Anger Management
Rah, Rah
How many extinctions can we claim?
Is someone keeping score?
Somebody needs to keep the score
because we're bad
and gonna kill some more.
Obituary
The self-styled “Painter of Light”
succumbed to natural causes.
Nature has its remedies.
Vermeer will nod his gratitude
and Caravaggio exult
as markets for Kinkades
dry up faster than his corpse.
In Memoriam: Ronald Reagan
There was always a vacancy.
Alzheimer's made it official
and killed you, the sock-puppet
president with wicked hands
up its ass to move the lips
and wave the arms in movements stiff
as those D'onofrio would use
in Men in Black to depict a corpse
stuffed with alien. Your faces
suit the mawkish paintings copied
and hung in tacky houses, sea
to shining sea, alongside blue-eyed
Jesus. It's good you're dead but such
a pity Hinckley Jr. had bad aim.
On Watching the 2012 Republican Convention
Contemporary Republicans
would be good for one thing-
food for the guillotines.
From a Distance
The lights of human occupation
look less like jewels
in the crown of creation
than they do infection
spreading in a terminal disease.
At the Very Private School of Management
Recession is good for business.
It throws 90% of the work force
into fear of worklessness
and they beg for more to do
at the same wage and less
as time goes by. The idled,
seeking work, are interchangeable parts
in the vast device of our control.
Let the public sector train them
in the skills we'll need to lessen
needs for skill. Their loss is our gain
so long as we tip the fear away from us
but in our favor. We make the jobs
and take the jobs away
to manage rates of change
as we know best.
Post-Human Archaeology
We don't deserve the planet we contaminate.
We don't even deserve an atoll
scheduled for annihilation
by an H-bomb test
in 1955.
I'd pray for an asteroid
the size of Rhode Island
but then the wildebeests
would be no more
and the dolphins would boil
and the Siamese would have no bowl
of meow mix and the dogs no kibble or bits
and the cows who die for us would merely die.
Fuck us. We deserve contagion more virulent
than bubonic plague but for which there is no cure
which selects the human genome specifically
and leaves us tasty corpses for the carrion birds
we deride and despise. We deserve
no better fate than to disappear
leaving ruins mysterious
and evocative.
How many extinctions can we claim?
Is someone keeping score?
Somebody needs to keep the score
because we're bad
and gonna kill some more.
Obituary
The self-styled “Painter of Light”
succumbed to natural causes.
Nature has its remedies.
Vermeer will nod his gratitude
and Caravaggio exult
as markets for Kinkades
dry up faster than his corpse.
In Memoriam: Ronald Reagan
There was always a vacancy.
Alzheimer's made it official
and killed you, the sock-puppet
president with wicked hands
up its ass to move the lips
and wave the arms in movements stiff
as those D'onofrio would use
in Men in Black to depict a corpse
stuffed with alien. Your faces
suit the mawkish paintings copied
and hung in tacky houses, sea
to shining sea, alongside blue-eyed
Jesus. It's good you're dead but such
a pity Hinckley Jr. had bad aim.
On Watching the 2012 Republican Convention
Contemporary Republicans
would be good for one thing-
food for the guillotines.
From a Distance
The lights of human occupation
look less like jewels
in the crown of creation
than they do infection
spreading in a terminal disease.
At the Very Private School of Management
Recession is good for business.
It throws 90% of the work force
into fear of worklessness
and they beg for more to do
at the same wage and less
as time goes by. The idled,
seeking work, are interchangeable parts
in the vast device of our control.
Let the public sector train them
in the skills we'll need to lessen
needs for skill. Their loss is our gain
so long as we tip the fear away from us
but in our favor. We make the jobs
and take the jobs away
to manage rates of change
as we know best.
Post-Human Archaeology
We don't deserve the planet we contaminate.
We don't even deserve an atoll
scheduled for annihilation
by an H-bomb test
in 1955.
I'd pray for an asteroid
the size of Rhode Island
but then the wildebeests
would be no more
and the dolphins would boil
and the Siamese would have no bowl
of meow mix and the dogs no kibble or bits
and the cows who die for us would merely die.
Fuck us. We deserve contagion more virulent
than bubonic plague but for which there is no cure
which selects the human genome specifically
and leaves us tasty corpses for the carrion birds
we deride and despise. We deserve
no better fate than to disappear
leaving ruins mysterious
and evocative.
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Author's Note
Poems can be like voodoo dolls. Nothing dies but the anger and need for redress that prompt their creation can be managed without actual violence.
Other stories by Gary Hardaway
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There was always a vacancy. I knew he was senile years before the diagnosis and it terrified me. WE don't deserve the horrors. THEY do. The ones that don't pay attention, that destroy, that don't deserve the planet the rest of us deserve to live on.
sharp & insightful.*
Good pieces.
Thanks, Gloria, James and Sam for having a look at these. I'm grateful for the good attention of fine writers.
Right. Fuckin’. On.
Thank you very much, Steve.
No holding back here. Rah Rah was the most chilling for me. It will haunt inside my head for a long time. Rah Rah.
Man, you laid it all out there. This is the time for that.
Thank you, Emily. I appreciate the reading and comment.
Gary, I must be too old for the twenty-first century. Or too something. I'm not impressed so far and that's said coming out of what is measurably the worst century in human history. Thanks for reading.