Black Helicopters Overhead

I hope you don't mind

if I wander in through your front door

and reset your clocks to headlight savings

life requires humor he said to the lens grinders

who were eradicating global stupidity

with mass readings of children's fairy tales

same s**t greater magnification was basically it

applying one clever artifice after another

one's conscience does want to hasten

the modern world along clippity clop

impediments to traffic flow were to be shot

what happened next is not in the dictionary

which is fine don't get me wrong

beats the nuts off a hunger for facts

but the world is not nice anymore

isolated pockets of apostasy perhaps

out in the bleak lizard sands hanging from a tree

but the rest stuffed with foam peanuts

that could turn you to ballroom dancing

your narrator being the test case

for daisy picking the numbers

the samples the statistics

the entire ABC unit was called in

from the chalk mines

and the XYZ crew was mobilized

from the slate quarry

his mind had turned upon itself

out of shame and envy

he had an entire city in his head

that wasn’t in Architectural Digest

honkings sirens gunfire breaking glass

compulgings and obsessities and hallucinotions

mysterias and distortoons and damplifications

may I add unregulated bowel flux

we haven't even begun to look at his libido

which had shrunk precipitously from

a roaring blacksmith's forge of intensity

to the vague expectation of an afternoon nap

better than living the prelude to a beheading

you decide if hiding in the bushes permanently

like a grinning jack in the box with a message

is the same as dancing through the forest

draped about in leaves and emeralds

pantomime after all is deception

random at first then shapes intervene

there is no random he said over and over

repetition is proof after all

they say the devil spoke Hebrew

and Popeye smoked his spinach

a contemporary exercise in

signal location

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon