the endearing fascist is everywhere
o,O
the words are a smear of nice, a pretend of nice, a klieg light of nice that burns everything
that’s good and makes it nice, nice, nice
everything orderly
this is a map and these are the lines
and inside these lines we are nice
and I with disrumption have come
have come, and ev-e-ry niceness is glum, was glum.
Tripulations and farkakte derivations of bad things
are apiece with nice,
bakelite
worked
into
one of van Meegeren’s canvases
hanging in a steady machine tic of nice
nice
nice
(THIS IS A CULTURAL TREASURE)
but if you test it, it is not
so apt is my example
Nice is a mill that grinds little Black girls into powder
or tries, and fails to succeed in a vale of Death
just so she doesn’t forget what she’s up against
Nice is the good white girl with almost perfect teeth
who has Done Something Nice
in a perfectly recursive way,
at this point it hardly matters what ; those
people on the receiving end of nice
normally do not get
an opinion
Nice is the nun
educating Cree boys
into a nicer understanding
of their true place in the real world
It’s not for me to say which way is nicer
I already know and you don’t much care, being at the end of the poem
but as for me and the tirelessly nice and
clueless gallery of my colonial foremothers
whom I am pressed to carry now that I have grandchildren
I will choose the lands, and the people they chose
and stay out of your very nice heaven
