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Poppy Thoughts at Twenty-Three

If you don't get out alive
you'd like to rise above cremation, turn on Captain Beefheart
and watch everyone seizure and spit at the floor
as a wild recollection of a life.
Unclear 23 dances like an invisible machine gun.
If you ever have marriage it will break up
because a man from Turkey found you over the Internet
and wants to see your boobs.
You're the kind of person who can't close
their windows properly. Is it true that you
attract the entire world to your virtual circle
but you can't keep community
together for at least six months? You're the kind
who is full of synthetics even when you deny
it until several shots of gin.
Snow is the retribution for your soul.
The only thing you own is your footprint on the metal slide
on Parkway playground in St. Joseph, Missouri 1999.
You'd rather chew your fingernails
off than learn the equation of existence.
Don't you want to take a 2x4 and rail
it against your skull? Don't you want a real meal?
Don't you want Papa John's garlic sauce
on your face? Maybe in this poem
you are the result of a star explosion. You're just dust
and you eat yourself. That's a real meal,
you've got the real meal. What is passive resistance?
Did someone tell you it is too unruly
to drink a bottle of wine and fling your body
against strangers' during shrieks, trumpets and drums?
When cremation comes a friend will dust a poppy
field with your ashes. A sudden gust will send
them to the City Landfill so half of you
will be in poppies and the other half rummaging
in garbage. Those winds always shove you somewhere
different, somewhere dirty. You want to get dirty.

Destination

captain beefheart

cibo matto

Cibo Matto is so bizarrely "poetic".

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Midwest meets Brooklyn

Brooklyn's fire escape rattles
the buildings metal spine rising six
stories. The city seems real
if you're in the illusion
that is New York.
We stare out into the city
and wait for life to change.
We're young. Soon, money
will mean little and all robots
can step out on manufactured
landscapes.

Night creepers crawl like crickets
around drunk headlights that waver
in the grid below.
Brooklyn's metal fire escape
is typical after whiskey
but the New York
of our minds lap at us
with the silence of an ambulance.
The big muddy ambiance
buries itself like a woven storm.
The whole city is as virtual
as we always conceived it.

I should be living next to a diamond ocean on Neptune but this particular bodily setup I have does not allow me the luxury.