Our Town

I haunt my own neighborhood.
I'm a disembodied spirit
forever waking up in the fourth grade;
an echoing wraith floating above
a black cesspool of poison
that never seems to drain.
At the bottom of this moldering fecal pit
lives a monster; a wild feral boy-creature.

And he would destroy this town if he could,
burn it to the ground.
Go motherfucking godzilla ape-shit!
He would feed you your deepest fear:
the unravelling of the flimsy cobwebs
that hold your postcard world together.

Isn't that what you're afraid of?
The rogue elephant?
The breaking of the contract?
What about all these children,
tainted by your lopsided constipation,
walking around with nuclear bombs in their guts?

If his hands would stop slipping off the rim,
that boy in the cesspool
would vomit up the town's toxic waste
in a homicidal berserker frenzy,
disemboweling the citizens
and ripping out intestines with his teeth.

And I'm watching the frantic wolf-boy
through a two-way mirror in the waiting room
and secretly hoping that he succeeds.
This town would be reduced to a charnel house,
a smoking pile of debris, a Hiroshima,
and a voice would tell my desperate spirit
to "go into the light."

You have no idea how I was mangled
when I tried to squeeze myself
into your sad little shoebox.
You never could see beyond your next bucket of oats.
Did you think you could throw a sack
over the raging sun?
I wish I could find the words
that would rip open your chest
and squeeze your heart like a giant fist
until you were gasping for your very life!

Because the life in me,
that was obscured by the carrot
dangling in your face,
is deeper and more ferocious
than you can imagine.

It sees through your tv guide persona like an x-ray.
It can create worlds, motherfucker--entire worlds!

It's volatile and boiling white-hot;
a nitro-glycerin factory on an earthquake fault
at the center of the earth.

It's carnivorous and will bite
your goddamned arm off at the elbow
if you try to feed it.

It sees the most fragile bittersweet beauty
in things you wouldn't even wipe your ass with.

It smells the pain you try to hide
like a shark smells blood.

It throbs with every shifting nuance
of the emotional biosphere
like a stinging open wound.

Forget the fucking ice cream!
It can offer you six thousand different flavors
of exuberance and joy!

This immensity is shut up in a dark little room now,
a broom closet in the mall,
sobbing and shrieking and rattling the doorknob
as I float through your ruins.

Nothing grows or changes
in this coffee-stained shadowland,
this scratchy, crumbling
sepia-toned film-loop.

But one of these narcoleptic days,
in some dark monochromatic corner,
I'm hoping to spot
an incongruous patch of green...

David Aronson
July 2006