Newspoem 10 Dec 2009

A Midwestern Parataxis

Chinese fast food: Hot and sour soup. Egg and sweetener ooze balm over chapped, sore lungs.

The absurdity of running an air-conditioner in October in a building whose internal temperature is schizophrenic.

Steamed antiwar praxis. Everyone I know is disappointed in our Democratic president except one Republican friend of a liberal friend.

Unlike Chuck Raasch of the Gannett News Service, I don't find it interesting that the President didn't once use the word "surge."

Work to do like a thick blanket of snow disrupting all traffic, silent, thick, blinding.

Running the numbers, trying to connect the flow of dots on my financial spreadsheet to my unchanging behavior: a failed experiment in biofeedback.

I'm not slowing down, but that means the world is accelerating.

African recipe: cashew and sweet-potato soup. A race against collapse to have dinner on the table before the chest cold plows me under blankets.

Expatriates mind wars. The good life, as analyzed through binoculars, a microscope, a kaleidoscope, and a mirror, but seldom simply seen or simply lived.

Asian hipsters’ ripped punk clothes clean and new.

That he even has that mustache says he is lost.

Disarm ants, expiate war.

People, whose arms, when they walk, do not swing but hang straight down at their sides, arouse suspicion.

How a poem can get in your head.

Flexetarian dietary math:

1 slice pepperoni
+ 1 slice cheese
____________________
= zero

Sidewalk always blocked by enormous, slow-moving athletes in expensive track clothes.

When did lunchboxes become cool?

Did I buy those records because I knew I would feel guilty for spending money, then angry for feeling guilty for spending money, then vindicated in striking out against the forces that made me angry?

Subway is a disgusting name for a sandwich.

Nothing says welcome to Illinois like a wind-wrecked, inside-out umbrella in every corner garbage can.

Mad anxieties warp rats. If the world is accelerating, it must increase in mass, which could explain why I weigh more now.

I'm not getting older–everything is.

And yet this truth must coexist with another–that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.

As president, I am a war tax.

Maybe he knows what he's doing.

Extirpate war as man's id.

When will we run out of names for bands?

Newspoetry by William at Spineless Books