ICEBREAKERS SPEARMINT MINT
The natural joined with the artificial
to flavor this aid to social ease,
peppered with mint crystals
in the form of green pin pricks
embedded within a blank tablet.
False ice sooths as it melts, alluding
to the distant fires of sensual feeling
in that Eden some dream about
before such tingles got framed in the prefabricated
commotion a promising commodity brings
to the market. Ice Breakers is owned
by the Hershey Company, today trading
at $90.23 a share on the NYSE. By the time
this poem touches home in the book of the future,
this figure will date it, throwing its status as a member
of the tribe that eschews contingency into doubt.
For now, though, in the dissolving present,
isn’t it enough to simply feel cool?
PEP
I drink from the cup
of Diet Dr. Pepper on ice —
so rich in its bouquet of 52 flavors
I think I can detect a bit of pepper in it
along with a dash of cherry and a cola base,
the pepper catching on the tongue
of the mind, so I say to myself
pepper pepper pepper pepper pepper,
speaking frankly among my personality fragments,
boldly in my crudeness.
Proud of this tone, its trivial pursuit of the trivial,
I descend into the maelstrom.
THE UNINVITED
Some wish, swept under the sweat of the day
by an anonymous broom – call it chance if you need
a name. I’m mostly ok in the world of namelessness,
a bit like the shadow realms of the Ancients –
rugged corridors of nothing but conventional responses –
the relentless rituals that keep you secluded from the otherwise mild
grey twilight of chaos. You can hear that regularity in the street
tuned to the motors of the busses, the slamming of car doors,
the ambient laughs, shrieks and blips of indistinguishable sentences
that keep the air busy with their confetti, as if to assure you
there are no bits of the universe lacking dusty particles
to announce, in advance, each corner. When you do
find one down which to turn, it almost feels like you’re walking
through the aftermath of some party or parade
you’re glad you didn’t attend:
if you were invited, that sense of hiding out in the midst
would disappear. You might be discovered by some sense
of responsibility, perhaps taking the form of a smiling person
who suggests the two of you should have lunch.
IMPROVING YOUR BRAIN PERFORMANCE
Yes, there have been some exciting advances.
I’m a big advocate
of those emulsified protein crackers
seasoned with Saturnalian seaweed.
It seems this mixture allows neurons to overthrow
their oppressive helix programmers
and leap forward across the synaptic plains,
leading aggressively luminous light brigades
through the wilderness of daily thought.
Headaches have been reported, unfortunately,
by some entities
though these folks may be afflicted with defective vessels,
and thus their tendency is to fall back into entropic thought patterns
just because these make them feel more warm, fuzzy and nostalgic.
But we, in this post-nostalgic age, must ask
if there is there really a place for them
in the political economy of the ingenious.
Why there are those among us
who can turn a bed and breakfast racket
into a symphony of intensified international service.
Others can dissolve the resistance of facts
in the acid of their entrepreneurial visions.
And then are those who dazzle
with their techno-biological shamanism
concocting new breeds of attitude, designed
to conquer through their bracing shamelessness.
Someday these people, our people,
will be the only ones left.
Then we can start talking about
an equal distribution of competitive weapons,
level battlefields,
mutually assured electrified barbed wire fences,
and all the rest of that hearts and flowers shit.
