Like B-movie bombers came the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Homelessness, the War on Sex and Violence, The War on EVIL, the War on War ... the next Brave New Movement ... champagne toasts of Das Kapital sparkle upon streets paved with god ... aborted fetuses are our business -- our only business ... benefactors piss in the mouths of the hopelessly human dying of thirst ... Auschwitch fairyland, bombed out ghettoes of the Terran nightmare ...
Unwitting stooges, goons, hitmen in the name of Gold and country, in the name of the "higher good" ... switching the channel did not dam up the bloods on the block ... whirlpools of mistrust churning within rivers of routine lies and propaganda ... overflowing scenarios of fear and dependency ... random violence flash floods the landscape ... Mein Kampf on trading cards, pink bubbles bursting onward and outward ... roly-poly bug militias hamming it up for the cameras ... dodderers dotarding around the plastic pineneedle forests of Target and Wal-Mart, making New Years resolutions for the next Waco, the next Okie City ... paintballs hurtling through the bars smoting trash talk and beer bellies hoping ... sporadic aggression, gestapo raids, assassinations, coups, reincarnated inquisitions ... ontological horror, internal vacancy, great chaotic vortices consuming them from the inside-out, rotting and poisoning them, as the airwaves bled with upbeat nonsense to bury the national memory ... the skeletal cell, membrane without brain, viciously apprehended scapegoats, kissed the hands of corporate gangstas ... threw sand in the eyes of the national dignity ... peanut gallery protests of atrocities, as decisive and empowered as monkey farts ... scribbling profound lines of socially conscious poetry lamenting bungs in the fenders of Audis and Chevys ... canned laughter and tears ricocheting around a pinball universe of 2-dimensional realization embellished with buzzers, bells, and UFOs ...
The following two poems are taken from "Ever-Expanding Wilderness" by Antler, a section of poetry which appears in Stiletto 2: The Disinherited.
SMUGGLING THE DUST OF IMMORTALS
Flying back from Europe to Milwaukee
looking down at the Pyrenees
where the antler'd dancer
dances on the ceiling of a cave,
Seeing the Atlantic spread before me,
thinking back to Rome,
to my visit to the Protestant Cemetery,
my afternoon alone there
with the graves of Shelley and Keats,
Speaking poems by them by heart
to their final resting place,
and taking a pinch of soil
from each grave
in a plastic bag,
Little suspecting when I landed in New York
the customs inspector would find it,
open it, sniff the contents,
eye me suspiciously: "What's this?"
"Gravesoil from Keats' and Shelley's graves."
"Who are they?"
ATHEIST CONCHES
Are there conches that don't believe
after they die they echo the sea?
That go to great lengths to prove to other conches
the foolishness of believing after they die
they will echo the sea.
Spend their whole lives writing books
about how there is no air or beach,
only the sea,
and when you die that's it,
there's no echo.
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Book Description Trade Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Heyen, William; Goldbarth, Albert; Wakoski, Diane (illustrator). First Edition. Book is in Very Good condition. Boards have a small amount of shelf wear. Fore edges have a small amount of reading wear. Interior is clean and legible. No store stamps. Not remaindered. Thanks and Enjoy. All-Ways well packaged, All-Ways fast service. Book. Seller Inventory # 036650