Please Remain Seated

Dare to disturb the universe, you peach

Startle the smooth, soporific hum

Of an ordinary conversation

In order to complain about your place

If you wish to understand your ticket

In terms of class

If the plumbing is shot, and the wiring haphazard

If the security is questionable

Especially given the neighbors

If the communal facilities are derelict

Too disgusting to be as crowded as they are

If your ticket costs increase despite the decreasing quality of your trip

You will know you are reckoning with someone

Who has never known, or has enjoyed forgetting

The material conditions of spots like yours

When, with the kind of counterfeit dignity

That can be bought

And earnest seriousness

The question is posed:

"So, why don't you just move?"

What it is like to be you

Where you sit

At this unfortunate, implausible hour

Is opaque to the party who posed that question

With better seats

In the purgatory of business, or the fool's paradise

Of first class

You will know who is seated in the same section you are

Flying through the indifferent, speckled dark

For they will express visceral solidarity

And commiserate with you

Without guile or pretense

Or patronizing irony

They will swear almost inaudibly

When they learn of your woes

Sometimes in a language you do not know

But understand

They're beside you

They will nod and bump your fist

With conviction

As they tell you of their trials in turn

With winking whispers

For they understand that modest means

On a vessel divided by craven, nihilistic avarice

More and more managed by mere machines

Inhuman

Gradually induces

Paralysis

Belts stay on for most of this trip

They insist that it's safer that way

Such that, when that pompous twit from the expensive yonder

Who could very well be your inferior

In terms of character, or intellect, or artistic virtuosity

Who is probably less qualified and experienced, without the same, dear knowledge

For which long and diligent toil is the only price

This visitor from another realm

Is undoubtedly adept at impressing the attendants

With a taste for saccharine flattery

And sunny, synthetic enthusiasm

Spiced with obedience

Who are amenable to emoluments

And like a fresh, stylish fit

Who know how to pretend

To misunderstand a bribe

When this owner of the classier ticket

Asks, thinking him or her or themselves to be a bubbling font of empathy:

"So, why don't you just move?"

You will know that your seats are worlds apart

The sphere of your liberty is smaller than your interlocutor's

You cannot move

Ends miss a meeting now and then, though not always, as things are

Where you sit

You could not summon the resources required

To edit the list of your grievances

In more luxurious digs

Without selling yourself

In some form or fashion

Just to survive

You will incur

More debts

That it will be difficult

Or impossible

To pay

It takes a melancholy, Danish heart

That mistakes hawks for handsaws

Weather permitting

To be bounded in a nutshell

And count oneself a ruler of infinite space

How tiring it is for the imagination

Convincing oneself from boarding pass to baggage carousel

That things could be worse

When they obviously ought to be better

You can't move

Do you understand what that means?

Should that be true for anyone

Who has worked like mad

And stoically suffered much

Just to be asked

"So, why don't you just move?"

You cannot move

This body, this seat on this worsening flight

Wherever it is going

This miserable, mutually mangling marriage

This farce that insists upon being read as epic poetry

And claims to deserve the name

Politics

As it turns reality

Into bad television

This albatross whose alias

Is faith

This endless, boring lecture

This memo massacred, ugly parody of work

This unhappy meeting

Without the courtesy to end

This blood-glutted, undead war

This sullied flesh, subject to ills

That only physicians and undertakers

Are on a first name basis with

Is home

For those of us

Who cannot move

It could be better

In fact, it ought to be

Remember Mahfouz: “Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

Don't block the exits

With your smug comfort

Some of us

Are studying to become escape artists

As we go blind

Before your very eyes