Feckless Degeneracy with some Windmill Jousting – an epic in several belches –
Belch the First – by way of prolegomena
Of arms and the man I sing id est, of a man with arms and hands for that matter and nothing to do with them other than push gliding yellow felt across the faceless fees of contract physicians dealing the new deal daily to the deaf shipbuilders and jet mechanics and the incompetent OSHA oafs of Oshkosh and Oklahoma Sucking the blood of the body politic politely with a yellow felt pen Felt pen is all he’s felt lately so come, muse for someone should and tell of the student-cum-bureaucrat the man with arms and hands with nothing to do but pay bills and perhaps go blind
Belch the Second – in medias res (so what else is new?)
A brown caffeine haze like the stained inversion layer of womb-city L.A. swirled buzzing beneath his 4:30 AM skull like a Santa Ana locked in Aeolus’ cave bleary blurry burned home to Germantown where the rosy-cheeked firm-breasted wives of the power-corridor stalkers make their living doing T.V. ads for Cheer Wisk Breeze and disposable douches Brown and nondescript his mentality and the 2 unkempt letters on his unkempt bed from an unkempt friend a mad composer Beethoven of software UNIVAC of the mad pipes and unorthodox tunes and keeper of a faith in which all have lost faith but a miniscule few
Insanity issues from the violated envelopes rushing leaping prancing like a horde of lusting shoppers at Macy's white sale bringing back the shades, demons, ghosts, apparitions, & specters of times past when mastodons stalked the earth and loons reigned, then, and rationality belonged to serfs and the lords of bats sat wiggo and lecherous in a Coco’s booth sucking the bean and contemplating rape Jolly jester gestures jump from penciled pages and in a laughing gasp grabbed the felt pen pusher by corduroy lapels howling "Write! for the faith is dwindling like a soft candle-stump its fleeting flame flickering faintly from a shriveled wick.
Write! For I am playing pool and snooker with a drunken busboy Lothario the 2 of us Lear and his fool leering and fooling around with a round girl and her quoit-visaged female companion. Write! for the roundtable is broken with the tennis player salesman for Bridgeford talking Tupperware and household appliances as he flies to Dallas. With the great beard Sleaze of times past Falstaff with a joint now playing it cool in high finance at the bastion of upper-middle class white vacuity in Watts. With the genius leader of liberated wit doing a Ulysses gig in Asia beaming knowledge into little brown people and contrition, obscurity for the white man’s burden. Write! for it’s been so long, I find tacos erotic and Don Jose’s threw me out for fondling a quesadilla. Write! Right?”
“Right.” Thus murmured the pen-pusher toddling, tottering off to sleep to wake with the sun and, at the school the afternoon next he gripped his pen violently determined and thought Thank God Freud is dead.
Belch the Third — Arlington National Cemetery is my disco
So the student who feeds himself with a yellow felt pen and writes arcane monographs of the arabesque convolutions of the politics in Riyadh and Jiddah essayed assessed saying sayings not quite sane what he means is what he said Sotos speaks so to speak.
An auspicious year the best of the 20th Sophocles’ 3 Stooges Clotho & her Cronies gave the Greek grief early tried to hand him a couple of brooches to do a number on his bespectacled orbs but he’d seen that one before So they packed up their spinning wheel and headed for Ft. Lauderdale lawn chair lounging but not until his transmission got up and walked away from his Merc 18 miles west of Phoenix to the tune of half a thousand clams If it wasn’t for the pen pusher’s plastic money and smiling despair he’d be flipping burgers on Camelback Avenue Wearing a Marlboro Stetson snakeskin pasture pounders and calling home the T.V. and Gideon Bible at the El Rokay Lodge.
Jojo's has crept like mildew across a map and Visa-financed peasant lunches kept the moustache nourished all across the continent.
Back to the city of marble buildings and minds with few marbles where the town namesake “Father of His Country” has a phallic monument to mock the yellow felt-pen scrivener whose social life is on display next to the stuffed dodo at the Smithsonian and labeled “Extinct.”
Well, can’t complain one supposes, even though the only thing between the student bureaucrat and a morals rap is an iron will and saltpeter for breakfast.
Lots of late nocturnal revelry with Eve’s daughters watching omelets feed a Charybdis appetite, or catching two-dollar talkies at the Circle. Taystee Diner, bean brew, juke box jokes as Hall & Oates, Simon & Garfunkel and Queen eat my quarters Coupla babes a lanky blonde, a petite brunette (I’m a blonde sorta, maybe). [If you’re a blonde I’m Grover Cleveland] But the pen-pusher knows, through the cruel anvil of experience, never argue with a woman Their logic makes minds' Minotaur maze looks like I-10 between Quartzite and Phoenix so peace dictates saying he’s been out late with 2 buxom blondes (and call the pen-pusher Grover Cleveland). Fun ladies and dynamite looks socko boffo knockouts but as for romance my social life is in formaldehyde at D.C. morgue waiting for someone to identify it.
Belch the Fourth — Ambition rides the Metro, but still can’t get a seat.
Thrice has the world spun encompassing ol’ Sol in completed circuits since the Golden Greek marched east like Alexander to conquer Persia-on-the-Potomac Thrice. Most of those who entered grad school with the golden Greek (before he cultivated the yellow felt pen to streak the beige bilious bills at Fran Perkins' Annex (on 14th & NY, NW) Most of those who dared demonic dementia to cut academia’s umbilical with a sheepskin rectangle have and got spewed into limbo
Alexander pushes the yellow felt pen and checks the views on the Strait of Hormuz holding court Doing okay if you are a tortoise All done excepting 100 pages of shoveling so let’s look for birth in May ’82 unless alma mater aborts Meantime there’s always yellow felt pens and green enough money
It all adds up to the bottom line which is the theory of relativity flattened in the templates of grad school to wit master programs stretch like taffy over time the faster you work and time goes gossamer tenuous and ephemeral and e...t...e...r...n...i...t...y is the... last... gasp... of... pondering... postgraduate... programs while your transcript grins and yawns at once
Belch the Fifth — if life gives you meatballs, make albóndigas
Beckoning from beyond the lips of an unborn year are the evergreen plastic vegetables that live only in refrigerators on display at Sears & Montgomery Ward Come come We are the vegetables of legitimacy of actuality and your folks’ approval eat and could we interest you in life insurance?
Rustling from behind in those dim glow worm grottos at the base of your mind are the petrified relics Memories of a golden age long tarnished return return return unused portion of your life for a *full refund* Slapping your back with ghostly hands guffaws Why be a frog when you make one helluva tadpole?
Polystyrene peas aren’t going to make it Julia Child or no Yet you can’t keep the cranium small while the cerebrum expands unless you want to grow lobes out your ears
The abyss between the plastic veggies and petrified pasts is the only place to call home and keep your honor
The bricks and mortar of this balancing house are words the hardshells of deranged thoughts that maintain continuity with the solid past and laugh like a strait-jacket model making time at Camarillo State: the faceless featureless chaos of the unraveling future.
Belch the Last — by way of epilogue
The song is done, Muse, evaporated like Borden’s milk and the balance in my checking account the yellow felt pen pusher pushes on staining audiologist indices and the lives he has touched like a Mexican dinner The time-space continuum has swallowed the Golden Greek yellow felt pen and all and he inches along the cosmic alimentary canal
But soft like that Mexican dinner cheap and satisfying he may return with an acrid burp to remind the party of what once was.
zumpoems 
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