Better Than Starbucks!

1

 

Lamp my lamp,

bright streetlight burning

brighter than myself!

Come here, lamp.

Talk to me.

 

My walking-ground was in the field of stars

with these plain human feet, because the stars

surround our planet with no up or down.

 

Now a three-year-old girl tells me

in a woman’s voice: Come here!

To tuck her in at nap-time.

 

     Looking at a street light by my mother’s home

     the night before I lost my job again

     over another disagreement about how to raise the

               children.

 

4

 

I too can lead a tall song by the throat.

If manhood’s proof is always to be in the money

my heavy silence will not earn the name of man.

But if you look back on yourselves, how you began,

your hardships were all paid for by the state. So

 

three peasants walking in a field without a gun

watch a great duck fly by and when they hear

the gunshot each man thinks his poverty his own. You,

 

you good people, Red Guards in your childhood

of your Great Cultural Revolution, now you say

the poor are poor because of being lazy.

 

     After hearing from my young wife who brought me to

               China

     that her parents want proof of my manhood by my

               showing them the money,

     thought shows me where their own starting capital had

               come from.

 

 

Ilya Gutner was born in the Soviet Union in Moscow and grew up in New York. He was for a time a PhD student in Slavic Studies at Brown University, but that soon ceased to be an option. He studies philosophy now in Shanghai, China.