Robert Siek: How to Define Social Infrastructure
How to Define Social Infrastructure
The unpaved section of sidewalk avoided,
homeless facedown in big cities, the stillness of
a CPR dummy, feet unlike flat surroundings,
prison-yard old days, stone breakers’ workplace,
space once mined for gas pipes; a doorman here
dead of night, an employee of the Dream Hotel,
him and his pickax and dressed in a toga, ape shit
shouting, “Good morning! Good morning! Time for
redecorating!”—end of story: white and gray rocks
unfriendly to shoes, footsteps. The site of a woman
taking her chances, her sheer scarf white-flesh nude
and floral like look at my new Laura Ashley comforter
a touch screwed in a nostril, the rest a hanged ghost,
friend of Casper, and a man in a garbage-bag poncho
(no hood) ambles by all I’ve got bad knees, shaking
a frying pan overhead, yelling, “I’ll crack you
like an egg, motherfucker!”
Robert Siek is the author of the poetry collections Purpose and Devil Piss and We Go Seasonal. He lives in Brooklyn and works at a large publishing house in Manhattan.
