3. DAILY MIASMA WHIRL

While the Media spins & spends
ten minutes discussing sweat pants,
I scream out to you like a wounded buffalo
in an ill wind that blows no-good-nothings
while yesterday’s asthmatic laughter
slowly catches up to me.
       With the saintliest Gypsy-squint
I’m jerked around like a puppet.
       “Anticipation loosens the tongue”
someone said.
       The gossip I hear of these tornado
-tongue’d people empties my heart
at the choke-point, lulling the bull—
a hole in the chest still beating bad blood:
bats in the belly, snitching on the preppers,
primitive, anti-social syllable chunks,
the sap in the cream, figurines of spare
electrons. I overhear a girl (who
reminds me of Jean Harlow) say to
her friend that reminds me of No One,
       “I hate being complimented.
       Like, just don’t compliment me!”
which then prompts me to tell her that
she resembles Jean
as she squirms in her Daisy Dukes
as if she’d just been squirted with Raid.
       The cockroaches climbing up your walls
& shooting across your floors when the
lights come on—they work for the guv’ment!
I’m not your TV that shows up after every
       controversy.
       I shaved my head into a Mohawk today.
I have digital indigestion. My grandmother
has Cherokee blood running through her veins
& her nose speaks for itself.
       I’m a contemporary Nosferatu
walking along the corporate cliffs
of these mind-numbed ROBOTNIKS.
       Socrates wore the same coat no matter
the season. Where’s my coat-of-arms?
       If it were up to me, there’d be “adult camps”
for idiocy. Mosquitoes, ticks, fleas
wouldn’t suck blood; they’d suck out
placid arrogance from the marrow of mindlessness;
they’d give an inhale on the flesh & vacuum out
the life-giving fuel of the self-righteous,
the bully pulpits, the Prosperity Gospel
vultures, all the lip-service scoundrels.
       I’m a Lochness-head rising from your
drowning pool, the sewer-spewer, this
meltingpot, this windbagging airbus.
Telescopic lens remain a blur within a blur.
       I’ve been mentally raped by the Dictionary
this past year. I’m being far more honest in my
poems. Earlier as I drove down the highway
with a potion of tears in my nocturnal eyes,
a flashing highway sign came closer in view
that said: “GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR APPS”.
       Instead what I do is this, what I do is this:
       I listen to psychedelic jazz & look at my
lonely phone, that may as well be a monolith,
boundary-less, taking a breath with death
in a sea of Pluto-shivering glacier-skulls,
looking for the blinking indicator light
to give me a greeting without spam-spasms
highlighting the ideal idyll. I may as well
thump a hungry beast.
       What might take my place
in the unreal tomorrow
has no legs, is bloated, delirious
& is embedded in a friction of the future—
narrow papyrus fragments ripped
where my mind summons serene speech.
       I cannot contain my twitching chin,
my mouth full of junkyard-crushed metals.
       This Charlie Horse has given life
to my hypervigilance! Hand-breaded,
I let the crumbs fall where they may.