LaToya Marries An Impoverished Marxist, by Clara B. Jones

for Robert Wayne Williams

He tried to honor Gramsci’s prison notebooks.
But, ‘Toya required means. A comrade fighting
worldwide oppression married to a princess.
Thesbian Ché chortling for cameras, never
exposing flaws, never so beautiful as in
death, revealing tiny pimples—an otherwise
unworldly face. “Revolution” a meme, violent

insurrection modeled by Lenin, the oppressed
led by a nobleman defrocked, clothed by
tsunamis of Red Tides and by a red flag rough
as workers’ palms, labeled “amoral” by well-fed
republicans, stable hierarchies prevailing,
formed by guilds and nation-states avowing
private ownership. A husband whose theories might

have earned praise, competing with Jackson’s Lenin
Prize, but privileging private domains over service,
showing ingratitude to his Frankfurt School.
Habermas lies disappointed but in wait. It is neither
confirmed nor denied that the husband was once a
belligerent entity, acting on Marx’s behalf, armed
with munitions of scholarship, writing documents as

deputed as manifestos, not binding as signed treaties
but uncorrupted as Capital or Notebooks, extolling
revolution but not trained to shoot a gun. FARC
is the new Politburo, Cano the new Che, Chavez the
new Lincoln, Chavez the new Churchill, Chavez the
new Fanon, Mono Jojoy the new Sacha. Hermeneutics
of sustainable politics coerced by agrarian reformers

and anti-imperialists, avatars in entrepreneurial games
that Robert’s defection empowers. Don’t fall in love
with your work. ‘Toya might have said, Don’t fall
in love. Instead her husband succumbed to her ways,
a negress with genteel ambitions, philistine and
beautiful, whose petulance the husband made a
virtue. Still, he labors for a different social contract.

..

Clara B. Jones practices poetry in Silver Spring, MD (USA). She writes about identity, culture, & society and conducts research on experimental poetry, as well as, radical publishing. She is author of three chapbooks and one volume, and her poetry, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in various venues.