TOMATOES ARE NOT DEFIANT

“. . . the fruit—- defiantly red on the white plate-- . . . “

--Jacquelyn Malone, “Summer’s Last Tomatoes”

I was told long ago that our job was to reflect,
To represent; some have said we should shock,
Provoke that moment of awareness
That leads to inevitable change. But that ususally doesn't work out right.
We try to say bombs are bad and somehow end up saying abortion is good.
Which inevitably brings out the hoardes of people who want to say
One or the other of these thing are necessary, and, therefore, good.
I bought the argument that we were the ones freed from the salt-mines,
bringing back the revelation
that there were more things in the world besides the shadows on the wall. I got lied to.
I been bamboozled.

So I studied the greats, Shelly and Keats,
Roethke and Rilke,
Lowell and Ignatow,
Corso and Neruda, to see what they lied about and how.
I found out what I came to find out:
My favorites were the ones who lied less often and about smaller things.
My mistress' eyes were nothing like the sun.
Byron was the biggest liar of them all; Blake the worst.
Some lies served a higher cause.

We are propagandists, using our images and metaphors to cast
a certain vision of the world, endorsed by the elders, and,
perhaps, casting the world in our image, changing it
into the dirty little paradise we all crave.
No plastics, no discount stores, no donut shops just dirt and pain and paranoia.
That's better.

This world is the most exquisite corpse of them all;
no connective tissues, no ligaments, just bones and flesh
free formed and dissociative and predictable as the weather.
We inhabit it as ghosts in the eyes of others until we connect, and then
the world becomes the bright blue dream we know it ought to be.

Tomatoes are not defiant
The same way that light is not dark
And water is not dry.
(Although black lights and dry ice do exist.)
A defiant tomato might be, say
Lucille Ball or Barbara Stanwick in their earliest roles
Before they became acquiescent tomatoes
Or, depending on your point of view,
Sad tomatoes.
Although I don’t think they should be called tomatoes at all.
I have no quarrel with anthropomorphizing.
But I do have to draw the line somewhere.