Take Me to Your Pharmacists (2000)
Make your madness end
and head back home to burn
a hippy peace flag. Make a massive
spectacle of yourself, put yourself beyond
reproach and camp
out in a ditch with moral
authority. Exploit designer
sandals and stub toes like Freeper
threatening goons. You are crazy
and want a new speechwriter to air
anti-war ads against Bush’s Red Square
ranch. Your pathetic interests
at heart are a fun lie. Go home.
Your fifteen minutes of fame will remain
insignificant compared to a grieving mother.
You are like a glass of water
seen through a TV screen. Cindy sighs
but what are you doing with your sleaze? You hate
and lie your ass off. I’m tired of seeing you.
Bury yourself.
This should numb the pain from reading Freeper writing...
Today's image is a peek into the Freeper soul. The poem was collaged from comments made about Cindy Sheehan on the Free Republic website. Selected comments were cut and pasted into a virtual cut-up machine. All values were set on random, and the text was cut up multiple times. The poem was arranged out of the resulting, reconstituted text. The outcome is a found poem recast into a new context that turns Freeper language inside out. I like to think of this process as either a purification rite or a wingnut detox step program. At any rate, from my perspective, the remarks now seem sensible rather than pharmaceutically addled.
2 comments:
Kneel
From room to room I go
Do not bend or I'll never get up
Do not kneel not even for grace
From room to room
Contemplating
What was I looking for
Some thread
Loosened from the fabric
Of the will
Picking at crumbs
Rubble in the rug
Too hard to vacuum
Too hard to stand and iron
Or bake a meatloaf in the oven
Or chocolate chip cookies
How to roam from room to room
How to shift
The weight foot to foot
On crutches how to balance
How to pay someone to clean the gutters
Or unscrew a light bulb
Without a ladder or a neighbor
How to read a chapter without falling asleep
Or forgetting what day of the week
What month it is and calling
In a panic
I came in here for a reason I forget
I might even forget myself
Without other people around
Conserving energy room to room
How to keep the tray of food
From spilling
A palette looking for a canvas
It takes too much out of me
I do it in stages
Knead the dough then take a nap
Slowly so as not to splatter the orange juice
Slowly so as not to upset the hornet's nest
Drift in the buzz of a roomfull of monologues
Identity rippling out from the lilly pond
Wishing to be becoming all the time
Never identified -- a stalk
Detox the body shuts down
There's no end to feeling cold
No longer hard to play deaf and blind
Every once in a while I catch myself
Talking to the dead they're such comfort
Now that they're dead
Who grew up with me moved away
And took all solace with them
Knowing me better than myself
No one in the room with me to say
I remember what you forgot
Honeysuckle in the spring
The smell of the harvest coming in
The upstairs bedroom window
Ruffling the drapes finally a breeze
To break the heat
Marrow mends the broken bones
Let's see where I am now
Whom not to call I'm making a list
Where I left that screwdriver
I'm making a list to conserve energy
Room to room what's to be done
In this room there's a bed to be made
No end to the war on dust
In this room there are books to be shelved
Shelves to be cleaned books to be read
In this room there are books to be written
In this room everything I owned
Has been miniaturized into a snail
Into a thimble on the hump of sand
And planted in a pot on the widowsill
To see what will grow continues to grow
Continues to surprise us all
It's for the surprises that I try at all
That I make an effort
Surprises so small so insonsequential
They make up for the pain they dazzle
Small bursts of wonder
Some helium some water balloons
Room to room attacking the dust
Emptying these corners of all memory
Becoming a being becoming a being
Very, very nice. Thanks so much for sharing your poem.
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