The Poem--"Countdown"
Countdown
prelude: a history lesson
the year i was born tseliot died the beatles & stones & civil rights & vietnam & woodstock & the moon & hope & hope & change but they didn't invite me to the party coz i was learning to pee in the big pot and eating the strained apples of the knowledge of good & evil
by the time i was old enough to go to parties, everyone had quit dancing in order to sit on the sofa and look in coke mirrors and contemplate using the razor on themselves
they wrapped everybody's genitals in a national debt rubber & there was no more nakedness because we had our fig leaves on we lost all ethics turned to profits beemers and cuisinarts too scared to risk the dirty death in submitting to saintly motorcyclists & then the market crashed and downsized after the S&L's stole everybody's money & no life on mars & the disaster that strikes anything remotely Challenger so they stopped teaching math after people began to get suspicious about body counts and taxes & invented cable & crack for perpetual adolescents to suck on even got them to keep saying this sucks this sucks this sucks as they sucked on it
X. And then in 1990, we all showed up at a coffeehouse in Lousyville not knowing why we were there but sex was deadly & they raised the drinking age as they stole our social security & given us the dogdish full of recycled i dreamof jeannie on gilligan's fantasy island loveboat to lure us from rap until they could steal it, repackage it, and make a tidy profit off our insignificant rebellions & then those boomer assholes looked up from their fatfree nevergonnadie geritol encrusted oatbran & named us. & named us. & named us generation x. & x'ed us out of the equation.
but those of us who learned math under the old system before they decided it was dangerous for people to know how to count knew it meant ten & the countdown had begun.
IX. In the ninth yr before the millennium they set up the World Wide Web to suck the remaining brains out of anyone who might be dangerous.
VIII. Because it was an election yr, they snorted their mirrors hard, up into their brains razor blade coke & all, to elect a reflection of themselves & the saintly shaman of Lousyville called for a revolution in hypercaffeinated words, words, just words & the usual rubber check we've had since birth.
VII. When he looked in the coke mirror & saw that he had become them he did the right thing with the razor & juniorhigh girls cried as they bought tshirts the record executive used to squeeze out that last bit of profit.
VI. College instructors discovered portfolios & stopped bothering in a postmodern orgy where the students pretended to learn the instructors pretended to teach grading became passe & standards something only rightwing radicals blathered about & everybody was happy especially the administrators because professors didn't want to be confused with the angelheaded hipster of Lousyville who dared to at least profess something & besides they served curfews & loitering laws at the election breakfast but all the seats were taken at the bigpeoples table & the fatfree never-gonna-die geritol encrusted oatbran generation were busy contemplating canned jazz and lamenting the slacker generation who wasn't there & were therefore obviously unworthy.
V. Some guy in LA put weather balloons on his lawn chair & flew close to the sun but it was not an important failure easily handled by the FAA & dutifully reported in newsoftheweird columns we pierced our eyebrows to block our vision & muted our tongues with painful bars to show em some guy blew up a federal building in some passe fit of anarchy & our navels were much more interesting with rings in them & our nose chains an open cry for leadership but nobody bothered to tug then someone told a poet at the local coffeehouse that poetry had a 3000 year history & rules & was a lot of hard work & the poet cried academic! academic! how dare you insinuate that poetry is art & craft & not just my feelings & my perspective provincial & emotional life (flat boring & irrelevant to anyone but me! The piqued poet picked a plebian posse, pugnaciously prepared to publish prodigious piles of pusillanimous pap.
IV. The guilty went free & there was no riot & they added gigs of memory to the computer so that we personally didn't have to remember. The academic went home to study, in secret like masturbation or a proclivity toward rubber suits handcuffs or other perversions like fat women or saintly motorcyclists meanwhile Saint Martha, with her assistants lynette, susan, & aleene got the house norm & bob built together while furnguyed & furnguyjoe taught us how to distress everything so that it looked like it had a history unaware they along with the silk plants by the faux finished walls on the papermache pedestal were just a metaphor for people who no longer could distinguish between surface & substance besides no one can afford the real thing because the babyboomer locusts cut down all the trees and dug up all the marble & now its just too expensive to be real & a dream is a spaceship behind the comet how stupid to believe in anything.
III. We get naked for no particular reason. Even ugly people.
II. The fatfree nevergonnadie geritolencrusted oatbran generation retired & elected themselves god. We were all called to serve. Someone wrote another poem for the election but like everything else it was better in the past & everyone on tv said so & coffeehouse posers dutifully repeated it even though none of them really read the last one & hated it at the time coz it made them feel somehow inadequate but the saintly pseudonuevohipsters get to edit the past to pick only the parts they like steal the big rose off somebody elses birthday cake but we no longer read history or even believe that it was real but the bookstores are all stuffed with books books books about god wicca & elvis as people seek answers to questions they don't know how to ask: we all fall in love in endings.
I. We started killing each other in earnest. Mass production of folk art sold over the internet. Three days of riots and rapes. Someone had an idea but it took two pages to express & therefore was unprintable.
0. We sober up. Some of us go off in search of nonmicroreadypak answers but others do it again & again suck on their pap to pseudonourish their stunted souls, never knowing the difference between living & being alive but some of us dare to dream dare to dream of colonies on mars & progress & cures for diseases even those of the soul & hope & hope & hope & fall in love with beginnings even in the face of despair: risk the real revolution. It's now.
prelude: a history lesson
the year i was born tseliot died the beatles & stones & civil rights & vietnam & woodstock & the moon & hope & hope & change but they didn't invite me to the party coz i was learning to pee in the big pot and eating the strained apples of the knowledge of good & evil
by the time i was old enough to go to parties, everyone had quit dancing in order to sit on the sofa and look in coke mirrors and contemplate using the razor on themselves
they wrapped everybody's genitals in a national debt rubber & there was no more nakedness because we had our fig leaves on we lost all ethics turned to profits beemers and cuisinarts too scared to risk the dirty death in submitting to saintly motorcyclists & then the market crashed and downsized after the S&L's stole everybody's money & no life on mars & the disaster that strikes anything remotely Challenger so they stopped teaching math after people began to get suspicious about body counts and taxes & invented cable & crack for perpetual adolescents to suck on even got them to keep saying this sucks this sucks this sucks as they sucked on it
X. And then in 1990, we all showed up at a coffeehouse in Lousyville not knowing why we were there but sex was deadly & they raised the drinking age as they stole our social security & given us the dogdish full of recycled i dreamof jeannie on gilligan's fantasy island loveboat to lure us from rap until they could steal it, repackage it, and make a tidy profit off our insignificant rebellions & then those boomer assholes looked up from their fatfree nevergonnadie geritol encrusted oatbran & named us. & named us. & named us generation x. & x'ed us out of the equation.
but those of us who learned math under the old system before they decided it was dangerous for people to know how to count knew it meant ten & the countdown had begun.
IX. In the ninth yr before the millennium they set up the World Wide Web to suck the remaining brains out of anyone who might be dangerous.
VIII. Because it was an election yr, they snorted their mirrors hard, up into their brains razor blade coke & all, to elect a reflection of themselves & the saintly shaman of Lousyville called for a revolution in hypercaffeinated words, words, just words & the usual rubber check we've had since birth.
VII. When he looked in the coke mirror & saw that he had become them he did the right thing with the razor & juniorhigh girls cried as they bought tshirts the record executive used to squeeze out that last bit of profit.
VI. College instructors discovered portfolios & stopped bothering in a postmodern orgy where the students pretended to learn the instructors pretended to teach grading became passe & standards something only rightwing radicals blathered about & everybody was happy especially the administrators because professors didn't want to be confused with the angelheaded hipster of Lousyville who dared to at least profess something & besides they served curfews & loitering laws at the election breakfast but all the seats were taken at the bigpeoples table & the fatfree never-gonna-die geritol encrusted oatbran generation were busy contemplating canned jazz and lamenting the slacker generation who wasn't there & were therefore obviously unworthy.
V. Some guy in LA put weather balloons on his lawn chair & flew close to the sun but it was not an important failure easily handled by the FAA & dutifully reported in newsoftheweird columns we pierced our eyebrows to block our vision & muted our tongues with painful bars to show em some guy blew up a federal building in some passe fit of anarchy & our navels were much more interesting with rings in them & our nose chains an open cry for leadership but nobody bothered to tug then someone told a poet at the local coffeehouse that poetry had a 3000 year history & rules & was a lot of hard work & the poet cried academic! academic! how dare you insinuate that poetry is art & craft & not just my feelings & my perspective provincial & emotional life (flat boring & irrelevant to anyone but me! The piqued poet picked a plebian posse, pugnaciously prepared to publish prodigious piles of pusillanimous pap.
IV. The guilty went free & there was no riot & they added gigs of memory to the computer so that we personally didn't have to remember. The academic went home to study, in secret like masturbation or a proclivity toward rubber suits handcuffs or other perversions like fat women or saintly motorcyclists meanwhile Saint Martha, with her assistants lynette, susan, & aleene got the house norm & bob built together while furnguyed & furnguyjoe taught us how to distress everything so that it looked like it had a history unaware they along with the silk plants by the faux finished walls on the papermache pedestal were just a metaphor for people who no longer could distinguish between surface & substance besides no one can afford the real thing because the babyboomer locusts cut down all the trees and dug up all the marble & now its just too expensive to be real & a dream is a spaceship behind the comet how stupid to believe in anything.
III. We get naked for no particular reason. Even ugly people.
II. The fatfree nevergonnadie geritolencrusted oatbran generation retired & elected themselves god. We were all called to serve. Someone wrote another poem for the election but like everything else it was better in the past & everyone on tv said so & coffeehouse posers dutifully repeated it even though none of them really read the last one & hated it at the time coz it made them feel somehow inadequate but the saintly pseudonuevohipsters get to edit the past to pick only the parts they like steal the big rose off somebody elses birthday cake but we no longer read history or even believe that it was real but the bookstores are all stuffed with books books books about god wicca & elvis as people seek answers to questions they don't know how to ask: we all fall in love in endings.
I. We started killing each other in earnest. Mass production of folk art sold over the internet. Three days of riots and rapes. Someone had an idea but it took two pages to express & therefore was unprintable.
0. We sober up. Some of us go off in search of nonmicroreadypak answers but others do it again & again suck on their pap to pseudonourish their stunted souls, never knowing the difference between living & being alive but some of us dare to dream dare to dream of colonies on mars & progress & cures for diseases even those of the soul & hope & hope & hope & fall in love with beginnings even in the face of despair: risk the real revolution. It's now.