Notes On A Project
a painting
of a lone
rose
blossoming
on a
snowy
peak
in
the
dead
of
winter
painted
on
a
dried
animal
skin
of
an
animal
made
extinct
by the
murderous
lack of
wonder
Walt Whitman Trashed
I read that after his death
in 1892,
Walt Whitman’s brain
was kept
in a jar
at the university
of Pennsylvania,
where 200 other
brains were also stored.
But sometime in
the early 1930’s
a laboratory worker
accidentally
dropped Walt’s
gray matter
on the concrete floor,
and it had to be
thrown away.
Of all those 200 brains
it was the brain
of the poet
that had to be
disposed of.
Par for the course, eh,
Walt?
Internet Nazis
The internet nazis tore down all the libraries today
and burned all the books
on the streets, torching them
with Shell and Exxon gasoline
They blew up all the newspapers too,
the huge printing presses
exploding like small nuclear bombs,
the dark clouds of devastation
seen from satellites in space
Anti-air craft guns and off shore missiles are
mowing down all the bookstores,
and all the stationary stores, and the
paper mills are exploding from huge
charges of TNT
So, what about you, are you deaf.? And can’t
you see the bellowing black smoke?
And why can’t you smell the stench? Tomorrow
they will be burning the bodies of
paper book and magazine readers. Surely,
you will get a whiff of that!
This is a wonderful trio of poems. Although the subjects for them all seem unrelated, they are tied together it seems by a sort of dark chronology. We start with something extinct, which makes us think prehistoric, and then it moves to the age of Walt Whitman and what happened in the 1930s to his brain, and then we move to today. The interesting way that it slides out of the 1930s, with the “Internet Nazi” poem is really well done, because you can’t help but think of the Nazis rising in the 1930s, so it seems you tie them into today. I know I haven’t done a good job here, but I love it!
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