Betty Draper flips off the warden and takes his pellet gun to shoot down a couple of gulls flying stupidly close to Alcatraz.
It’s like I have ESPN or something.
Frances Farmer, locked in the klink, had to get out from under the doctors, the lechers, the lawyers and all their prayers; she took a dime, called her mind, and told it what to think.
Woke up this morning to find a present from drunk Me to hangover Me
She’s Got Bieber Fever and it’s Fatal
I was crouched on a corner in the Rust Belt
broken suitcase at my feet, retching, thinking it midnight
when a cop informs me it’s noon. NOTIFICATION ALERT
CNN Mr. Wizard and the Wright Brothers concoct a dirty bomb
to drop on Libya. I’m thousands of miles away. Neither a warrior
nor a newspaper with my heart stuffed in a jub of crunchy peanut butter.
( scared of autos, teaching class with a flash drive and notebook,
packt in a cough on a school bus, wallet filled with insurance cards
and grocery permits, watching eyebrows for telegraphed mental jabs
and guts ) Winter’s coming with soot to make Ash-men in our front yards;
deeds in their pockets, a diploma in each mouth, shovels for arms,
and a penny on every eye. It isn’t so bad, the exchange rate: 3 gallons
of gas’ll net me a large pepperoni pizza and my car repaired for a million
songs and if I save up I can get a girl to come over and hold my dick
while I eat tacos. I hear cicadas trapped behind a stove, beating
against metal pipe and brick and the cop who ate his gun
to the whispers in the wall: Q-1-OH-Something with a publican groove,
“Down to Hades they go hanging with the ladies in shadows.”
cut of rock; The Golden Tickets with “Dumb Luck, You Dumb Fuck”
and its broken refrain: “Raining stones, raining bones,
I’m growing old and fat with grace. I laid my empires down
for a deckchair in this lost place.”
Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle because some men just want to watch the world burn.
Remember those stories your grandparents told you of shadows, foxes, and ghouls of the desert? If you’re not good, Rommel, himself, will come and get you and put treads on your face.
St. Rambo, patron of the sleepers upon the Burnside Bridge, writes a line, does a line, and brings them all the guns.
The Death of Luxor and the Many Images of Feetless Subjects
Dishrag politics squawking in front of a solar flare like smashing an overripe banana against a large, HDTV screen until all the Governor’s horses and all the Governor’s men pause their rebuttal just to hear tomato’ed head Newt hock a lugie again. He’s a family man, with strong morals—strong as in a pungent stench, as in a stiff drink in an unwashed shot glass, as in a safe held fast with rusty railroad spikes. Akhenaten would have put him first against the obelisk for supping at the tables of the dark gods, Greed and Avarice—Nefertiti got some pointers for Callista in not looking like an owl.
At the limits of the new solar city lie newspapers with news worse than what they were in the time of my father. Times New Roman ain’t all that new, Gotham for a burg who stews absurd in film noir handshakes and low camera angles that slink alongside the façade of skyscrapers to meet the hands streaming from an exploding sun.
Been down for so long it’s made my heart dumb like the peanut within an M&M, my mind like an old vacuum playing a song only geeks can hear.
MC Ackbar puts on his headphones and exclaims, “It’s a snare!”
Three years ago I left the Midwest for Portland, up hills and through deserts along the way, saw the fabled Corn Palace and did Wall Drugs, and on the trip talked of explorers and treasure seekers. Back in the Midwest am I that same person? I have time. There is a legend at the end of the map. “Here there be wagons.”
The hiss and pop of a crock pot Hip Hop setting fire to my esophagus. (on turning 33)
Tobacco-stanked Conquistadors skip along the surface like flat stones and underneath there are such pressure-induced dreams where, whether the burlesque of a dalliance with a lively actress within the Gates of Ivory or deep, portentous bloops from the half-remembered forms that stumble through the Gates of Horn, I toss and turn, still lost and burned, waking, trembling and shaking along the wifi stream borne on the back of some Gulf War vet that the economy forgot with his Buy Gold / Sell Gold sign, feverishly dancing to homespun politics to the tune of timeless tricks from every unslaked pundit with access to the redacted script employed by Metternich to preserve the Congress of Vienna from falling into Gehenna.
“A penny for Romney,
a silver jukebox in his tailored suit and tie.
Lay a flattened penny upon his eyes
so he can go back to Texas
in the rain, across the plains,
and let his Armani die.”
You and I, indistinct from a thousand of his useful spies leashed to telephone lines, sit down to say the secular grace of a snippet of gossip shared over expensive hamburgers on hand-assembled china plates, tapping another fountain of innocuous blather into the king-sized Gulps of our unlimited, grandfathered plans.
Is it simply human to advertise our disturbed humors on the internet in order for others to sympathize? Here is a small vial containing an imbalance of adrenaline to notify my heart within its bone outhouse “…and to take phones against a sea of troubles.”
Maybe it’s better to hide along the fringes of trivia like an angler fish with its blind teeth floating in the interminable darkness of a loading screen? Paste-ups ceded to Photoshop, InDesign replaced Quark Xpress, the letterpress doesn’t impress ‘cept those who announce their marriage with formal dress and live in the Midwest in the time it takes to make a toast.
We’ll think it heaven,
but it’ll be a billion years hence.
I dreamed I was a wolf who dreamed he was a man. A robot. A robot man.
Some people just want to lie there and watch the world turn.
