(untitled as of right now)

If there were a politician who ran on the slogan, "Gym, Tan, Laundry",
you'd be his or her number-one fan.
I can see you front and center in the crowd,
holding your sign aloft,
your Abercrombie jeans smothering your thighs
like you painted them on, just like you did your face.
Maybe for once in your life, you'd do something,
like become the candidate's PR go-to,
considering you already spend 9.72 hours per day
on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.
You'd be perfect:
taking promo picture's of your favorite politician,
interacting with her people - taking shot for shot together at the local bar,
your favorite snapshot being the one
with her head buried in the trashcan before 11 PM.

I'm sorry, am I offending you? Well, you offend me.

While your fellow students are being pepper sprayed,
your professors being ripped from the lines of a peaceful protest
by their hair,
you skip over the news coverage,
citing the fact, "it makes you sad",
as if it wore a legitimate excuse for ignorance.

Born with a silver spoon in your mouth,
you fear nothing of the world,
of your future,
because you believe your destiny has been paid in advance.
But what will you do when that spoon
goes sour in your mouth,
turning out to be nothing but pewter?

At least your puckered, twisted face will match that of the beaten and the broken for once in your life.

Eternal

Eternal

Warmth left your body;
The bell of a newborn heard:
there is life in death.

EN240

EN240

When will the week end, they say,

asking, praying while seated at round tables

for relief, from the work, the rush of college life –

ticking off the days to the weekend,

to drunken stupor and land of non-memory.

The irony of youth wishing away the days

while the old lay in bed, dreaming of more:

more time with family, more time to learn,

more time to breathe, and for that one more

Ginsbergian poet to rekindle their flame.

Bitterness and reason has burned low in their hearts,

The faded embers and charred masses of the heat of passion,

of rights, or equality and cause passed on to the next generation

where it becomes shriveled down

to internet arguments over the reign of JoePa,

to bitching and complaints of parents, of professors,

of paying colleges to make them do work,

and the very last coal of passion now turned to this:

a grocery list of ‘eyelashes’ and ‘alcohol’

cradled between two lacquered fingernails

while Coltraine plays in the background

and Ginsberg is on the lips.

For once in this cinderblock box of Hell,

I have found that coal of passion, burnt down to a grain of sand

but still smoking,

and just as the sax solo enters, I see her mascara-ed eyes fly open wide,

and I think “My God, she feels it too!”…

Tampons.

Tampons, she adds in a scribble

as if the world depended on it.