Three Poems by AE Reiff

 

Lebensraum Burgers  A Space Odyssey

 

I wanted to write millennials and General Zs right here--

as Encephalitic verses bash, and the microcatch is near.

You don’t know this but “Google gas,”  

sends payloads in the air

where up in space Burgers fly and serve with fries.

This process is intentional

and amped to save our world.

As swallows build their culvert nests

on burned out sticks and snacks

our cities are the burgers lived in by their cooks.

 

That’s conundrum, for burgers make up verse.

In outer space they serve with cheese and sprouts

And soon we’ll all be patrons there

And all our clean plates there we all come clean!  

 

Burgers or French fries I can’t make up my myyminde     

And how to eat Giant’s they fry.

Invisible  super flux ---there is where you are.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

  

--When Hydrocephalic Giants were a required course at State

and all the t-shirts wore it, just like the Little Pigs.

Little piggy poplets were  a way of saying Pup,

[barks in background] registrations run.

 

--Back to the beginning of this prodiginon

giants cook their  books don’t mean lactate

unless you know the book is a feeding the little dog,

but how can a book have both a fork and tongue?

That is our prodigimon.

where read and eat are one.

 

Mouth and teeth encrypted words

like moths moles in the parlour at dawn.

Up on the closet shelf they play

With flies in the back of the pantry

weirds go up in the reader’s brain

And then they out full come.

 

But back in the brain, they buned them all

some meat pack wit and blurb encephela-food.

Sugar sugar on the wall who eats the best

brain taters tell CDC made?

 

Thousands of MFAs were drugged out

Lying in the grass

Mouth Feeding Anomaly,

Translated means foie gras.

The more they eat the bigger they get. 

Consumed a lot like candy bits,

little dogs supply bon appetit.

  

If dogs and books  mess up and invisible giants  too,

Boiled down to nubbin,

They squirm out what they do,

solvents catch the disconnect,

to redirect the pyrotech

that mess to make into a stew.

    

 [Sung to There is Superstition-- Stevie Wonder]

 

Constant replication

with consumer application

Constant replication –

WRITING ON THE WALL

constant  application

new world publication.

 

 [Dr King] Edible at last!

They eat themselves at last  

 

 

[To When Johnny Comes Marching Home]:

 

We catch  the imprints  by the Head. Hurrah, hurrah.

We don’t make hybrid mutants up for naught, for naught

A lot of mushrooms by the cap,

Are pallor white and tough of stalk

 Hurrah Our Johnny cleans the dens

 So catch your breath my gastral friend.

 

The wash reports, the phones redial,

The lamps reciting say,

what books did you read today

and what re---mains behind?

Go down the list of presence void

The sounds, are all the same.

 

Contraction Footprints in the yard

are never hard to see.

Research has dubbed them Cephalites

And encephality

I bet you know what dinner is

The holes the giants left behind

Are holes into your mind.

 

In this way the giants leave their dents and prints behind.

The prints are craters on the moon---

craters deep and wide,

at one command the several pools

will breach a flooding tide,

when we accept the hole as proof

the lake remains behind.

 

Pepto Bismol in the hole Or alum cast is poured,

To cast the hole and print them all

Just turn your device on.

Now you see what matters most

When you cast the hole engrossed,

and that’s… your… chance… to welcome our Johnny home.  

                   

Giants of the invisible sound just like a joke

We’d hate  to see one in the flesh

It sounds just like a hole.  

Flash as flesh, a Meteor dressed

Goldilocks’ dome too big for us,

to see but not  to partly entertain.

 

The final sign of giant growth will end our story now

Obesity farms and ranchers’ herds

Succeed beyond the pale.

One third of readers in every town

Consume morefood at home and cows

And chicken readers grazing their own.

 

Don’t graze in an open field My cow,

rebreed, rebreed,

Feedlot libraries and slaughterhouse U’s

are in the FBI,

fry brain come clean

After all it’s the tender mind they fry.

Sure that leaves the Walkingells

as government does its herds

 

 

The giant throats with every cry Resound resound.

Respect, respect, respect the mind

Take off and leave it behind.

 

Giants like their poets self-consumed,

self-dole them with some skill,

so farms and industries endure a greater scale.

 

Und Poppellis eat their food.

stockholders fly to Mars.

To take the show abroad they fly

so Look out Mars, the buzzards fly,

The giants are coming home.

Take a lesson from the Walkingells

When the universe Europeans come home

 If you’re still hungry take a chance

 to try to finish the moon.

 

 

Gravediggers on Ben Bulben

 

Together

 

We keep the clod where Ben is laid

like someone’s hubrid seed,

A working stiff who waits

To rise and intercede.

 

Each night he beats the clay

To learn to sprout, intervening grass or sky

forget the trust between. A star sits by his grave

 

--I think he’s been assigned some task.

 

--I guess you mean his politics

the new old man laid down with his infernal war.

 

--Will we know him and his Maude?

 

--Will he know himself?

 

Shuffle the cards, both hand and root

the pain of feet and mate, as spuds repent,

the seed balls sprout and he’ll come out!

 

--You think he’s like some seed laid down?

a pumpkin vine to nosh,

thick crust and mash that immigrants pick up?

 

--I dug a garden once myself to grow the onion wild.

 

-- Preposterous convention-potato lions stand

on some big ball and sound some horn and go to ground.

 

--Don’t argue me day a life and in each night a death.

We wait on our begetting of dreams to root the ground.

The easy part is the end forgetting, while we bounce around.

 

--You think a cherub curb side came

To all creatures great and small?

 

--Come up a new way then!

What gets most is the begetting Ben can tell

Whatever growing up, whether everything is real.

 

Science was inevitable once,

And contradiction stored the more it gets away,

 

--If you means mouse, or horse, a drop in ocean comes,

How many lives you seen?

 

--I knew one but it was not enough.

The love of contrast shall we say,

hoed by summer, watered pride,

so rose could areole from the throat of birds

and milkweed pods.

 

--Oh that’s some source,

A bird in a shrub, a rose in the yard

Or overheard on a ridge

The siege of opposites.

 

-What I remember is heads and hearts.

I get the gist. It goes like this:

 

“mirror, mirror when I rise and take my winter breath,

With only moonlit wind and flower on the heath…”

 

--Go fill your mug.

It‘s all about hard fighting men putten under stone.

If you had died my friend you’d know you slept too long,

wake up in rows, revive the bones

of shrouded dawn and wounds.

 

--We embroider what we see produced right here.

Peel potatoes and roast meat.

 

--Ben taxed his femur to the earth, we waited side by side.

This bench unknown was where he’d gone

and I woke in my bed.

 

Together:

We keep the clod where Ben is laid.

We keep a plot in case he’s raised.

What’s then to do? Pull up a chair.

We’ll wait to hear his view.

 

 

Description of the Self

 

I came prepared to communicate

the road splintered ribbon of water

to melt and reform like a river.

So I nailed these mottoes to a tree

For the bed of sleep where they lay

Unreached by the old man, the obese

Who ask of the meadow, have you see my self.

 

Sure I came with horn and grunt, Bugle, yodel and cup,

to pretend to rut but for the counterfeit

Of my refusal to cause the death

By fire of the self

Let the worst be believed, the best suspect

Lest I seem to join in its neglect.

 

That architects speak in their own deaths

With consequent road closings and announce the news

by air, that when in a thunderous boom

a bull falls at evening it is god sport.

The body fills a pickup bed, a rack of antlers sticks up

not intending to tell there is no denying.

 

Without the hunt they’d overrun the boundary

of starvation, there being no other predation

Death is genuine who hunts the noble predator but himself?

 

The road was ice, the fire was ice

The wind terse with aspen leaves

The logs stood straight

covered with blue needles

Marked with blue x’s

The Spruce trunks lay insulting axes

Of a million forms.

 

But you had come to a burning smoke thick in a valley,

Ravens coaxed into flame with Helio tongued aspens

 

See the age marks, molds and lines

the lichen infested bard black?

Discolorations? All these precursor species

It was good for them to die.

 

Now the wind is silent

Declines its aspect toward the sun

Does it make sense

To those who prowl night

That the enemy is light

For it brings the hunter in his pickup—light!

The rifle crossed in its sight—light!

The enabling light, the all-seeing many,

 

Then its absence, then danger when it comes,

when it goes, sees while it is here.

All wonderful for the least small rain.

 

Because you were sentient and poetic

The enemy envied your voice

The trigger pulse your finger

The joy of leaping.

 

Didn’t the indoor envy you

The outdoors, the creation?

 

Had you been in hospital or the store

Or drove a car, had a job,

But you sang all night while they covered

Their heads with the stars

had flashlights so they couldn’t see

Cars so they couldn’t walk

Mastered all prairies, plowed species.

 

The  radical non thinker insult to their being

UNcovered at night Must be shot through

sapient structure Being afraid.

 

He had made him to be like us

All creatures of our God and King

But he became himself

Creature with a soul who reflects the sun.

Did the bull when it mounted its mate

Have soul? Lie you obese one,

Had it soul when ungulated its belly, thirst? 

Joy when itself sang? Cared for its young?

You were the superior one

Let everything that has breath say it.

 

Where have I seen the empty hearth

The abandoned wife, rejected son? I heard talk, cousins of light

The boast beast of strife, seen you bark to begin

Who began overgrazing then you blame them

For continuation, for tire tracks in the meadow

tree stumps that look like stone cats chopping and cutting.

 

Men are masters of disguise

Said Las Casas, discerning soul,

Not alone in Spanish men,

In Indians, elf and slaves

The soul that sinneth it shall die

Not he raven nor the owl.

 

Shoot the gun make life more fair

Than angels, leaven, evolve to be.

Only at night unseen retreats

At the far ridge turn and fling

Their leiderhosen, weltanzand metamorph gold

All the next day guns fall cold.

If AE Reiff is kidding here and you like more serious poems try Red Head, A Reparation for Cruelty / Poems of the Unknown Soldier from the Book of Taliesin (2022).