November 8, 2016 admin

The Hole Story

Dan Raphael

The Hole Story
by Dan Raphael

”Every now and then I know it’s kinda hard to tell
but I’m still alive and well” — Johnny Winter (for Mark Sargent)

So much treasure in my intestine I knew someone would eventually come looking for it

When the mountains shadow spreads like a happy vulture, when the hospital hallway

is as long as the grand canyon and I know better than to look up, to try and find the water

i hear passing nearby like an interstate of mumbling baleen.

Your health is your wealth, your illness is international business’s pocket lint,

your death could be someone else’s college degree or vacation home—

cash it in, plow it back, ignore the smell & the flies in expensive suits

Holding onto holding onto: not sure what comes next and i have nothing else

to grasp when the floor opens, when my walls are carried away and i have to pay the freight.

All those empty apartments in central china calling to the disenfranchised, the dead,

those who don’t know what real chow mein tastes like, how chickens in beijing

are all dark meat because of the air, the coal, the history:

our ancestors could afford to be sloppy with fire

but were miserly with shit and secrets that had little value

in a big city in a bigger country—just say you’re canadian

snd you’ll be as invisible as pigeons and potholes

As a country evaporates

populations evacuate

the lucky viruses fly trans-continental

while the mediterrenean returns to its historic role as graveyard

Can a gated community secede,

the first rocket cars hopping from enclave to enclave

lakes turned into golf courses, people who’ve never seen cash

or vacuumed a floor, while soon the only clothing i can afford

comes from a 3-D printer fed with tanks we don’t want to know the origins of—

we’re cycling & recycling as fast as we can but can’t get there in time

for the job, the damaged free stuff, the barbed assignation.

and usually need to replace something by the time we get home—

a left shoe, a right thumb.

Would you give up your arms to have wings

would you give up your teeth for an affordable liquid industrial diet.

take two of these every hour until you can’t take any more.

Remain a moving target and never stop to it, circling the take-out window

While the chameleon-gened soylent becomes what the jingle imprinted

My house has been replaced with a medical bill

my mirror’s obscured with clouds while the sky is garish with advertising

how does the machine draining my bank card make me feel grateful & pleasured

while everything i eat leaves me hungry and slow