Unnecessary Pastiches and Other Ruses

"All the beautiful people..."
There's a man on a beach

sketching onto a piece of canvas--

the story of our lives
or at least those important among us

like that girl
who pours a drink on her boyfriend
and then goes out onto the dancefloor alone drawing all sorts of stares

or a couple
holding hands
outside your aunt and uncle's house
that you sort of judge as happy
based on how naturally they are standing so closely together

that figure
you saw
flying through the streets at three am

who disappeared
once it got outside of your line of vision

excluding perhaps

only me and Eleanor Rigby.


"The Uselessness of All This"
I write words
in lines
somewhat randomly constructed,
strung along in my mind
from ideas and observations,
and I sew a techicolored raincoat
from all this wornout fabric
that I am finding in the world.

It is sometimes hard to admit
but still a vague
somewhat unnecessary truth
that today recurs to me:
one in five million
chimpanzees hooked up to typewriters
would give you Shakespeare
and I'm sure Bubbles
could easily
do this job
just as well as I.


"First lines from poems quoted at random from some machine that I found in your closet when I was looking around for those drugs that we used to keep hidden there before we both sort of went semistraight because of that one time when you almost ODed"
Lying on the floor, her hair fanned out on the linoleum like a sun
He was a simple man
My father hated that old guy so much
She's a beautiful girl in the shower
Writing is like bleeding

...

[lines 5005-5010]
Sorry was actually a very easy word on his lips
She kissed him, softly, and almost immediately
They held onto each other for dear life
The universe was a hole too big for the either of us to understand
The woman calls out, "Hold me please," sometime in the middle of the night
The man said, "Let me tell you why I'd never trust a lady."


"Impress you much?"
If I pulled up to your door
on a Lapras named after your great-grandfather
and asked
if you thought it was possible
if we might set off for the Indigo Plateau
together
would you skip your classes
for like a week and a half
and ride
side by side
with me on our bikes
catching Nidorans and releasing them
while we revel
in our last summer as children?

Or would you simply
throw out your Jolteon
tear my dreams apart,
take my money,
say,
"Level 22!
Boy, you've got to do better than that,"
and run off with that dude
that I saw you eating lunch with
sometime last semester
and who I heard
from a somewhat reliable source
had plans
to become a gym leader?


"Dragons"
one hundred thousand
is a number with seven zeroes
like the number of spheres
that we had to gather
to bring your pa
back to life

so just remember
that i've sworn you to secrecy
because my father
would not like to hear about
how I sort of dishonored mortality
nor my crime fighting


"It's another Monday night--"
and the evil people have nuculur weapons
which means
that Jack Bauer's
about to be hooked up to
yet another car battery
and tomorrow
we all know
that Gibbs will call another
man in a black suit
who'll shoot some random guy
in Central America.

You know,
we could seriously take
our own personal David Kelly
in stride
because
as Mr. Burgess found out
we are Nixonian
and we don't spread this myth of a clean government
but in fact
we fictionalize
--immortalize--

the proof
of these
so-called
horrible truths
and make light of them
with jokes
along the lines of
"Did you really
expect us to be shocked
with that, man?
Because this is New York!"


"Xenophobia"
Just because
you admit
that some people
inside this country
are bad people,
does not allow you
to continuously
plot
your TV broadcasts
around
foreign invaders
of some sort
trying to get their dirty hands on our technology.

That's really
not much less bigoted
than the next guy.


"Perspective"
Written
on the side of the staircase
of Turlington,
the words
"Dad, I miss you,"
catch my eye,
and I think to myself
in this world
that all but
worships
Tyler Durden and Adam Smith
what that person
most likely might as well be saying is
"Daddy,
you left me
and I replaced you,
my initial image of perfection,
with money."

So
I got a drink
at the water fountain
and went to class
and thought about
my priorities.