Way More West
Page 17
Be observant, but don’t overreact.
In most cases you will be ignored
Or worse, charged. If you have bad feelings
About anyone around you, leave immediately
But not with alarm—don’t look back
Let your witness do that.
Especially be wary of “friendly locals,”
the original terrorists. Look around,
Evaluate. Who is weak, who, in biting,
Has swallowed the bullet?
Nervous wrecks should definitely be avoided.
Finally, avoid heated discussions.
Don’t panic. Be cooperative.
Never make gratuitous sudden movements.
Eschew stickers like “Up the Army” or
“I Love New York.” Hit the Deck. Leave Quickly.
Above all, don’t be proud—
In the event of fire you may have
To crawl through heavy smoke.
5 August ’88
Boulder County Primate
Progress: slow but inexorable
He set out to buy the American Dream.
First, he went to a yard sale
and bought himself a yard.
Then, he went to a garage sale
and bought a garage.
Next, he went to a porch sale
and bought a big porch.
Now all he needed was a swing
and a house and a car.
In the smoke of
the “Western” media glee
over the spilt blood
laced with a little apprehension
for reduced
business. 7 June, 1989
Free Market Chinoiserie
There will never be enough BMWs
for the stated Billion, there will never
even be enough paper towel
or gas barbecues or ever enough ribs
or sauce for those short ribs. There will never
be enough coupons to clip or scissors
to clip them with—and there will never be
enough accountants to count it all
or paper to keep the accounts on
or discs to store the accounts
for which there will never be entries enough.
Someone should tell them.
31 December, 1989
Kill’em & Bill’em
The End
Did you know that
when they execute you in China
they send your next of kin
a bill for 1 Yang (28¢)
to cover the cost of the bullet?
This is the very definition
of frugal management.
Maybe Bush can learn something
from Deng after all, maybe
there’s a pow-wow under the kow-tow.
It’s a good thing Reagan
didn’t know about this practise.
He’d have considered it tax relief.
FROM WESTWARD HAUT
El Peru/Cheyenne Milkplane
PROLÄG
Th’ acetylene sun hung over the Ocean of Oceans
Flooding the quick afternoon of El Peru,
Casting the World shade on the gasaer jungle of Amazonas
Putting to bed the gene meat of the protein chains
Fueling the epidemia of cheap labor,
Cooking the slummy stews of cholera, cooling
The constrictors with its withdraw’, slowly deepening
The tone of the washed out neon, mocking
The fitful tungsten strung along in the shadows where
The Luminosa don their Chinese hardware.
Across the tierra helada the temperature
Plummets and cracks, beyond the altiplano
And the Eastern Cordillera and the Plains
The stranglers take another hitch, and the Lianas
One last jack and hoist as they reach for the fleeing light.
Everything trends toward gigantism, giant spiders
[Theraphosidæ] “the bird eaters,”
Roam the forest gloom, centipedes a metre long
Who feed on native children drop from the canopy
Onto the sanguinolent commerce of the jungle floor.
Dynastes beatles the size of a fist, Water Boa
With the girths of court eunuchs haunt the galleries.
Butterflies, like the spectacular blue morphos
With a span of 50 centimetres, whose flash
Can be seen from more than a kilometre away
Send errant heliographs in the twilight shade
While within it swim fishes too terrible to class.
The Nazca Plate subducts this neozoic mess
Scorching the continental basement with frictional stress
As out of this tectonic scene magmatic froth
Erupts with showers of ’candescent trash
And the expulsion mixing with an assault of basalt
Spoils the thin wake of the El Peru/Cheyenne flight,
And the passengers crowd the windows of our craft
To ponder and growl and hail this mighty sight.
ABOARD THE TAN AM WITH ODIN, A DOG OF JUDGEMENT
ODIN is a dog of wealth and fortuna
in a world where “its a dog’s life”
is as often a human fate as not.
He was heir to seventeen million held in trust
through an uncontested settlement from his owner,
a kindly and traditional old villager
who still drove her great grandma’s electric car
to market.
Odin always felt embarrassment mixed
with the pride natural to dogs when they ride
whenever she took him out in the antique machine,
with her blacklace glove on the tiller—
for she was a sweetie and he was a killer.
And lo, during the heyday of the Gipper
the Seventeen Great Units had increased
with the criminal returns of the times
and left him loose, with the means to keep
his noes in the air for the slightest shift
in the millieu any new tunes from the venue.
It was pleasing him now to be on the Cheyenne flight
to the rendezvous, he certainly reckoned,
with Yo Ochenta, Over the Road Pal & Paladin,
Phaëthon of the Haul,
known to most as simply ¡Joe!
It pleased him not so well,
we know that from a slight twitch of his docked tail,
to be reading a film review by Pauline Kael
in the New Yorker, a somewhat predictable slick
he saw from time to time in el Peru,
But when he came across her assertion
“a bit of gonzo demagoguery that made me
feel cheap for laughing,” Odin looked out the porthole
at the Ocean of all Oceans and El Niño
brewing some turbulence for the future,
grand houses launched on the Malamud,
an assembly of images awash in avarice.
He retracted his tongue
and breathed quickly through his back lips
to dispel the Evil.
He knew some Big Dogs along that coast.
Some had Human drivers; usually Irish—
Philipino grooms and oficianadas
to sexus canus, who moaned, and cried out in public
and who paid for every thing they wanted
in gold and dismissed their critics with “¡Here!
a Thousand Rubles—¡Go Home!” thrown
with desdän into the street—a tango of contempt.
He opens his mouth and his tongue
lays out, a little off the side of his mouth—
the pressure and dehydration intense in the cabin,
the tortured meso-american spine curved below,
the smoke of fresh volcanos smouldering
from the rupturing subduction
of the plate.
Dogs were not meant to fly, he muttered,
picking out the updated homonids from the Dogs . . . .
If this was in the hairy days—five hundred thou B.C.,
their bags would be cooler than they are. I am
very happy not to be sharing their bloodtype.
Our race has known them
since they could walk on the ground
—and carry a stick, ¡¡what magic!,
what impromptu rule, what easy acquiescence
to a minor threat, the invention of attention
the future police wand, the First Rule . . .
Aye, in those times they roasted us on that stick
when their inflated ambitions
made them sacrifice the entourage,
the pack of dogs and the family of slaves.
From carrion for scavengers
to scavengers proper
—it comes from hanging one’s tongue out
but it takes more patience than magots.
How they lost that hair no dog knows.
But there are races that haven’t entirely—
His attention reverts
to the review under scrutiny:
this #’s from the Time/Rom—pre
Fujimori—what an airbus! he muttered.
El Niño deploys grenages, updating the system . . .
... He recoiled his tongue and swallowed
Having once toured the autotowns
he knew Mr. Moore’s documovie from Saginaw
electric bus, lunchbucketopolis
one false move and you join the depression.
Grim, raw Michigan-town reality—a strictly
business-empire approach to class—let’um freeze
don’t throw’em a blanket, they didn’t pay the rent.
Da! Haul’em off¡!
Pauline Kael should be exiled to Flint
for that remark, he curred in a velvety undertone,
or have a homeobox patch applied to her mouth.
Did I hear you say A Homeo Box
patch¿
An ivory white female Saluki,
legs long and fine, well muscled thighs,
bred for blistering turns of speed
looked up across the aisle—What box is that?
shaken the long silky—feathered hair
close hanging down her pertinent face.
Odin smiled and tipped his impressive head.
and looked across the Pacific,
his tongue in midMouth—
That is one soignée Gazelle Hound, he mused . . .
that platinum mink stole is not from the tropiks . . .
I said “I should have filed
instead of clawed”—Simply a mental note,
delivered aloud, in the style of my late mistress
a diary of her reflections for my improvement
That’s a human trait the world over,
the desert beauty agreed, but rare in dogs she thought,
flashing her hazel oval eyes—
would you like to curl up over here? she suggested
sweeping her long silky tail around her skimpy skirt.
Odin studied the breed:
Saluki from Saluq, an antient town
of Arabia . . . way back North African & Asiatic line
tall slender swift-footed keen-eyed hunters
having long narrow skull long silky ears straight forelegs
strong widely set hind legs, a long well-feathered tail
and a smooth silky coat ranging over white to cream
black or black & tan, Umm—this one’s pure cream.
So Slughi, you wanta buckle down or not.
What I’d like to do I’m apt to put off—and that’s
good advice for die whole Welt.
Besides, I like the prospect from here,
and the space through which we converse be fixed,
so unless we crash, we’ll never part
until we reach that sticksy Wyo aerodrome
which for now doth be our common destiny
Whereupon he sailed a card over the bobbing head
of a slobbering Biped child staggering in the aisle—
CAVE CANEM
picket fence perpetual security
“We only bite what’s wrong”
Specialties in Internecine War
Valkyries for rent
O.Odin, Prop—J’ai Beacoup du
Chien
Crosslink 4-15-7-8-9-10
The percipient hound caught the card
in her feathered paw, and scanning the text
asked the winner of the Iron Cross
What more happened in Peru
under Llosa and Fujimori?
Well, the Working Dog began,
checking his Bulova Automatic,
sticking his tongue out and yawning:
The Pizarro brothers landed—kicked a little butt,
toppled some Idols, melted down some effigy &,
outlawed the chewing of leaf, brought it back again
promptly when production dropped, Hey!
cut off some head, requisitioned some treaz—
Stop That! la chienne deli softly curred, I mean
die Explosion before you enplaned &
the nature of your ‘enterprise’ in Lima—
if we can call it that, and why is a fine,
“High Tona” dog such as yourself
travelling on the suborbital?
I’m talking about the ruckus in Caracas, about
the commotion in Cali, was that your entourage
or what? Were you accompanied or chased?
A little of both—in my business
it amounts to the same thing.
But to reply to your question:
I operated an academy in Lima
until Very Very recently (he glanced
at his Bulova)
and actually my school is wherever I happen to be
instructen die Businessmen to think like terrorists—
it comes totally natural to them.
That’s not surprising, given their inherent proclivities.
Business is a form of terror—you leave the victim,
the customer, even the mere low-end shopper wasted,
drained of cash and will and shackled to the future—
wage-slaves of les Rentiers.
The difference is you don’t kill’em,
you just pillage the village—
it’s a licensed operation. When all has been stripped
but the desire to go on, then you finance their revival
at rates collectable only by goons wearing hats
and driving automobiles with whitewall tires
in crude and ostentatious former times
but now enforced with a few ugly stabs at the keyboard.
It’s called “Das Neubizznes.” It runs on Cheap Labor
and this time it’s gonna stick.
Oh cher, how chilling, shivered the sensitive Saluki—
How do you do it?
There are two approaches to private security.
The Givem the Keys to the Benzi and Hope for the Best School,
also known as Throw Money at Its Feet and Hope It Stumbles.
(ie, playing on Biped susceptibilities, you understand) . . . .
A patch of rough air brought on the seat-belt sign,
and the artificial Tan Am voice
pointing out the eternally obvious.
Miss Saluki fusses with the hardware—Je deteste
zees abominable biped arrangements!—and clicks it shut
across the long curvature of her flank.
Odin gazes out the window at a Banana Republic
brightly lit by the tropical sun with some volcanoes
scattered about, poking thru the mist, and mutters
No, we Do have some bananas. Und das’s das Problem.
. . . . And the other schoo
l is My School,
real paleomodern,
hard edged defense, with a lota plate implied.
Violence werks, that’s why your enemies use it liberally.
Sendero (to take the immediately receding hegemoniacs)
comes on with at least a bundle of dynamite, Minimum—
they’re Very post-korrekt.
I school my clients in throwing it back
and before it hits they’ve got das Werthers outa their belt.
When the homocorps
walk out of my sandbagged academy
they’ve danced around
and jumped over live ammo, they’ve spun a car
and hit the ground:
when they leave home thenceforth they’ll be packing
die Kanone, loaded & loose.
It’s the New Bizz, and It is Booming—
Terrorism is Business & Business is terror:
A mercury switch could tilt even now in the hold
where our undelivered cagéd bretheren are shivering
and whimpering in their K-Mart Porta-Pets
and we know those Kennel Ration Barkomaniacs
in transit from one Retroapartment to another
are right now howling their mindless brains out:
or an engine could separate from the wing—bye bye
mama I’m off to yokahama—criminal mechanic,
neglecting to run the fatigue check, criminal executive,
ordering a speedup. Look Out Sioux City,
Look out Keokuk! Some got license, some don’t.
Have a nice day, or Carpe Diem as the latin dogs say.
One of my clients, indeed one of my Products,
is the redoubtable (Very doubtable I should say)
Stanley South—practically started a gusano farm of his own,
used to take an airforce jet down to the Isthmus
around tee-time just to load up with Pineapple.
He was strickly into rough terrain
but nobody could lay a finger on ’im—then
Bingo! he founded Cocaland,