A Heapin' Helpin' of Milk-Sop Angst

So I wrote a poem the other day.

I don't normally do this -- reserved as it often is for wieners and downy-soft proto-"Sarterian" jabber-mouths. I'm a proto-Nietzschean wiener, so pages of bombastic vitriol are normally my bread and butter.

However, I was feeling very Sarterian and wienery at once (bad combo) and this is what came up. To offer a summary, it is about how obnoxious everyone is, and how futile it is to do anything of substance in the world -- shackled as we are by the incredibly asinine and self-indulgent nature of our generation (18-35 years of age). Bah.

You'll be glad to know, however, that I am acutely aware of the irony implicit in my producing this "piece." In so doing, I have made myself an asinine and self-indulgent person. With this I am fine. But owing to an oft-times schizophrenic nature, the present-me is going to make fun of the past-me as if the past-me is someone else.

In essence, lacking a specific target, I have chosen myself -- and I don't feel bad about it. Call it exorcism, call it whatever you like. I am making fun of myself as a proxy for all of you proto-Sarterian wieners in the world.

Humbug!

Here it is:

***********

I woke up wrapped in the stars and stripes,
Unable to move.
I lay in the alley next to a liquor store.

The Battling Bastards of Bastogne
Prowled the angry streets,
Smiling “"Nuts",”
Black and white.

The old men, toothless, skin stretched tight on heads like light bulbs,
Nodded.
And wept.
And wrung their hands,
On chairs on porches at houses on oak and spruce lined streets.

A monkey on the T.V. in the shop across the street
Winked and smiled.

“Victory to the swineherds!”
Four-score ten-ton tin soldiers
In the dust of hot, silvery Babylon screamed,
With pricks hard and in hand,
Sounds of metal made music rang in ears
That knew man'’s birthing cries.

I woke up next to Columbia, coughing.
She rolled a cigarette and sat on the corner of the bed,
I touched her shoulder but she crumbled into flakes of green copper.
She dropped her book,
And I picked it up and I tried to read,
But the pages wouldn'’t turn.

The children down the block drank and leered through smoke in bars.
And copulated on pool tables and stools,
Smiling red-eyed at bracketed televisions,
Which hung like spiders in cob-webbed corners.

The Barons of Austin and Alabama and Arkansas twisted off the ends of Socialist cigars,
With their teeth,
Big as the blocks of marble that hold up Lincoln’'s seat.

Where he sits,
Alone in the red swamp dusk,
Half-concealed, tearless and bloodless in pale urine light.

They sharpened their knives on Lincoln'’s stony shoe,
And cast yellow jaundiced eyes on corn fields, and forests, and rivers.

Skull-headed pin-stripe soldiers screwed on their pants and bolted down their jackets.
Listening.
Ear to the ground for something to put on their salads,
Green and wrinkled with presidents’ like croutons.
They ate and disgorged on their children in vomitoriums of steel and ivory.

I woke up in a college,
On a blanket of nitrogen-bloated bluegrass.
In a desert,
Of wrinkled Mexicans and dusty water.

I drank beer with lilies and wandered, aroused, in sugar beet pungent air,
As cows farted,
And the pages of Nietzsche and Plato and Marx and the Holy Bible flipped idly under the gaze
Of MTV and Britney’'s tits.

Whole continents swallowed mercilessly in pupils wide and soulful as brackish wells.

In the toilet,
Eight-hundred children saw their faces for the first time.
Lingering in good time ripples.

I woke up at Lenin’'s tomb in a picturebook,
With spent shell casings underfoot.
I woke up in tangled brambles of scrubby Greek underbrush,
With spear points and still more shell casings.
I woke up in an English bog,
Where Anglo-Saxon Man crawled up from under the corpses of Druid priests and
legionnaires.
I woke up in Italy.
In a train station.
Talking nonsense to a French Jew, who played violin in Croatia.

I squinted toward Africa,
Where once mountainous kings stood staring back in robes of gold,
But where now they die with the ceremony of insects.

I pitched and rolled on the Mediterranean Sea.
That iron-bottomed tabletop of empires and fools,
Reading about Malcolm X and Cuckoos'’ Nests.

And I asked,
Where are the uncles?
Did they disappear? My fathers'’ brothers?
Are they in jungles? Helping rice grow fat and white?
Do they still wander in primordial green sludge?
Hollow-eyed into the abyss?

And it was the buzzing that woke me up.

Propellers on iron-clad rain.
Ten million cellphones.
Twenty million radios.
Forty million televisions.
Eighty million cars.

One-point-six billion cows lowing and farting and eating and dying,
Cast out to the trucks for a blind odyssey into the unknown,
Where no Sinclair waited,
Where no Reed waited,
Where no one waited.

In the bars they drank from the Doctor’'s veins and spilled their seed,
To rest with popcorn kernels and cigarette butts,
And to seep into the earth and give birth, one day, to vast rivers of black blood,
For steel mosquitoes to probe and collect,
For more tin soldiers and more cellphones and more televisions and radios and cars
To feed the cows.

I woke up in the mist and smelled their feces.
And saw their tracks.
I started to follow, but turned back,
And wished I were still asleep.

***********

Yes sir. Sarterian and wienery. Booh-rah. So you sissy-assed past-me, take that. You are a fool.