What Are We Eating?

(a decollage/search for popular history)



Sometimes I wake up at 3 a.m. and

write furiously until there are so many words

Each one bleeds

Into the other

But even if not nobody

Reads and even if so, needs, so

I call up and there’s nobody

There, the President’s chair

Is empty, all conflict thus

Refined, chin on hand I stare

At the dark walls lined

Like an empty subway with the faces

Of public personas in braile peeling

Off layer after layer palimpsest of

Ultimate betrayal I claw

Rip and tear, regress

But can only guess

at two dimensions

of intentions on the faces

of a demogogue mouth after mouth after

Eye after ear passed over by wisps of fog

And ghosts

of people with real jobs running

Rat races

oppressed by fragmented and demented faces

each beyond reach conspiring

To be more retiring and constipated and self

Absorbed than the next while we in the text

Beneath grind our teeth

Bad rapped & trapped

In the endless mystery

How they jerk us & work us

In the pre ordained circus

Of history

Let freedom ring let the white dove

Sing why doesn’t anybody ever say

anything

the silence explodes

with the sound of a billion

commodes Hillary’s cackle crackle

of distant talk

radio

Darkness

Hitler’s mustache interrupts

Dr. Laura’s sadistic

Panache, a model’s cracked

Lip sucks the universal

Insanity & inanity out of

Sean Hannity’s eyes

Until he cries emptiness down

The nose and cheek of a

Clown behind Hollywood’s small boy’s

Idea of war

pundits from NPR and
The Wall St. Journal, scientists with

A little knowledge kept in a little

folder Anne Colter

In an ad for a college

Of design

Michael Savage, a long thin line

To Rush Limbaugh, burning between

Real and fake, Stah Waugh, Stephanie

Miller rails, Ed Schultz fails, my nails

Break, still I can’t

Get in, the only thing that opens is the skin

On my fingers blood streaks

Across the lines of these photo screen

freaks imitating

lines I draw against

The night the squares and tears

And TV and computer screens the means by

which “I”

lives so uselessly

Well read while eating its daily bread

One tiny hand reaching south the other

To hold mother’s nose the taste

Of wallpaper paste

In my mouth