cops
outside a bar in the wild west?
is that easier or harder than two?
two and I already had a hand around my
throat…
and we all had air conditioning that
night…
it’s so silly trying to calculate what a man’s
life is worth,
what it isn’t.
give me Andrew’s compassion
I pray to saccharine gods too perfect
to understand such human concerns
as how long the coroner takes to
make arrangements
for the body
on a sweltering day where
no one wants to do shit but lay down—
his foot stuck out from under the blanket
like a single loose cigarette.
there’s a haiku about
human nature
and the mountain it makes
of coincidence
and the snow that covers it
like a body bag
like the cold blanket of an
AC unit on full blast
during the heat wave
that keeps us all from going nuts
at once.
well, most of us…
