POEM FOR 2002
The sunset looked like a discarded Matisse palatte
And the inside of my head looked like a Bruckheimer preview
Michael Jackson was dangling a cosmic baby
Over the edge of eternity
Baby, baby, where did our love go?
Maybe in the car back to rehab with Diana Ross
And the Southern California day was a horse apple
Dessicating in the sun
Somewhere along the way, you know, they forgot how to do things
How to say please
Demographers took control
And turned everything into artificially flavored fat eaten by people who are very
passionate about sitting
On couches and in their monster trucks
Like a rock
The other night Dr. Phil was having a sandwich with Billy Graham
They were on the Subway diet
And they were discussing plans to conquer intelligence
Because it keeps getting in the way of megalomania
You've got to beat it out of 'em, said Dr. Phil, and Billy said something about the Jews
again
And how he convinced Bush that he is cranking up Armageddon
Well, at least we have sitcoms and praying mantis heroin-addict supermodels and Mary
Hart's big clown face giving us all the celebrities we can eat
You know, get a little down, and Leno's there with a joke about fat guys on toilets
All the music is written by angry children
All the movies are directed by Rupert Murdoch
All the books are written by Danielle Steele
And demographers
Well, not quite all, I hear that Steinbeck's son knows his way around a short story
And Philip Noyce found his way back to integrity in "The Quiet American"
Not many people find their way back to integrity
It was given up for dead back around 1968
Or maybe when Lincoln was shot
I don't think anyone will ever find their way back to 2002
I don't think anyone will express nostalgia for it,
Outside of a Hallmark card writer, perhaps
The world is a big corpse-oration now
Between nasty little brainwashed men with box cutters,
And nasty little brainwashed men running industry
Sometimes I think that Barbie and Ken were very quiet aliens
Who invaded the minds of humans and made them
stupid
After all, irony is dead, they say, and they might be right
Randy Newman's songs have become anthems
"I Love L.A.", you know, was supposed to be funny and mildly embarrassing
But I read that the troops are singing "Drop the Big One Now" like a war chant
in Afghanistan
Or Turkistan or Yezbekistan
Where is Laurel Stan when you need him?
Oh, well, oil's well that ends well
and if you can't kill the one you hate, kill the one you're with, kill the one you're with
The Amerigun people have plenty of beer, cigarettes, Happy Meals, Britney Spears,
flat-screen TeeVees, cell-phones, and well, at least the Angels won the World Series
Maybe they should have their own series
Oh, wait, they did, and they cast Della Reese in it
Never mind
The sunset looked like a discarded Matisse palatte
It got me to thinking about the ends of things
Which got me thinking about how you die so casually
As people sing in the shower
And cut one another off on the freeway
And Bugs Bunny runs from Elmer Fudd
And a million clerks say "finding everything all right?"
When you are not finding everything all right anymore
When, for the most part, you are finding everything rather dissatisfying
Living in the present gets harder as the past gets bigger
On the other hand,
As Don Van Vliet said,
"It's all matter, but it doesn't matter."
---Charles Bogle |
