Honestly, buddy, I'm too educated,
Handsome, suave, cultured, straight
Talking, yeah right, funny, intelligent,
Charity-minded, well-traveled, green,
Humble, well-endowed, hard working,
American, fresh off the boat immigrant,
Descendant, goddamn it, from the Mayflower,
To be shafted, fucked twice, madoffed,
Upside down mortgaged, underemployed,
Just handed my two-weeks, without a
Safety net beneath my fat ass, drugged
By 24/7 cheeky bullshit, rah, rah, rah,
Time for another SuperBowl commercial,
While I invest my last dime on a machine
That will lick my wife 280 times a minute,
Because the Cyalis just might finish me off,
What with the high blood pressure, and no
Health insurance.
.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Static and Hiss
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Hola, It's Io
- An essay by Susan M. Schultz
- Interviewed by Matthew Sharpe
- Interviewed by Phạm Thị Hoài (in Vietnamese)
- Audio file of an interview by Leonard Schwartz
- Audio files on Pennsound
- YouTube videos
- Posts at the Harriet Blog
- Free Love Pix
- Two poems at Green Integer
- Two poems on Mipoesia
- Two prose poems in Jacket
- Poems translated into Arabic by Tahseen al Khateeb
- A short story in Jacket
- Eight Vietnamese poets translated into English
- Seven Contemporary Italian Poets
- A translation of Roberto Castillo Udiarte's "Vita Canis"
Followers
Bouncer, Janus, Bellhop
Choice Verbiage
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
5 comments:
Fabulous poem, Linh -- you should send it to Keith Olbermann so he can read it at the Super Bowl on Sunday. But I do have one question . . . why the comma after "always" in the third line? Don't get it . . .
Hi Joe,
As is, "always" is a modifier for both "straight talking" and "intelligent." I was trying to be cute, maybe overly. In any case, I'm very glad you like it.
Cheers!
Yo Joe,
I just changed "always" to "yeah right," to gain clarity, at your suggestion, without sacrificing cutesiness...
Cheers!
Linh
That's a good shot, Linh. What I love in this poem is the turn between stanzas (signaled briefly by "goddamn it" in the last line of the first), where the guy, who started out giving the script that many of us have inherited (educated, green, etc.), starts giving voice to the anger and terror that results when all that is jerked away.
Good God, this poem sure is spot on.
Well done!
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