Olberman had
a nasty cold.
When the power came
back on, we pawned
loose gold in lieu of
Cable, we watched,
we watched
the follies unfold.
Barack's smile, rational
thought, Reform Talk and
ironic middle name— so
very sublime, and for a while
we very nearly came
to forget...
We almost forgot
about that war in... Hell,
it was Yesterday's News!
Until some guy got
all mad, went and
threw the Shoes.
Not one, but two herky shoes
at Junior! Not one, but two
herky shoes
at Junior! We didn't know our boy
could move like that. We blew fuses
on a billion Tivos, watching, watching,
watching...Somebody, by God
should have
thought of it sooner, before Bernard
Madoff with all the silver, and Cheney
rode shotgun for sunset crying:
"HI OOOOH!"
Meanwhile
O'Reilly doesn't know he's
Live, we watch him gnaw
a wad of lemon Chapstick,
Geraldo does the Charleston,
shock, awe, guffaw it's so
slapstick!
Bill O'Reilly does not
know he is Live,
this contagion must be
immune to triangulation
in a Kandahar cave,
Solstice season, Mullahs slap
many High Fives, we watch
without reason.
I was about
to call it a night
when my I Mac
channeled Kerouac
on brass knuckle Blackberry,
updating his stellar web log
from an outpost
on Antares:
"It's much like the desert, where nothing's as near
as it appears, or remember that Time I shot craps
with Pascal when I was but a stone greenhorn
fresh out of stratosphere? I watched him press
and press his hard way bets while I built up
my bank, until Double Fours did blow me
out of that game like pale pink particle
dust from a sunflower super nova!"
On chat platform I scrambled
to answer Jack with my cheesy
3-D Pulsar Avatar of Milky
Way Bar—typing on tiny
wing-shaped keypad just
as fast as my fingers
could fly:
"Well other than that, how have you
been getting along, Master Kerouac?"
"Oh man, with gravity in a hermetic
vacuum it's nothing but zoom-zoom...
zoom – zoom - ZOOM!"
"Are you an angel now, Jack?"
"Heavens no!... but yesterday I
did in fact catch a glimpse of Neal's
holy snow chin whiskers in the Katherine
Wheel sparks of a Haley's Sleigh Ride.
And man, what a GAS!"
"So it's true, we're not all alone in a vast
coal-black and frigidly-indifferent universe?"
"No, man. Just very, very Self
Centered. That's all... Remember:
Even the most gaping, galloping
Big Sur fault line cannot stand up
against a heartfelt rope skip rhyme..."
"And all addictions, fratricide and bad
tattoos are spawned by boredom?"
"Where did you get that one, kid?"
"It is written
on the sweating wall
of the Cow Trough Pisser
in the heady men's room
of Club Satyricon, Portland
Ora-Gone, circa
Twenty forty six..."
"It's not half-bad."
"Anyway, I think this post
is gonna draw a whole lot
of freaking Web hits, Jack!"
"That's cool, kid—now, dig, I
gotta fly, but I might be back."
"Until Zen?"
"You're catchin' on, dad, you
really are comin' along just fine."
Dennis Mahagin's poems and stories have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, 42opus, Frigg Magazine, Absinthe Literary Review, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Pequin, The Angler, Mannequin Envy, 3 A.M., Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, Zygote In My Coffee, and Hiss Quarterly. A book of his poems, entitled Grand Mal, is forthcoming in 2009 from Three Roads Press, which is a new imprint of Cleveland-based Suspect Thoughts Press. Dennis also has a blog, which contains many colorful vignettes, You Tube music videos, and lurid paens to Levitra, Cialis, and L-Arginine. This blog is located at http://fourhourhardon.blogspot.com.