People Behaving Badly A Concern - Analysis

A civic complaint that keeps slipping into dream

The poem starts by sounding like a municipal report, then steadily reveals itself as something more unsettled: a mind trying to impose public order on experience while private feeling and surreal language keep breaking through. The opening catalog—Aggressive panhandling, public urination, verbal threats, public nudity, even violation of the open container law—is the language of ordinances, not confession. But it immediately turns metaphysical: for why / are we here. That jump is the poem’s central move. The “bad behavior” isn’t only out there on the street; it becomes a prompt for a deeper anxiety about why anyone is here even this long, and whether politeness or rules can contain that question.

Tone-wise, the voice is half scolding, half plaintive. I ask you / to be civil sounds like a public announcement, yet not interrupt night's business suggests the speaker is also begging for the right to let the night do what it does—be irrational, erotic, unruly, unconscious. The poem’s comedy (that bureaucratic list) is inseparable from a quiet dread (why are we here at all?).

It was fun getting used to you: intimacy as a counter-law

The second stanza swerves into the personal: It was fun getting used to you, addressed to a you who couldn't have been more nicer. The grammar is deliberately off—over-nice, too nice—which makes the compliment feel both sincere and slightly performative, like someone trying to keep the peace with sweetness. That tension matters: the speaker wants a human connection that can stand against the day’s ugliness, but the poem won’t let that connection settle into a stable romance narrative. Even This was as modern as it had ever been is slippery: “modern” could mean new, fashionable, “of the moment,” or simply the present as a condition we can’t escape.

Then the public world intrudes again in distorted media form: some dirty magazine / on the air tonight. A magazine shouldn’t be “on the air,” so the phrase feels like cultural noise—porn, news, and advertising blurred together. The parenthetical (Amid the chaos, reports of survivors.) heightens that blur: catastrophe coverage appears like a caption, as if the poem is flipping channels between salaciousness and disaster. The intimacy of you is real, but it can’t protect the speaker from the intrusive, absurd broadcast of the world.

Flowers, cats, and taffeta: the mind misfiles reality

The poem’s strangest music arrives with Didn't the flowers' restoration cat fugue, a phrase that sounds like several categories mashed together: botany (flowers), repair (restoration), animal (cat), and music (fugue). The question form—Didn't—pretends this is something we should remember clearly, but the syntax produces the opposite: it mimics how memory and perception “spill” and recombine when we are overwhelmed. The speaker adds, It wouldn't be the first time, as if this kind of cognitive spillover is habitual. In other words, the chaos isn’t only societal; it’s mental, linguistic, and emotional.

Even the social groups become costume-like: The pro-taffeta get up and laugh. “Pro-taffeta” reads like a political faction invented from a fabric; it suggests that in this world, positions are flimsy, stylish, or arbitrary. People don’t argue so much as get up and laugh, then investigate or communicate—verbs that sound official but are almost empty without an object. The poem keeps offering “public” actions without stable content, as if the procedures of civility remain while their meanings have drained away.

Night’s social economy: someone else always kisses

Midway through the third stanza, the poem becomes sharply social and faintly jealous: The night you were / going to stay up late, others will kiss. This feels like the speaker’s small, private grievance set against the earlier civic unrest. “Stay up late” implies a plan for intimacy, conversation, or selfhood after hours, but the poem punctures it with the indifferent fact that elsewhere, others are already kissing. The world doesn’t wait for your readiness.

Then a muddled triangle appears: he talks about you, and the speaker admits, I don't know what. This is an important kind of not-knowing: not the philosophical why are we here, but the everyday confusion of social life—what people say, what they mean, what you missed. The invitation Come in, anyway sounds hospitable, yet it also sounds like resignation, as if the speaker is telling the “you” (or telling themselves) to enter this messy social scene despite not understanding it.

tales of the Assertion: civility versus force

The phrase tales of the Assertion is one of the poem’s clearest clues about its inner argument. “Assertion” is what you do when persuasion fails, when you push rather than explain. Earlier, the speaker asked for civility and begged not to interrupt night's business; now the poem admits that the stories people carry are stories of force—of claiming space, attention, rights, bodies. That connects back to the opening misdemeanors and makes them feel less like random “bad behavior” and more like symptoms of a world in which everyone is asserting, and the line between survival and nuisance is contested.

So when the poem states, We're talking civilian unrest, it lands as both a news headline and an emotional diagnosis. “Civilian” echoes be civil: the poem plays civility against civilians, suggesting that “civil” order is always threatened from within the civilian mass, and maybe always was. The brief reply—Yes, well—has the tired, half-dismissive tone of someone trying to end a conversation that can’t be ended.

A final instruction that sounds like a warning to the reader

The ending—maybe you should take one followed by (Do not bite or chew.)—reads like the dispensing of a pill, a lozenge, a piece of bureaucratic help. It is funny because it’s so procedural, yet it’s also unsettling: whatever “one” is, it must be swallowed whole. The poem seems to say that the modern world offers remedies that are also controls: accept the dose, but don’t work it in your mouth, don’t test it, don’t interpret it too actively. That injunction clashes with the poem’s own behavior, which constantly bites and chews language into strange combinations—dirty magazine on the air, cat fugue, pro-taffeta.

The key tension, then, is between the desire for a manageable, “civil” reality and the poem’s insistence that reality arrives as interruption, distortion, and unasked-for intimacy. The speaker can list offenses and request order, but the night keeps its business, and the mind keeps spilling.

One sharp question the poem leaves open

If the world is full of assertions—legal, sexual, social, linguistic—what would real civility even look like here? The poem’s final parenthetical feels like an instruction manual for compliance, but the poem itself behaves badly in the best sense: it refuses to stay orderly long enough to become a simple civic “concern.”