https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Poems, by Jason Wilkinson.
The Knobkerrie (A Prologue)
This is not about a lot of things.
It's not about a dim-witted politician who poured his country down the drain.
It's not about superheroes
or a boy necromancer
who traipses through the slumbering ashes of Time
between gym class and study hall.
It's not about procuring a 'swell tent'
by utilizing common household items.
It's not about hotrods with
tinted glass and diamond wheel-covers.
It's not a dissertation weighing the pros and cons
of the latest weight loss scheme.
It's not about the sequins on your prom dress
or how sad it is that some famous person died.
It's not about TV, DVD, or MP3, not a
resuscitation of antediluvian scripture
or the Phantoms that supposedly crafted it.
No place here will you find a cure for dyspepsia.
Or Gout. Or Cancer or Pneumonia.
Or death.
This is not about investing money in cheap real estate.
Or how there isn't enough of it.
This isn't about what to do with your retirement package,
the number of pills you have to take these days to remain alive,
where to send the puppy that keeps tinkling on your new carpet,
then to plant acacias and tulips, the rise of unemployment,
low IQ's governing Everything, or why they made such a big deal
about Pee Wee Herman jerking off.
No this isn't about UFO's, or JFK.
This isn't about an innocent girl.
Or how a senator had one killed and then ran for re-election.
It's not about Weapons Of Mass Revenge or why no one
seems to care how many Uncle Sammy is proliferating these days.
Not about Watergate or Bill Gaits, tenements or tintinnabulation.
This isn’t about sweat-shops, Viagra, or what your mother looked like
when she was a wistful young trollop.
This isn't about the evolution of the pogo stick!
or the land mine
or Da Vinci's crackpot inventions.
It’s not a call to arms, an end to arms,
or a ceasefire.
There is no blueprint for living
hidden among these words,
no gods, no slave trainers, no fainting lickspittles.
No pervicacious, phlegmatic tyrants
evaporating slowly into jaundice and crayons
shall find themselves trapped under these floodlights.
No lost souls will find their way here.
This isn't about me
or my innocuous habits
or my schizophrenic grandmother.
It's not about laureates yawning in a smoky townhouse.
This is not about mealy-mouthed five-for-a-dollar shamans
who are too busy ramming choir boys
to give a rat's dick about anything.
This isn't about the drug trade
or what the government is doing with it's proceeds.
This isn't a song. Or a jingle.
This is not an attempt to collect on a debt.
This is not about justice.
Thaumaturic Lego Set
get right or
get out get
Time & poke a hole skim the fabric-jade curtain aisle 3
:wheelchairs, iodine
newsreels, gym classanother tape-job
another way to build yourself out of matchstickslight the mess just run
run like a child w/it's
hair in a blaze of nectarines,
peroxide let the buck stop only when you've no more
things to burn:Create a shortcut to the becoming size
then write leaflets
about it
paint your stupid face all over them
aisle 4 Mr. Potato Head head of lettuce cucumber-patios
$5.99 won't the morons next door
shit thumbtacks on a summer virus when they
see how well it compliments the grass oh look at all the
drawn pocks latched window
still the glass breaks like
hot nickels through frozen wire velocity did us in
and now the only thing left
on the menu wears a nameplate
, drives a hotrod plays
hooky just to finger herself to breathe where the touch is
vapid crenellations feet
pause and flex writhe and shimmy to the jangle of bellsanother crash course
another half-eaten scrap metal parfait
-nosedive
another bright idea
was to have a song they wind down
statues fizzle into paper.