I'm Sick

I swear not all my poetry is this jaded.

A duel: everywhere, on every street corner,
separated by a few cents in price.
Every dad born between 1960 and 1980
looks out the window and says obsessively,
God, the price of gas is high,
while they visit their favorite massage parlor nearby.

An alter to appetitive fetishization.
Same place we go for vehicle fuel, sure.
That's a great idea—fuel the dragon and the stomach.
Ancient hunger dressed in polyester
Plato's appetites just threw up
at the sight of such fluorescent light
beamed down on all that soda.
Even a Roman augur couldn't predict
The ritual of filling the tank, 
not even if he saw seven crows flying from left to right
As he stepped down from the pillar’d mount

satisfying himself before God 
and on the face of some Temple prostitute. 

This is a poem I wrote last year for a writing program, and it seems like it doesn’t fit with the tenor of what I am submitting, or the chapbook I am compiling, so I figured I would put it out here. The imagery is stark, and it veers from the surrealist mental reflection that I navigate towards. It’s sort of a fresh difference from the forms I normally write, but man, the attitude is still there.

-JNG