OBITUARY OF THE UNEMPLOYED
After Pedro Pietri
They worked
but didn’t get paid
so they resurrected
an army of dead desempleados
that ran through the streets
with pellet guns
shooting birds to roast
their matches were tiny sickles
under dark meridians they closed in
no sophisticated planetary bombs
only firecrackers and rocks
all incarcerated hobos were freed
and got to keep their ransacked brains
La policía now hunts them with spears
except they can’t see papier-mâché
ghost piñatas
ODE TO BACKYARD LADYBUGS
After Pedro Pietri
There are no more backyards in AMERICA.
All yards have been burnt & went to heaven
exploded searching for the Christian God
& are now overrun with dandelions,
crabgrass & psychedelic mushrooms.
The ladybugs have arrived flying from their cloud nests to colonize
the imagination of small, small children with curls. They have killed
God the almighty at last & buried him under grapevines
where he remains forgotten. They have gnawed all house
foundations (soon no pillar or stone will be left standing).
The ladybugs have rigged elections & declared the rule of anarchy
(“people no longer got all the say around here”). The earth feels
cool again. The earth feels sexy with the ladybugs twirling breezes
on unscratched places. There’s a melancholy ladybug
that sits by an old typewriter writing with her wings
about the ladybug revolution, the death of God & rise of lady-angels.
Meanwhile, all men have grown beards. No one knows how to shoot a gun.
MANIFESTO OF INJURY
Poem’s weird after seeping becomes intelligent inertia & watches how there are still places left to wreck, how the retch succeeds in winning over a dull stomach, how vacuous & unclean words have come to mean when condemning drones of dead.
Nine out of ten will succumb to eeriness & after a while the surface will shine again with freshly incarcerated & administered bodies.
When the re-revolt must happen before more hoarding takes hold, please, release my frogged poem al-ready, positing dementia over television wires transmitting mind control fantasies. Our brains are more elastic than that.
I tried giving a poem’s certainty, looking for purposeful bite into state of surety, but vagrant is not vagabond edging on each other’s meek, that maroon solar thaw rarity pops every-other season, when Fahrenheit meets Celsius’ asscheeks.
Poem sees chlorophyll clouds hissing through corners. These aren’t violet dreams wicked wish fulfillments with moustachial beaked streaks of bird-link.
Poems want to soar like peregrines. Yet that is rare, moreover, as the expired collective pronoun mourns itself, as deadwood is on the rise, as antidotes disappear behind bushes & diseases soak up the body’s veined energy, one begins to mull over these inconclusive scenarios.
Trans-continental, tradition of yokel, instability of blank indent I-soup stewed-up imageless; I learned nature by the book, speaking swirled fumigated sibilance, indeterminacy in unpronounceable dusted word.
Where obsolete words slumber beautifully plantoun in darkened light hooking breathiness to nether body, outburst of latent pitch ripple enters left auricle from where sounds of skulls reach the heart.
Still charity & chary looks go hand-in-hand when pockets are full of dollars & you’re feeling like
you owe the world some goof, some speck & shine, some supine tenderness.
Poem’s goiter spells gargantuan wobbliness, stiff like old bark, stumbling through traffic furnished with cane & fortified with weather, a very relay destitution in the eyes.
Lately all boogies suspended in powerlines alongside tennis shoes & crows, latterly free meals gone rancid & smithereens of pulp, sunk lifeboats, whisks of latently all men are having some reckoning, not that lambently one doesn’t need a deep cold stare at one’s spasmodic self, not that lackadaisically one shouldn’t look behind the eyes that see, head that mulls, & arm that steals, because lamentedly they sniff when sad & smile when glad without one evoking the other.
It’s a little late for hypnotism as poem’s hype is over zealous, in this real propriety in this real tallied realness one is the image of prosperity, one’s proper instances of presently where waters have been disturbed into thinking.