Reproachable Optimists
Page 2
Histopathologic Exposé of Brain Trauma
(Lightly Fried)
Me?
I
Worked from Thursday midnight
Through to Friday afternoon
Woke up in the spring time
With the flowers in bloom
Yourself?
Let me guess:
You’ve been bowling
With your painful piles for nine pins
Stomach doing vegetable somersaults
Live on the Sewage Network
And for commercial break
The world’s last housewife
Will sing/wail through tears:
Hey chicks and Charlies
How’s your old man
Still drinking bourbon on Gottingen Street
With that skunk leather jacket
And a farmer’s tan
The world moves indoors
And floods your toilet
While reading magazines
From the coffee table
And remarks loudly on your
Poor use of color and
How
Poverty is a flophouse rental
And its landlord is Stalin
And the fight between
Tenant and landlord
Shall continue unabated
Blah blah blah
Until we silence the spirit of poverty
Yada yada yada
In utero
But not to worry
For
This is what happens
When
The world and his missus
Get drunk on self-analysis
And reality TV
Broken Record
Got a lovely set of 78’ records here
You can shoot them off the fence
From the front porch
Pick a record
Pick a gun
There’s
Gene Autry and Slim Whitman and
Some Sousa Marches
Got a couple of shotguns
Dad left behind
When he got itchy feet
And
Headed south
Headed south
Headed south
One way
Shekhinah (Esse Quam Videri)
Hello rat,
Hello doc
Don’t be freaked out by the drained, blue dog
Body not quite attached to body
Trying to sleep on a hateful loveseat
Waiting for the dreams to slip under
Overdrive
Little external jabbing prompts
One eye to open and behold
God’s own light
Above the wings
Of cherubs
Perched above a floor TV console
Pathé record
Trills through a shofar horn
The bothersome, neat rat
Shall threaten the smooth beater
And allow the dog to dream
La Foi
When a woman moves a mountain
She drags it
Angles it
And hoists it with her knees
Then pushes it over an embankment
Until it falls into the water
The mountain top becomes an island
And the first step
Towards walking on water
Palilalia (Trim over Squeal)
In a simultaneous blindfold chess display
The world was now rejected by the people who reject it
Bastard’s muddle
Motive quarrels
Mama Earth has the Darmstadt blues
I think it takes three pills not to hear the mind cry
Child pipe your eye
Could have averted it all with one pill
Open ill
At the Balmoral Residence Club Hotel
I asked the wise man on the mountain top
What he thought about Taco trucks
His reply:
“Taco trucks
Might taste okay
But will never pass inspection”
Creeping Things and Fowls of the Air
At a block party for no one
We watch our city sink into an open wound
We watch ships do-se-do with cars and trees
And the earth whispers:
Rise
Perkin Rock
Kill and eat
Seed a cloud
And make it rain on me
Back shift manager
With the third horseman
On her forearm
Gives overtime
To her friends
And almost no time
To
“Oh!
Is that
You
?”
And the sky whispers:
Face of the day
I’ve heard your short cry
Piece of flesh and Earth dust
Too bad you and your three
Kids hunger
You’ll have Ramen noodles
And no
Meat
We watch our city sink into an open wound
We watch ships do-se-do with cars and trees
We are wicks of light snuffed by the same breath
Blight of self-interest has declared itself
And marked the day with night
Somnambulist
Drop the best thing you ever wrote
You are walking down a pathway only you can see
Drop the best thing
You see gravel where there’s oncoming cars
Drop the best thing you ever
In the city, bright lights replace beds of flowers
Wrote