A Good Idea I. A Good Idea Kick an empty can across the Milky Way or lick Saturn’s sugar rings like cleaning a spoon or an ear. Now anything is a good idea now that we have nothing. (We are all FUCKED. We are remote to an engine that starves us and cock-teases our political metabolism, then lets us picnic on rinds of light and seeds of shelled decency. Well, I swore off the blood and bulk and gorged myself instead on crushes and water grains, and wiped my mouth on everything that ever seemed like a good idea at each respective time. Then I halved. I grated the rust- ing legs of the amputee sun. I planted the relapse in the soil of a thousand cracks. “It’s over, and it’s been over,” I said, kicking a grenade down the Milky Way and resolving not to let any of this happen to my children. I cut my white finger on a darker can, the teeth of that tin helmet.) * * * The hostess called “Kerouac, party of 100” but moved on to the next group before we got there. So the Government, the Electric Man, raped the waitress with his fat fingers down her red throat and stole and ate the Passion right in the kitchen. (He ate it raw, right out of the box!) Holding his piggy mouth and wiping his piggy snout, He left before coffee and slid a quarter in the jukebox that is on the way out, that is the local team of consciousness: Mad Tao and his disease; and they unrolled and sang their saddest song: You cannot invent emotion You can only invert an ocean Turn the world over Love is a loner. II. A Tale of Two Cities We unrolled our tongues as the red carpets under HooverVille 2003. I watched the blue blood boil over tanned pots, watched through under sketches of blued hair. I want to hitchhike to a new angle because here the world dwindles to a meeting between the blind who is leaving the blind and the inverted ocean. The newspapers are pagist. They dress to regress. Soon we’ll be planting people like trees I want my I (still) want my I (still) want my Mother TV. III. Nuclear The ocean will invert out of habit, and I will have to move. But we know we are gods, we are Fate, we are Jupiter, We are a push, we are a rile, we are nuclear. Epics do not keep the poet running hot, and dead men make slow angels. Carbon