satire – Page 2 – poems 2 die for

OVID

the pompous Patriots
scoreless
at half time

Seattle (smart city)
with their
blitzkrieg football
acing it
in our own
back yard

meanwhile
between Oz and Kansas
the corn still growing
as spears go, every
clutch of corn
by
rank and file
deep as a legion
tall as
a phalanx

but Empire troubled
by what it sees
out at half
time
rapping in Spanish
(language
closest to Latin)

worse, singing about
love and
community
not
fish, beer, trucks
and dogs
as quintessential
song lexicon

and preserving a
language
for the sake of
ablatives, declensions
and gender

spoke as it
are

vestal
as a virgin

from
the horse’s mouth

(the Empire that
gave us
Spartacus
also giving us Ovid)

TURNIN’ POINT

TURNIN’ POINT
“All you need to do
is swallow.” Josh Johnson

waiting for
something to push
an envelope

must have come
to the wrong place

basic chords, I presume
the guitars
are
in tune
(not a lick, not a riff,
not a whiff of the blues)

paint drying slower to not
show up anything

and free speech put
to the test here, yes sireee,
twangibg lyrics that sink
to the bottom
of the bottle

giving dregs
a new name

and these
the musical
airs and graces need
to send out to, show
the world

the deepest metaphors
of the tribe imaginable

would
tie up
with a ribbon, present
you myself

but the truck got stuck
truck got stuck

BOGUS

so this skinny old
withered guy

splurted out that the skiers
who called into question
the current state
of American

should be unceremoniously
stripped of their
national ski uniforms

which
gets me, thinking
if this geezer is
so passionate about this
he should
travel to Milan
strip the offending
skiers himself

presuming
obviously that
he survive
the cold
manages to
not drown
in the snow

such fake, bogus contrived passion
stuck in a glacier
not going to melt anything

poor, skinny, old
withered man

older, more skinny, more
withered,
infinitely
more bogus,
than i am myself

SIR JIM

for a moment
when Sir Jim
came in
to fix us
we deluded ourselves
it would be
Camelot

but turned out
much more
managed by
Mordred and Morgana
than reborn
Manchester United

still
a key player short
and no free
bananas

no free lunches ever
as we stop-start climb
above fifteenth

we never expected you
Sir Jim to be
thin and sparse and
tin
man kind
of hollowed out

supposed
to unite us all

but here you
are breaking apart, fragmenting

a team of squares and
round holes
bits and pieces

no football logic, common
sense
so must be

profit in it
primarily, exclusively,
in
everything we do

ROCKET

rocket
sprocket
in your pocket

so this is the social benefit
of billionaires
of wealth creation
the utter beatitude
bounteous bounty

pushing the boundaries
of masculine sexuality
through
the ceiling

right through the shitosophere
out into the absolute zero
of everything held dear

MEANWHILE

meanwhile
above the clouds
the Lolita Express
is banking
descending

is like an aeroplane
in a children’s story
inspiring thoughts of
magic and
mystery
and exciting destinations
full of memorable
characters, exotic beings

the speed of this jet
being quite impressive
you think you have
left that
shadowy raptor, harpy
that goes by
the name
of nothing
is the embodiment of
nothing
in its tracks, empty-
clawed, struggling
far behind

today it
missed its pray
the sneakiness of it all
just too much.
for it
existential disappointment
in its eye
as bleak as pure abyss

back to
Noam and Ali
after
so much
meanwhile

only two options
the man
is an idiot
confusing the meaning
of bilingual and bi-
sexual
(purely on the hidden
sexual punning
sounds of
language)

we have
the philosopher maestro
of linguistics
juxtaposed
with this hip hop
moron who
doesn’t
know right
from left

unless
   the joke
is on you and for
all your acumen
you took this
covert killer master-
satirist
   at face value
did not
    see his
       failure to
find and comprehend as
radical sign
beyond itself

leaving you
a bit denuded, stripped
of all
presumed acumen

an empty vessel when
nuance
called for

meanwhile
the jury was out
but is now
returning

let me see any, if any,
Chomsky satire,
Chomsky comedy

any of the resonant poetry Chomsky wrote

can recite
to end this thing with
less
nihilistic bite

as the Lolita Express
comes in to land

GENERATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS

when I first
heard you were
in those files

I thought I must
have misheard
your name
being mentioned – –
how the Hell
could it have
turned up
there, Wow! WTF,
I mean
there but for the grace
of God, how
can it be
go figure!

unless
it was just a typo

or a mess up
in the transformational
generative grammar
as it maps
the deep structure into
the surface syntax

garbling everything we
near universally agreed
you (dear emeritus
professor)

felt in your heart
of hearts,
did most radically think and believe

JESTER

I suppose you would argue
from your position
of superiority
that it still counts
as camouflage
yet boots or jacket
forged from this skin
would hardly set the pace
in Milan
or Paris

too much commedia del arte
it would reek of
to flaunt
such “jester leather”

and yet, in our version
of this seminal tale, this
is, indeed the serpent’s livery

which I might hazard
an explanation, which being,
life pre-
lapsarian
bound to be at
this point quite immune
to selection, evolution
and need for decisive tactical
advantage
in the species survival race

yes
at this stage
dressed to jest
as jester
than ambush
as ambush predator

though theology may see
clear ambush here

this
trickster of tricksters
first stand-
up comedian
sidling up, telling a few jokes.
spinning a few yarns
getting
    our first Mother, first
Father,
   convulsed with laughter,
linguisticaly impressed, to
much
   forget themselves

gorge themselves on fruit
whose prohibitedness was
and was to
remain forever, technically safe
and yet for so
many
completely banned,
its consumption unforgivable

worse than eating the fruit
it has always been claimed they did

that giving the knowledge
of good
and evil

this simply giving us
the, revelation of
our own
absurdity
paralleling, mirroring
the cosmos in its sense
that
there is only absurdity
all is absurdity

opening up our species
to the horrors of
comedy
and laughter itself.

DEEP STRUCTURE

and suddenly, totally
unexpectedly

I fell into a poem
talking of manufacturing
consent for a
“great artist” and
the deep
structure of
irony

thinking of you
too excited for words
flying to that island
that
great M.I.T. brain
up in the clouds

eliding
your Kubrick
redacting
your Nabokov

soon to be
there with Woody
playing it again

and the gods of satire
drooling at the
thought of
the fall
from great grace

into their
     realm of scruffy
syntax
   and superbly sordid
                     semantics