skelter helter

ink dot,
mind blot,
brain jot,
net horn,
smoke brake

silicon pulp,
blast food,
Einstenian bicycle,
terrible horrorist plot,
solemn babblings

cultural commerce in the air-port
and taxi-cab warfare outside:
flights jumping from gate to gate,
all but unseen art on the walls,
grown socialite children broad-casting their calls,
as omni-present voices tell us
to "report any unattended baggage
to the proper authorities"

Meanwhile, in the news,
the disinformation age is at its height.
Writers who loathe colonialism
cheer the forcing of polls
into every corner of the world,
and describe any other form of leadership
as a military dictatorship,
making it unnecessary to compare
(however fleetingly)
the results gotten by different governments...
thus making the world safe for pet-marts,
shopping malls,
sky-scrapers,
and big money law firms
(the modern Egyptian scribes.)

in the universities,
youth are oft "educated" into ignorance,
and "cultured" into complacence:
"conservatism" becomes a desire to pay fewer taxes
on booze, casino, and tabloid-T.V. income,
and "liberalism" a charitable resolve
to find a black member for the country club,
or a most heroic commitment
to indirectly remove a few of the land-mines
plaguing the vast country-side
of the non-existent nation of Vietnam
(which is theoretically beside Laos,
where America once spent millions a day
waging a non-existent war)

alarm shock,
hawk radio,
shopping male,
hosing sale,
white wail,
paper leopard,
digital lynx,
and the great Heidegger fraud
(the larger crime "being" not anti-semitism
but the abuse of philosophy and semantics)

in the psych wards,
street criminals are coddled
and the sensitive, needy, and tattered
are punished with over-medication,
blank walls,
blaring trash T.V.,
restriction,
Jungian mysticism and Freudian harassment,
thread-bare resources,
vast amounts of empty time,
and a frequent lack of ANY books

anasthetic value,
21st century fatigue,
sun-shined shoe,
wall-white hue,
digital dizziness,
the vast international Conformian empire,
multi-cultural yankee stew,
"made in barbaria" glue,
philosophical verse,
modernist curse,
acre-wide book-stores,
and suburban protestant teens dressed
like top-end street whores

affluent cosmopoli in fear
of difficult "abstractions,"
cities packed with churches, guns,
chain steak-houses and Asiatic restaurants
staffed with new Americans
whose busy, avertive eyes
hide minds likely living in homelands
few customers would or could fathom

CD tomes,
cold war thistles,
virtual homes,
CD streets,
still mighty dinosaur Rome,
fading roads,
and coffee-house blues

Human apes on the T.V.
driving luxury car bananas:
flip the channel and reactionaries
are found exulting Jesus
(though giving no thought to his needle)
and denying evolution
while talking about "the missing link"
as scientists analyze the tenth such fossils
and the electorate watches sitcoms,
soap operas, and NASCAR

chinese masks and african trees,
Merman precision,
flourishing libraries,
and american bees,
heretical physics,
and silver-spooned academic quarry

computer hum
and screen shine,
strawberry wine and vorticist grime.
The paper mail
virtually always comes
but not at any given time.
Thai food but not Thai beer
is usually served with lime.
It's quite out of fashion
for poetry to rhyme.

ran spot,
can hot,
sea ran spot,
plot thick,
antic rot,
pacifist cot