POEM FOR 2007

As the piss and detritus and mold
settle and dry on human deeds
Piled up during yet another lazy pass around the sun
I must wonder wonder who be-doo-oo who
Who wrote the book of love
Or maybe who reads the book of love
Seems it takes a lifetime to get through the damn thing
It’s no page turner
And by the time you finally figure out the plot, it’s just about time to wind up in your own plot
It’s never on the New York Times Best Seller list
It can’t compete with Stephen Colbert, Sue Grafton, and Dean Koontz
And The Cat Who Had No Ass
or that little Texas billionaire televangelist
Who looks like a dried booger in a suit
Greedballs and connivers and hucksters and filth
Control the airways fairways highways not my way
Soon there will be no more air in the ways
of PCBs and particulate matter
Does it particularly matter?
We wriggle up out of the clay and look around, sniff, fornicate, laugh, kill, make bad movies
Then fall back into The Big White Noise on Galactic Youtube
Lights out times up freak out light up
Jesus flees us
Buddha’ll do ya
Krishna’ll bliss ya
Allah’ve had enough
And Zen there were none
I wonder wonder who be-doo-ooo
One book that will never be written is Kurt Vonnegut’s next one
I think it was going to take its title from Oliver Hardy’s transcendent Zen phrase,
“I have nothing to say”
Or maybe it would be another piquant and fiendishly ironic MRI of human behavior
I needed those books like crutches to enable me to hobble through all the broken brains
But Kurt left curtly, falling down, falling down down down
Like Laurel and Hardy’s piano
Down the Silverlake steps
And The Boys weren’t around to carry him back up
We need Stan and Ollie to carry us back up the stairs and deliver us to that house where crazy Billy Gilbert lived
Where Stan and Ollie danced to the player piano
(Which is also the name of a Vonnegut book
So the snake eats itself
The ultimate quantum physics)
We need Stan and Ollie to carry us all back up
John Lennon and and Frank Zappa and Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo and George Harrison and W. C. Fields and Janis Joplin and Rachel Carson and Ed Ricketts and Iris Chang and Jerry Garcia and Mother Teresa and Beethoven and all those who tried to read the book of love
We all need to dance to the player piano
but these days, as Tom Waits said, the piano has been drinking
My necktie is asleep the combo went back to New York the juke box has to take a leak
Which brings me to a little church
Where I sat on Christmas Eve because hardly anyone else did
A little brick church in Westwood with about twenty lonely people where do they all come from and a smart lady pastor
Who knows that Jesus is just a nice Jewish metaphor
After all, what’s a meta phor?
And she spoke about the need to be hopeful
I think it was the act of a hopeless person
What reason to be hopeful with the player piano busted up by crazy Billy Gilbert?
Who obviously works for Al-Qaeda which works for the CIA which works for the ISI which works for Homeland Security which works for Monsanto which works for the Saudis which works for Disney which works for Murdoch and I don’t know why she swallowed the fly
Perhaps she’ll die
Hope all is well
Well, all is hope
As the Grateful dead sang: “cat on a tin roof, dogs in a pile
Nothin’ left to do but smile smile smile. . .”
Maybe smiling is an act of protest, defiance
Real smiling hard-won smiling graceful natural from the spine smiling
Not TeeVee Newsmannequins manically flashing their teeth
Not Hillary Clinton’s carnivorous gnashing or Mike Huckabee’s undertaker leer or Barack Obama’s megalomaniacal grin or Mitt Romney’s Mormon underwear protected pearlies
Imagine a religion that tells you to wear magic underpants to protect you from harm
Imagine that a man who believes this is running for president
Imagine that people are voting for this man
Imagine a religion that tells you to believe that the earth is six thousand years old and humans played pinochle with the dinosaurs
Imagine that a man who believes this is running for president
Imagine that this man won the Iowa Caucus
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothin’ to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Oh, woe is me, woe is me, me is woe, me woe is, eenie meenie meine woe
Larry Woe and Curly Joe
I wonder wonder who be doo-oo who
Who wrote the book of love
The guy who blew up Benazir didn’t write it
Guess Benazir wasn’t wearing her magic Mormon underpants
Funny how the U.S. asked her to go back to Pakistan
Funny how the U.S. refused to provide her with security
But not as funny as Laurel and Hardy pulling the piano up the stairs
Hey, Sisyphus, what’s the fuss?
‘Twas ever thus
So smile until you bust a Vonnegut laughing
As George H. sang, “It's time we start smiling/ what else should we do?”
Well we could try cynicism
it’s no sin to describe an ism
Religionism Polticalism Moneyism Televisionism Pop Musicism Educationism Americanism Rupert Murdochism Oprah Winfreyism Yorkshire Terriorism
That nice lady pastor at the Westwood church told me that hope is
“confident expectation”
Yes! I have confident expectation that the TV Newsmannequins will present us with
a childlike view of the world and that childlike viewers will dominate the world
And that more childlike children will starve and be murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan and Africa and that childlike children in the west will have their minds murdered as they suckle at the great teat of Avarice, Cunning, and High School Musical
Confident expectoration
Be CIA’ing you.
Of course, Barack Obarmy says he will change the world
Vote for me and change the world!
Change the world!
Change the world!
Change the world!
He shouts it the way Hitler shouted
Hell, I’d be happy to have a president who can change his goddamn socks
There is nothing more uncultured today than culture
Everything has been dumbed down down down the Silverlake steps
The player piano is broken
All the music sounds like death metal
And I wonder wonder who be-doo-oo who
Who will write the book of love.