John Popielaski
Let There Be Light
The new administration on the first day
opened the Department of Unnaming
in an old house on the outskirts of the capital.
The Secretary of Unnaming
was anonymous, rejected the entitlement,
and even had an underling
remove the numbers from the mailbox
and the letters from the road signs.
The ideology was that objectification
obviously had done more harm historically
than good, and fifty-nine percent
of citizens who showed up at the polls
agreed that naming everything
was so colonial, so narrowing,
so condescendingly reductive,
such an obsolete projection
of the sad need for control.
Why would anyone desire
to be pigeonholed as Ken or Mister?
Who would really choose to be
identified as Chef or Senator
or Architect to the Stars
when in each one of us is so much more?
The juniper did not consent
to being named the juniper, nor did the wren
say yes to being branded as the wren.
The logistics of enactment
and enforcement seemed impossible.
Right off the bat, the unnamed Secretary
signed the papers that erased the words
United, States, and of America
from all the maps and documents
because abstraction was the enemy.
Agents went to kindergartens,
genially disbursing dollar bills
to children who believed in promises
and promised not to say or think
those words again, and in this way
the Secretary’s thinking borrowed
from whoever said what life is
all about is planting trees
beneath whose layered shade
you won’t live long enough to laze.
The Secretary took up smoking
and prepared to set aside
their long-held personal morality
because the Secretary knew
that the inevitable Unnaming
of arteriosclerosis
and malignant neoplasm
would increase the tragic incidence
of what was still named Death,
but the Unnaming would get easier
and once it all was said and done
whoever still was living here
would have no words to thank whomever
brought them to their senses.
Other work by John Popielaski