JEFFREY ZABLE // Two Poems

Reaffirming Marx and Engels

Private property then is truly estranged labor
rooted in the antithesis of human development
in which the worker bends over and takes it in
his non-Socialist behind. And in this bestial form
of wage earning, the worker loses his identity and
falls prey to an unrestrained bourgeois who quantifies
private property and creates a state of labor that scientifically
erupts as a pain in the groin, as human history becomes
a political vagina asserting itself in an endless appropriation
of capitol whose dominion has Biblical roots in suffering,
self-denial, and fetishism fueled by a lust for endless production
and an exploitation of a human’s natural impulses.


The Final Curtain

It wasn’t easy to teach my pet fly 
to stand on her hind feet
and do the Can Can,
or back flips off the stage
with every performance.
What I never anticipated 
was that an evil spider
would be lurking in the shadows.
By the time I found her
she was six stiff legs,
an empty head, 
and two silver wings
pointing toward heaven.

---

Jeffrey Zable has been publishing poetry and prose in literary magazines and anthologies since the mid 70's. He's published five chapbooks including Zable's Fables with an introduction by the late great Beat poet Harold Norse. Present, or upcoming work in Toad Suck Review, Mas Tequila, Clarion Review, Yellow Fox Quarterly, Futures Trading, Sassafras, Clockwise Cat, Boston Literary Magazine, Epigraph, and others.