I’ve decided that the perfect post-apocalyptic food is cereal
slathered in creamy, slow-motion milk,
rice and sugars and grains
-shit you can package up and store forever

we’ll just make billions of pounds of it now,
before the bombs go off,
we will revitalize Michigan’s economy through the armpit
of Battle Creek, and then wallah!
we’ll all be survivors living off of Captain Crunch and Fruity Pebbles
while we salvage the shithole we made of earth

There will be a milk problem
but we’ll just move the cows underground
and bludgeon them with our mighty super-evolution hammers
until they become milk pumps with hearts

blobs of flesh and bristly hair that we’ll grow in chambers
the size of top-loading washing machines,
dubiously alive yet not much more than a vegetable-
a vegetable that produces magnificent amounts of dairy and meat

maybe not T-bones or flank steaks,
but at least all the gooey hamburger our underground civilization could ever need

—

Let me just say this:
I am going home to Battle Creek Michigan
where the ghetto smells like frosted flakes,
because that cereal smell is money in the radiation-proof bank

And just outside of the city limits await the cows,
dumb, docile, slow, ponderous, and indecisive
waiting to devolve at our fingertips.

oh, the sad sad cows

I stand before you today
as a witness to both my dreams and yours

witnessing, as I slink
with a trail of slime and debt behind,
the methodical yet completely chaotic
reality of our very lives,
as well as the lives of others

witnessing that nobody
knows what the fuck they are doing,
even though they pretend to

this must be so confusing to dogs and toddlers
who, although living in relative ignorance,
must witness the act of humanity,
the ragdoll dance and clown face games-
they just hope to get through with a little love and attention
from their owners and parents and random human coo sirens,

but they cannot avoid that creeping anxiety
that we specialize in as a species,
that we specialize in transferring to our domesticated animals,
that we specialize in rubbing into our children like baby oil

I am here to witness dreams and nightmares
and the wreckage left behind like so many styrofoam Big Mac cartons

I am here to see colors
red for injection molded plastic firetrucks
white for pre-shredded and pre-seasoned mozzerella
and blue for my boxer briefs and the basketball god who endorses them

and hell
what is America if not Michael Jordan’s massive nutsack?
or Michael Jackson’s decaying glove?
or the red rage of Mel Gibson?

He screws on his hat until it clicks into place. His child’s head is loose and keeps sliding off the neck pole. He tries seven times to secure her head into place, but as soon as she starts toddling it wobbles for a bit then falls to the carpet and bounces away.

He sees a lot of things that there are no words for. He wonders if, in other languages, they have words for them.

The movement of his child’s plastic head as it sashays/bounces/spirals away, what do you call that? Sounseral. Sounseral! Her head sounserals away, into the dark closet.

Once her head is on for good he carries her onto the balcony, and they are speaking in a tongue he’s never heard. He has no idea what they are saying to each other. But they seem happy enough, lots of smiles.

They sound like two Swedish Chefs, one big and with a deep, comforting voice, the other small and possessing the squeals and honks of a large bird. “Bortste fornert de dort!” he says, bouncing her.

“Bortne! Bortne! Shushort!” she exclaims, shooting her hands over her wobbly head in pleasure, causing it to again pop off. This time, it’s a three story drop from a balcony.

Terrified, he yells “Sneeeeew nuuuu! Oh nee padoooo!”

Her head rolls into the deep grass. The grass is neon yellow, like shredded cheddar. Her detached head makes it’s way, rolling from stalk to stalk, chewing contentedly. He’s never seen her so happy. He hears a muffled “Booboonoo!” from the tall grass, and smiles as her headless body, which he is still holding, gives him two thumbs up.

He liked to imagine that his skin
was made of glass and never to be touched.
He left his subterranean apartment
only for cigarettes and microwavable meals.
He read and re-read a dogeared copy of Catch-22
until all of the pages fell out,
and from those yellowed pages he glued together
a magnificent and confusing mural
on the bathroom wall across from the toilet.
Every time he had a difficult bowel movement
he clutched his knees and screamed “Yossarian!”

He took showers with Windex and published papers
in academic journals about the absurd state
of his precious internal organs:

His liver was composed of cotton candy
his heart, coffee grounds
his lungs, a folded up Twister board
his stomach, a kerosene space heater
his bladder, an expired debit card
his spleen, a roll of faux-wood contact paper
his colon, a blue length of PVC pipe
his brain, a hopping set of wind-up teeth
his eyes, cherry jelly beans

Encased in glass he took inventory
and pushed away his terrible anxiety.

His last vacation was spent climbing the hunchbacked cherry tree
couched up against his apartment building.
He fell and shattered into 539 pieces
like a postmodern pinata.
The neighborhood dogs sniffed
until they discovered the jelly beans,
which they inevitably licked and passed up.

The Dough Boy scrambled across the table
giggling and squealing and knocking over wine glasses

I was the giant crashing onto the table behind him
armed with an ancient wooden roller
and an underused pair of salad tongs

I wanted to snatch him up with the tongs
and bash in his head with the roller
until the giggling was squashed forever

My wife didn’t believe me
she said she couldn’t see the Dough Boy
when he mocked my cooking in the kitchen
my paunch in the bathroom
my funny sex faces in the bedroom
and my ineptitude in the garden

When she came into the dining room
and found me flailing on the table once again
she decided it was time for divorce

“I didn’t know that the Dough Boy came with the package,”
she would later say to her chain-smoking sister

Instead of careening into
a mid-life crisis I found
myself thinned out and
spiraling through a neon
pharmacy sign. You all
wished me well and I never
looked back. There were
aliens hovering over the
apartment complex and
strange men taking photos
then running away before
I could catch them, but
somehow it was all ok, I had
my words and my patchwork
soul to remind me that in
the face of terror a happy
caged monkey resides, gnawing
on a silver banana and wishing
me well forever forth.

In this rain
slanted sideways
all people wash out the same

wet shadows

losing focus takes more effort
than keeping it
moving about the block
trying to forget such a trauma
in such a storm

a wildebeest escaping a pillow
dreaming a languid lion
patiently tracking behind bent dumpsters

head down hands in pockets
crashing away from bed
choosing the safety of neon slicked pavement
over cotton sheets twisted in anxiety

Blue mushroom smoke echoes
from Charles Bronson’s head

steadily pumping the doobie
he leans over the mezzanine rail

I approach him from behind
beer swinging from my fingers
fuzzy memories of his films
interposed with his exhaling real body
and giant head flickering on the big screen
swallowing us all

once beside him I remain silent
casually watching the movie
where Charles breaks ten bad guy necks
in an effortless zen exertion of dominance

I get a contact buzz as smoke billows
and fills my ears and eyes

Charles is a ganja smokestack
a ganja campfire
a ganja thurible straight from mass
a ganja forest fire out of control

he slowly turns to me and asks:
how did you get in here?
swallowing the roach and winking

I don’t even know where the hell I am
or why I’m on the balcony of some old theater
hanging out with a lit Charles Bronson

see, he says
a new joint magically appearing between his lips
the less control you exert
the more interesting it gets

he jumps over the railing and transforms into a barn owl
just before slamming into a plush red seat
between two enormously fat men
sucking soda through neon orange straws

another fucking dead owl
one of them says
every Bronson movie, no fail
says the other
belching and tossing the owl behind him into the darkness

Behind the soap company
rested a toad named Gunter Grass

he was a goddamned giant animal
the size of an angry tank

Gunter ruled the city
by suggesting new soap formulas

everybody on the block
smelled like fairy breath

or on his bad days
like horse ass sushi

one maroon day Gunter up and left
leaving us without olfactory direction

we discovered our own sweaty aromas
which smelt strange, like new cars

wandering around whiffing armpits
it became time to find a new totem

weary scouts returned with news:
Gunter was found in the black forest

mounting musk oxen with calm eyes
and smoking web digit-rolled cigarillos

the mayor said to leave him be
by all accounts he must be happy

time moved on without him
but Gunter remained a humid memory

the town built a statue in his image
endowed with the scent of Strawberry Shortcake

this world orbits dimensions unsure of themselves
and these tiny creatures inside me rule everything

eyebrows raise while eyeballs fly
to the tune of the fourth stooge, an indomitable spirit
whose spit makes rain on our heads

his purple smoke fills dreams like paper balloons
LISTEN-

the drive-through window is accepting hieroglyphs
and applications for unemployment in outer space
or sweet, sweet death for the happy scratch-off winners
with imploding mansions and cars melting into pudding

life has burrowed itself away in a discarded kiwi
LISTEN-

there is nothing there
and therefore no need for a proper search (engine)

peanuts have become fuel for our time machines
LISTEN-

the maestro is asking you to roll one up for him as well
and either you do or you don’t, it’s that simple