The Carnival Self
Even before pain whose absence
has been called the meaning of pleasure
if you hear your jaw hinges crunch
while you munch an egg salad sandwich,
that means nothing good. It means
your skull won’t be chosen to decorate
a lawyer’s simulated walnut display case
along with autographed baseballs
and photographs of smirking politicians
cupping milky-eyed fish whose bellies sag
between supinated palms in a gray
defeat like slyly presented offerings.
When your skull will tumble down
a dirt heap where a robot backhoe
has just disgorged a dripping mouthful
of planet earth while scooping out
a subterranean paradise where elites
pre-chosen to preserve the best of us
will conduct our specie’s busy progress
when the topside gets too warm
for business it will surface bucktoothed
minus the mandible that completes
a sardonic grin a mock memento mori
needs to make its ironic jest. But dust
to dust will be your dull brain’s fate
that wasted your brief hour of light
in fretful wailing and gnashing of teeth
while those selected for salvation
and hid not their trillions under barrels
but made ready to have their brains
shelled like walnuts at the moment
of their animal deaths to be frozen
and unthawed in a more perfect future
to silently hum in luminous blue
solutions and re-continue scheming up
business deals in perpetuity while robots
who will perform all the world’s work
in a painless Nirvana will nourish them
because lacking the Desire that rages
without surcease in our soft white meat
they would do nothing but be. Your dust
must rejoin the dust banged loose
when the universe began when your skull
will be tossed aside and re-mixed
in the churn next to some similar skull
with teeth worn to nubs from gnawing hides
and a perfect hole cracked in its dome
where someone dug out the protein
to struggle on through yet another day.
has been called the meaning of pleasure
if you hear your jaw hinges crunch
while you munch an egg salad sandwich,
that means nothing good. It means
your skull won’t be chosen to decorate
a lawyer’s simulated walnut display case
along with autographed baseballs
and photographs of smirking politicians
cupping milky-eyed fish whose bellies sag
between supinated palms in a gray
defeat like slyly presented offerings.
When your skull will tumble down
a dirt heap where a robot backhoe
has just disgorged a dripping mouthful
of planet earth while scooping out
a subterranean paradise where elites
pre-chosen to preserve the best of us
will conduct our specie’s busy progress
when the topside gets too warm
for business it will surface bucktoothed
minus the mandible that completes
a sardonic grin a mock memento mori
needs to make its ironic jest. But dust
to dust will be your dull brain’s fate
that wasted your brief hour of light
in fretful wailing and gnashing of teeth
while those selected for salvation
and hid not their trillions under barrels
but made ready to have their brains
shelled like walnuts at the moment
of their animal deaths to be frozen
and unthawed in a more perfect future
to silently hum in luminous blue
solutions and re-continue scheming up
business deals in perpetuity while robots
who will perform all the world’s work
in a painless Nirvana will nourish them
because lacking the Desire that rages
without surcease in our soft white meat
they would do nothing but be. Your dust
must rejoin the dust banged loose
when the universe began when your skull
will be tossed aside and re-mixed
in the churn next to some similar skull
with teeth worn to nubs from gnawing hides
and a perfect hole cracked in its dome
where someone dug out the protein
to struggle on through yet another day.
