the day i met a strange little helmeted fellow in the Ozark mountains.

who made me feel stupid beneath and beyond my years.
he stared
and swung on a junglegymnasium rope
hung from the ceiling,
which along with the football helmet
he wore quite casually,
was a logical sink
for the demoniac,
super-brained energy of this approximately
six-year old gremlin
who, some time within the next few seasons
of torture for his wild hillbilly parents and the community,
managed to climb into the family auto
and engage its kinetic potential,
so that it went flying down the mountainside.
The sort of untamable action
which necessitated helmet and gymnasium-home rope.

at one point
we were alone and i tried
talking to him and
he looked at me with
an impossible un-six-year-old disdain and amusement,
so that it coated me with self-contempt
and to this day
a persistent sense of my own mediocrity,
an exchange of which he surely has no memory at all,
if he is still alive,
the doomed, sick little mega-mind.

The Raisins of Annoyance .

what scams these are,
how elaborate these dirty skulking schemes.

we are accruing interest on debts owed to those who
would rather see us dead than pay.
we are tricked like country yokels at the fair,
duped into drinking demon-piss,
told it is a tonic for good health.

our insides coated with serpent oil of every sort,
we have extremely fluid bowel movements.
none of the slop we consume troubles us,
it flows greasily through our gizzard
and out the other end without a whiff of trouble
or doubt.

we are paying our murderers for the privilege of being murdered
under cover of hollywood
and madison avenue tinsel,
murdered to the sound of singing children,
singing because they will be branded and beaten
and dropped from a helicopter in a sack,
if they don't sing.

we pay the homicides so they will go easy on us, and do it slowly,
to murder our souls first and foremost, and eventually our
sluggish, unquestioning bodies.