Jessica
Members of the Revolutionary Working Party Know
that revolutions take time. More than one hundred
and thirty years later, they are still working
towards our American revolution. Not the one
with parrot colored coats, tea dark seas, and gunpowder
but the one where we define ourselves daily
as Americans. These revolutionary workers work hard,
cataloging all our choices, recording the half-turns
and quarter-turns we make together. They see
us growing in stop motion, exponentially expanding
into thousands of cities, towns, and streets. They know
what it really means. What they didn’t expect was the splinter
groups, the men and women who grew weary of change
at the molecular level. First came the Reconciliation
Working Party, shaking hands and signing wordy agreements
with each other. They couldn’t fathom a revolution
without compromise. Then came the Rule Working
Party, who wanted a tidy and orderly event. How can there be
change, they asked, without structure? How will we know
what we’re building and destroying? They were tolerable,
but those mole-eyed academics in the Research
Working Party, they ruined it all. Cloistered
in libraries and pontificating in hushed tones, they only
wanted to learn about revolutions and never engaged
in any. After that, the Revolutionary Working Party
was driven down the path of division.
each day, new splinter groups detached
from the main body, breaking away into ever smaller
caucuses. The Regional Working Party, divided
of course into regions. The Roads Working Party, falling
into ditches. The Rural Working Party, suspicious
of the Regular Working Party. The Refugee
Working Party, isolated and unknown. These days,
it’s impossible to find the true revolutions
among all the interlocking factions, the moments
when we turn to find a new part of ourselves
hidden beneath all of our rhetoric and work.
***
2 down, 28 to go.
Today’s prompt came courtesy of Therese Broderick. The instructions were to use the Acronym Attic to find an acronym for RWP other than Read Write Poem and to use that as a launching point into a poem.
When I reviewed all of the 31 options, I started to notice all of the conflicting “working parties.” The more I thought about it, the more I imagined an ideological fight among all the different working parties. I don’t think I’m trying to be particularly political in the above poem. Instead, I wanted to take the idea of ideological warring into an absurd explosion of differences. I think I may continue to work on it, but for now, it’s good enough for a first draft.
