Trying to move with breath (see: Charles) and stupid bric-a-brac (see: Kenneth) toward clarity (see: sand-dune Frank) and inflate (not with nothingness, but like tires don't run if they're not inflated) relevance (see: Allen).
Lordie, but what a paragraph of white men!
Now .. poem.
P.S. Please tell me especially about any technical inconsistencies in the poem. Oh ha ha ha. I'm serious about wanting to make sure the technical things are consistent, but yeah, ha ha ha. Read the poem.
P.P.S. If you post a comment saying 'i scrolled to the bottom // the poem is too long' then I will roll my eyes seventeen billion times.
Airplane Hangar Pancakes
okay: pancakes in an airplane hangar
and i worry about the men from oklahoma
with their cancer shoes and terminator reruns
like standing beside the motorhome two hours
just to watch me hook up the sewer line and
to tell me now you're shitting in cotton
and the old aunts! their millennium bunkers!
yeah those? with cheerios and applesauce?
evaporated milk and astronaut food? like after the
blackout a trucker will picnic with cockroaches
(out of work, both) saying well, them fucking
computers replaced prayer in the schools
and well, i worry about the mill towns
living off the photographs of old floods
stapled above the beaver heads in coffeeshops --—
i had a seven minute argument with my father
on how he said 'diners' were really 'coffeeshops'
and Starbucks didn't 'exist' and i got mad
then i thought of how i don't know a single
pop star from the 1850s and now i think
will litany shaped piffery save anything?
is salvation staring at the earwig in the tissue
before you step into the shower -- but okay:
pancakes in an airplane hangar, some years
later the tourist trap between humboldt
and southern oregon: back room with platoons
of old junk: kayaks, paul newman posters,
neon pool tables and pool table riffraff
of sambo dolls and styrofoam rc cars,
like stuff from the redemption of
a megagillion cereal tops or radio passwords
they drafted in longhand (radio!!!)
and the owner's blender was broken for
milkshakes so we had strawberry ice cream,
which tasted of strawberry ice cream --
then the yuppies, toddler, digicam and
since when did the word 'cute' come to mean
look at this thing that i own! and since when
did the word 'quaint' come to mean
how lovely that this smells like death
and we don't or has it always meant that?
please write to me: mike@noojournal.com
to tell me if 'quaint' got invented by assholes
and the owner's blender was broken for
milkshakes so i thought of airplane
hanger pancakes from box mix, like oh
when boxed food was new! and now i'm saying
organic, like, you grow it in the ground?
and they are saying look at these jiffy boxes!
and i am saying those fonts need bedpans!
and my hair, then wrists, then knees glop up
from their sludge of dead rocketships and
cantor oil for baseball gloves, which melts
and sighs like a showtune through a glass tuba
and then i say a thing like that and feel like
bugs bunny's in a green hospital slip
but don't make him 3D just do all you can
just write him a card and staple a lily to it
like in second grade the lunch lady had a disease
that cards wouldn't fix but the teacher said
do cards anyway and we didn't understand
'anyway' we just understood 'cards' we did cards
and to third grade we went and to fourth grade
we went she died and to fifth grade we went
and to sixth grade we went and to eigth grade
we went and to eleventh grade and some of
us had babies on meth and took to sundown cigarettes
and everyone died and i have no idea if god
propped a nice carnival up somewhere in space
if we'll build another shuttle and sprinkle it
with gongs and vodka and bluegrass and think
like star trek: oh what silly days were those of war!
or if hope falls out with every tooth -- i have no idea
if you and i will ever fall in love on mars
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