One Poem by Jay Passer

SQUEAMISH LIKE A DUMBASS IN CAHOOTS WITH FASCISTS

 

young people like to squat in the new grass and drink wine and eat bread and ripe cheese and apples straight from the trees over yonder where the cows graze listlessly before the slow surprise of the nuclear explosion. 

 

you may not be so young anymore but you must remember waking up from the only kind of dream that gets you super hot, right?

 

where in the middle of the night behind your locked door some mysterious woman lurks and then the door breaks off its hinges pounding open and screaming, you awaken!

you’re about to be beaten 

or stabbed 

or strangled!

it's hot!

 

but sometimes you reminisce; you fall to earth like a broken satellite;

only to remember the young, enlisted, murdered; 

the sacrificed in a death-pit of shovelled shadowland;

propaganda recruits, ascendent poster-children...

 

oh hell; they just gotta go.

(like that song stuck in your head).

for what they could ever yearn to accomplish, there's plenty of AI to go around. 

 

I get hot 

watching the kind of porn, I mean,

the kind of hot I liken to certain divisions of hell yet to be invented.

 

and the old days 

in the new grass?

when we were slim,

drunk,

and

indestructible?

 

(a nod from on high)

(plenty of time to sleep when you're dead).

 

then

we learned to drive, we voted for one or another’s authoritarianism, we settled into sloth, mortgages, newborns and oblivion.

 

(a song like acid thrown in your face).

 

maybe I regret not marrying my first love, so finally, we could stare into each other’s eyes while being murdered for our ancestral faith.

Jay Passer's work has appeared in print and online since 1988. He's been included in numerous anthologies, is the author of 13 collections of poetry and prose, and is widely published worldwide, most recently in Don't Submit!, Horror Sleaze Trash, Fixator Press, and Piker Press. His newest publication, SQUIRREL, a novel, is available from Alien Buddha Press and Amazon. A lifetime factotum, Passer's been employed as dishwasher, barista, cook, housepainter, courier, warehouseman, bookseller, soda jerk, and mortician's apprentice. Curiously, his written work has never yielded any serious remunerative status. Jay Passer lives in San Francisco, the city of his birth, with a pantheon of imaginary cats and some very real houseplants.