looking ahead with your favorite vegetable

looking ahead with your favorite vegetable

if the people
who never liked you
don’t show up
at your funeral
your funeral will
be a total drag
it'll be no fun at all
we couldn’t argue
about your life
and its myriad flaming failures

i made a wonderful
tape about the people
who don’t like you
they were so chatty
it’s got a ton
of painstaking crap
about you

didn’t you make a tape
all about your zucchini farm
and how to ship
zucchini so it won’t get squashed?

why don't we
since we're still
both alive
look at those
tapes now?
we could get really gassed
and finally admit with a toast
that you really weren’t such a bad guy
I’m looking forward to it

without this

without the space between our ears, we would have no
• motorcycles

without a larynx, we would have no
• taxes

without a medulla oblongata, we would have no
• arguments

without cheez whiz, we would have no
• crackers

without a bunch of arcadians in a swamp, we would have no
• new orleans

without new orleans, we would never
• sweat confetti

without mexico, we would have no
• mexican women

without pheromones, we would have no
• rhinoplasty

without a frontal lobe, we would have no
• difference of opinion

without the us treasury, we would have no
• change for the bus

without the isle of langerhans, we would have no
• pancreatic jazz

without webster or roget, we would have no
• synonyms for skank

• without texas, we would have no
alamo or drunken hell-bent bravado

• without tears, we would have no
metaphors for flowers

without laughter
you'd have nothing to laugh about

• without us
you wouldn’t have this poem

so yeah, let’s get behind the mind
because once you have it
you really pretty much need it!

we ran out of cantaloupe

the cantaloupe
what a boring subject
it’s giving me a headache
it’s the last thing
i want to talk about
i really hate it
if we didn’t have cantalouspes
we wouldn’t hafta
figure all this crap out
then we could just
have fun all the time
until we ran
out of money

multiple choice poem

the japanese have a word, hanami
we who get by on ingrish
we have no single word to fit hanami
what does it mean?
1. a mexican word that means “lodestar bodestar”
2. when a bee gets pollen on its ass
3. that which can’t be said in one word
4. I want to hold your egg mcmuffin
5. none of the above
OK, number five, “none of the above”
happens to correct
perhaps because
the Japanese meant something elegant
perhaps beyond
the scope of this poem

hanami means flower viewing
hanami
elegant enough
to stretch the scope
of these multiple choices

Erratadati Roy stared down his catcher and shook off the sign for a curveball. Sure the world was going to hell, but noway was he going to throw this meatball a junk pitch. He was in Rome, Georgia, two weeks out of the Inter-Asia Development League (.025 era for the Bombay Bombers), and here he was in the class A promised land (temporary resident alien work visa) facing a burger fed tobacco spewing hayseed with a 3-2 count in the bottom of the seventh (back end of an abbreviated doubleheader) protecting a 10-8 lead with two runners on base (not his fault). He was gonna strike this motherfucker out, so help him shiva. He called upon the head of the hindu pantheon to help gird his loins for the upcoming pitch, even though he considered himself an adherent of the even-tempered Buddha, but seeing as how the Buddha didn't have no pantheon, and (also and to boot) the situation called for a distinct and sudden disruption of his serene equanimity, he figured he needed a little extra juice, and he didn't care from whence it came. He waited till the catcher rolled his eyes and set a single digit down between his legs and then he (Erratadati Roy - "Errah!" to his snickering teammates) stood up strong, grabbing two seams cross the ball in his glove, and with a final glance towards second base (and, coincidentally, towards Mecca, even tho he didn't give a shit) hurled the ball towards home plate to a destiny he knew was predetermined but hoped would be strike three. It was a good pitch, but a microsecond before the thud of ball against leather and the confirmation of his amalgamated cultural zeitgiest came the crushing crack of ball against ash and a mild "Fuck" uttered by Roy as his head swiveled to mimic the arc of the ball headed out to straight centerfield. There were two outs, and he could tell from the sound of the contact, the speed with which the ball soared into the sky, and the general tenor of his own recent fortunes, that this would go right to the fence, and that he had no idea if he would ride out with the win or be saddled with the loss. He watched the white ball slow as it reached its apex against the night sky and as it seemed to stop still in brilliant equipoise he suddenly became aware that all 1,327 pairs of eyeballs in the Coca-Cola Rome Braves Municipal Stadium were locked in with his, watching the ball as it began its descent, those eyeballs directly hooked to brains suddenly quiescent and silent and joined in the common spectacle of watching something inevitable but not yet apparent, and in that moment, Erratadati Roy (who, he quickly admitted to himself, had never deeply considered the application of buddhist truths to the vagaries of baseball) felt his mind suddenly snap free from its self-reflective gaze, and found himself in the extremely unusual, salubrious and panoramic state which he immediately recognized yet reflexively (to his credit) refused to identify as that condition which the noble Gautama had termed, in many unimpeachable translations, as "detachment".