Man's Gotta Eat

The silver pitcher sits on my wife’s ass

full of cicadas.

I like it when there’s tar in my hair.

Know what tar is?

It’s when a man and a steam engine

make a llama together, but

the llama spends its whole life searching for

a small temple in rural China.

The riot police keep showing up

with canisters of bees

to dump em on striking factory workers

who drop their picket signs, lay down

and recite the Third Book of Psalms.

In the corner a spider is tossing

coins, but her copy of the I-Ching

is from the future

and so much of the original text has been misinterpreted

and erased that

it always tells her to make lemonade.

Toshiba has decided to sell laptops outta gumball machines

and all the consumers have decided it’s smarter

to just use your money to make more money

and all the disenfranchised have decided

they’d be better off going to college

to study how to be mice,

so now we’ve got a cist

in the earth’s mantle—see it

ballooning out of every volcano?

They tell us the tumor isn’t cancerous

even though it’s clearly getting bigger.

The llama looks troubled.

The steam engine cries every night in her nursing home

for her boy, lost in a sea of green,

never realizing home is where his hoofs are.

That spider senses something’s wrong

but the coins never lie.

Come on, baby, just a few more days

you’ll have the world record

for lying belly-down balancing

something pointless on your bottom

dollar, then we, too, will have

our names in the Book of Lice.