The Toy Box of My Intentions
So many of them strewn about!
Intention is what the prisoner understands
as she hurtles through Manhattan
with her jailer—
and he too, leaning on his steering wheel,
separated from his dazed and reeling captive
by a wire mesh grill, knows
his way along the shining grid of streets
just as he knows
the grander moral map of his intentions.
2.
Did you say intention?
Intention that the wall of red-brown mud feels
as it rolls over a darkened Panabajan village,
or that a song knows
when it hears itself on television,
trying to die amidst the thousand tapping feet?
3.
O O O O everything
happens for a reason
Elah Sh'maya V'Arah
never gives us more nails than we can scarf down
at one
fairly elegant sitting
4.
Intention, you toy!
The boy-president plays with you
whenever, somewhere in the world,
a wedding party
is in sudden need of slaughtering;
and when the one-way holiday makers
light up their jet-fuel cigarettes
and sift down to earth in all their purity
intention smears them extravagantly
with the dust of Jews and women.
5.
Augh, so much lovely damned intention!
When the stars come out
loose hunks of the burning stuff
fall off the mental dirigible
as it dreamily plummets down
and all the while sticky
spider-threads and ribbons tie me
up in gaily festooned packages,
packages which intention
gallantly wrestles to the ground.
