Yeah, you can make human sacrifice to dialectical history
with druids and Marx
And you can root for truffles on Wall Street
But until you see the fallout on your
greasy fork
You’re just a vapid bowling alley
attendant
on graveyard.
–Zumwalt (1981?)
Burnt Toast
Orange!
Hellish pastels screaming unknown genius and hint at hidden chortles
While nicotine nimbi scud and stain
And we suck slyly, slyly sweetened caffeine and wait for it to
reach crit mass in our body-plexus-pit
How’d we find this sticky formica stop anyway?
We iron out our cerebral wrinkles
Observe the threading warp and woof
And still can’t discern how we got in
Or where they hid the exit
So all you know is that its always open–
Isn’t this the graveyard shift?–
And the cross-eyed waitress will bring a misspelled, miscalculated
mistaken check when dinner’s over
whining whining wining and dining
Somebody waste that skinny kid if he won’t stop bellowing
Disagreeable distaste in distinct decibels
Disgusting!
The food may slither down your maw like greasy lint
But can’t we at least eat in peace?
A garish cosmos of flickering neon and cretin muzak
It seems as if everything was drawn from the maniac cook’s
Primordial soup
The proper proprietor leans in languishing linger leisure
Across the register
Smiling slightly as he strokes his beard, unconcerned
Christ! Is this morbid midnight meal a subtle jest
Or is he just plain stupid?
–Zumwalt (late 1970s or early 1980s)
Voortrek
Twisting and deforming
Raging daemonic forces
Scream across the veldt.
Corkscrew clouds
Peeling off our thin, Formica-top civilization.
No Oz awaits;
Dorothy and Toto have headed for the shelters.
The only Munchkins, mutants.
Your fault
My fault
No fault.
We pulled the cork,
The Jinn gave their notice;
And History’s in its familiar whirlpool
With vertigo the fashion of today.
Like hunkered hedgehogs
Curled in spherical,
Lance-backed laagers,
We have one option:
Shut our eyes
And wait for the dust to settle.
— Zumwalt (1981)
mental block
spiraling parapet spinning passages
sweeping the bleakness
clouds sail skimming the
gravy scum of lifetimes of labor.
I know
of what you go
and where you want
but pretense
the avenger of moonglow
cries out against all that is anguished
and taps on the counter
like the frozen ballerina
on the shoulders of your shoelace.
— Zumwalt (1980s)
Hands Off, Bob Avakian!
Shuffling
— In dark and dank
Howling
— A dialectic chant.
Genuflect to the rotund Mongol
Take, eat
This is my body
Of confusing, Confucian
Union by laws.
“Forgive me, Dad:
I did a Tenzing Norgay
On the north gate of the White House.”
“Ego te absolvo –
You did it for the proles.”
— Zumwalt (1981)
Two Decade Hangover
An oscillating madness
Like the twenty-year howl
Of impotent hyenas—
Shrill
Shrieking
Schlock—
Blows the encumbering cobwebs
And reveals the
Fundamental dry rot.
Crewcuts
Brylcream
Primal chords
Jerk the memories and mores
Back to the visceral
Atavistic anarchy
Spotlighting Spengler
As an optimist.
— Zumwalt (1981)
Overweight Legionnaires
Ripening wine
And a greedy fire
Throw on another log
While the fog coagulates about the limes
And chokes Eboracum
In a clammy shroud.
Hadrian’s Wall’s gone mossy—
Too cold for laid back Latins
Pouring libations
While we watch the
Gonzo Celts
Digging up the peat.
— Zumwalt
Cousteau and Darwin Move to Suburbia
Like pilot fish
Affixed, transfixed
Upon the gluttonous chin
Of the maneater,
We give thanks and
Humbly suck the detritus
From Fate’s
Serrated mandibles.
The irony of Sophocles
Is just the symbiosis
Of little fish
And unevolved vertebrates
Scrubbing their gills
With polluted waters,
Lacking the initiative
To crawl up the bank, and breathe.
— Zumwalt (1981)
TICKER TAPE PARADE
Parody Worship
Smiling in the Dusk of Midnight Eyes
Acting in the Bleakness
of Frosted Minds
Paced Paper Parade —
Pausing Promises Pleading
Past the Cineramic
Sycophantic Sharks
a Coldness Recedes
and Faith Breakers Retreat
into Placebos of Reeling Celluloid
— Zumwalt (1981)
Bull Market
The gardeners have hit the pavement,
Bulldozed by smiling engineers
Optimists—peddling bromides.
Take your pick:
Withdraw your last fiver
For a philosophic Wheel-O;
or,
Hands in your pockets, sardonic
Watch Babel climb.
“On this spot will be erected utopia”
Yeah, sure.
But, the wise man knows Penelope
Has taken on Ithaca
And counsels Odysseus to put his
Money in Krugerrands.
— Zumwalt (late 1980’s)
zumpoems 