My Mind Is A Wasteland: An Epic
(Apologies to T. S. Eliot)
1. I Feel Like a Buried Dead Guy.
April was the cruelest month, as I could not pay my electric bill,
And it bred a blush in my dead face when the electric company called.
Winter was better, though I still didn't like it.
At least the snow buried my apartment,
Keeping away my pesky relatives, (but not the roaches).
And the silence fed Life
Into my poetic thoughts.
(For my thoughts are the highest form of poetry.)
Summer surprised me with its heat, for I still hadn't paid my electric bill and I got really sweaty.
So I went into sunlight. Into the Hofgerden'
And I drank coffee and talked.
I thought it would make me feel better but it didn't.
And then,
"Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch!" (The heat was too much and I started talking in a foreign language.)
And I remembered when I was little I went and saw the arch-duke and rode a sled with a girl named Marie,
And it was scary and then I read a lot, and then left for the south when it got cold.
(I did it to see if she missed me but she never even wrote.)
Then I got depressed.
What could grow out of my stony rubbish? I wondered.
And I knew I could figure it out if I knew what "stony rubbish" meant.
The next day it was one hundred and one degrees.
And my Mind was a heap of broken images where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gave no shelter, and the cricket got no relief.
(I didn't have a clue what I was talking about either, but it sounded good so I wrote it in my poetry notebook.)
It was hot that night and I dreamed a red clay rock was telling me to come under its shadow.
And there was no sound of water in the red rock.
And it gave me a handful of dust but I wanted water and then I saw my shadow and woke up.
I was freaked out.
So I called my therapist and he said I was probably just thirsty and hung up.
And I drank water and remembered a girl I had used to know who liked hyacinths. (She was after Marie.)
Oed' und leer das Meer!
By the way, did you know that Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless, even though she was known to be the wisest woman in Europe?
I didn't think you did. That's why I told you.
And then I thought of someone I knew who had buried his wife in his garden.
And I couldn't sleep so I called him and said,
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"
And then he hung up on me and I didnít know why.
I was sad, for no one liked me and even the breezes avoided my company.
"Hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable, mon frËre!"
And I was disturbed because I was talking in that language again.
So I called back my therapist but he wouldn't answer.
Anyway I could go on and on but I have to go to the bathroom so I'll make it snappy.
My life is a black hole, but I am so talented I could stretch that fact out to a pretty long book. An EPIC poem of HUGE proportions.
(But I need to go to the bathroom and get a new therapist so I don't have time right now.)
And on top of that, London Bridge fell down.
And I had to fish with an arid plain of modern stupidity for my scenery.
And then I'll never get over:
Why then Ile fit you.
Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih! !
~Finis~
Sent as a joke to The League of American Poets
