by FT Marinetti

“And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black

 fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran

 before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.”

Pray, mantis,
monk, ascetic
leaf-eater.

Smash cricket
against floor-
boards.

Moth, fly into
this devil's
mouth.

Swallow
flies by the
cupful.

There's a hole in my heart and I'm
filling it with cork and maybe bubble
wrap.

Oppenheimer says that
he's death, the destroyer
of worlds.

I say I'm depression,
the destroyer of words.

But switch depression
for television and words
for critical thinking,

you get the one place
we don't want to be, the
one place we're already at.

The television when I turn it on
gloats that Life's Good.

Found mummified cockroach
in cardboard box.

Suburbanites of the Mojave, be warned-- your next
box office movie ticket might explode
all over the evening news like Charlie
Sheen's load, in a town exemplifying how
the West was finally won, not by the cowboys 
but by realtors.


And Vegas was also won by the realtors,
so are you if you play ball, and playing ball when
you're no good at it makes the game easier
for those that are, and playing ball wouldn't
be such a crime if only it was a real ball and not
some immigrant's head that found himself in
the wrong neighborhood in Phoenix.

The world needs more firebenders. And when
I say firebenders, I mean poetry that matters.

Can we make poetry matter?

Neurosis

The iguana firelight trembles
underneath the home turned
landfill, paper boxes stuffed
with dust, mothballs, spider
eggs, hot glue guns, a broken
sewing machine, plastic bins,
hair-dryers, old cell phone chargers,
dust, furniture, knick-knacks,
broken china, unbroken china,
books, books, another printer,
dust, pencils, computer monitors,
symptoms of an overproducing
society plus the nesting instinct,
where money buys misery,
not clean but filthy filthy misery, the
next best thing to happiness.

Waste land, internal clutter, banish
your neuroses--

or your neuroses will banish you.