Mary Jane, image by Alfred Corn
Told Where to Go by a Surrealist Poem
Really? At least
it’s hooked me into reading
on, and I do. Freak-out
events that can’t happen
happen. Green blobs
approach, and we’re surfing
several whitewater
channels that threaten to come true.
A whooshing jump-cut.
Animals that look like people
that look like
animals are busy at various playful
and backbreaking
chores, repeated (with changes) again
and several whacks
again. Again? Dangnation!
I’m lost just where
they wanted me to be, alone
with their red hot
ice cubes, no louder or smoother than
these freeze-frames.
The Dormouse overdoses. I’m being
told how plodding is
my mind, I’m the living dead,
programmed
zombification for Instagram.
Words don’t know
what they’re talking about,
they won’t hear what
I just believed. Funhouse daze,
maternity leave for
Grendel’s mother, anyone else
feel faint? It’s Loona
World, plus whatever opts out
of being the case,
just as big brain’s bargain basement
urges you to paw the
goods, why not, it’s a free
country and just
this once you don’t have to pay.
Gristle
Has been
Part of a living
Cow. Is not now.
No need to say
here’s
Some cold sniping,
most
Unamiable.
Looks repulsive.
Has an awful
Mouth feel—
Chewy tough,
Fibrous stringy,
And won’t go down.
Could choke you
Unless someone tries
the Heimlich
maneuver.
Unheimlich: It means
“uncanny.” But
gristle
Is canny as a nanny
Goat just before
rapping
Your knuckles to
tell you
How stupid you are.
(Not.)
Brushes with Greatness
I got good at
getting the hairs out of them,
grunt work, granted,
but handled pdq.
The aftermath felt
cozy, collaborative,
to the extent people
ever looked at a flash
going off when the
designated carpet salesman
drove up, a worm
turned, or an avuncular type
winked and quipped,
“You little so-and-so.”
Kiwi had its points,
so did peach, ditto
cocoa—and silver,
especially old silver,
goes with any color,
it’s that versatile.
I could drink most
of them most days.
They could also be
instantly spewed out
when a fit of
debunking took over.
You saw it first,
the drunken wasp whose tail
got mistaken for a
black-and-yellow barcode.
Consider it a
childhood memory of parks.
In that dawn time
everybody ran in packs,
so we called our
gang The Bronx Luckies.
For mass transit the
transported had to buy
brass tokens, a
buck-ten each. They stuck it
to you, same way
Chinese “cash” had piercings—
We’re talking before
plastic swallowed everything up.
And ever shall be.
The clunker remaining?
It wasn’t sex work,
it was survival. Besides,
nothing never ends,
even when it busts a few
killer moves trying
to or when you card
a mom or any other
fiber optic. Oh: would you tell
your friend odds are
she’ll be going home soon.
—Alfred Corn
