Tim Kahl

Drag Ass Establishmentarianism

The magnolia tulips are shouting at me again.

Thank god I gnawed a hole in that gunny sack

to get where I am today, which is to say

there is no turning back to Mesopotamia to

watch them put on a pair of jeans that sag

in the ass. That was a time that understood

regal display. Even the gods were hands-on,

digging those irrigation canals. They lifted baskets

of mud over their heads and carried them off into

the sky to build their everlasting temples. It was quite

the corvée, but the only account of it was from

some poor dope who ended up as an irrelevant scribe.

That pathetic bastard didn't even have a publisher,

and they didn't ever find his bones either.

But no one was harmed in the making of this

poem. No one was able to pay attention to it

for very long also, except for that clever

interpreter who was tied to his reading chair.

He had a moment of jubilation and then a lifetime

of disappointment after his first bite of the word.

As a result there is no more reason to play the old

fight song, nor to modify the work space

at the first sign of cognitive impairment.

I might as well send money to the Marines

so they can bury me with my computers.

They can bury me with my little scraps of paper

that were used to line the guinea pig's cage.

I could shout my evidence from the tallest tulip tree

that all snakes have a clitoris—that's what

keeps them slithering. Their shiny underbellies

write their pleasures in the dirt. But who would

listen except for the tanukis who've been trained

by the bowls of midnight grub set out by the Buddhists.

It's a goddamned circus out there after the lights

go out, and my pen still drags its ass across the page.

Homo Absurdum

There's a woman in Australia who condones

eating the recently dead. It's our greatest natural

food source, an end to hunger for all the folks along

the streets in tents. Now why didn't I think of that?

A man in South Africa is calling for the end of human

reproduction. He says it's the moral duty of the living

to put an end to all the pain and suffering. If things

turn out the way they should, he says, someday

there will be no more people. What will our dogs do

when we're gone? 40, 000 years of adaptations have

wedded them to us. Will those little sycophants

latch onto another apex predator? Or maybe they'll

start calling the shots, bossing the rodents around,

barking at the birds and justifying the spread of

their indiscriminate shits. I just don't see them

collecting their turds in a bowl of water and shooting

them through a series of pipes to a sacred place,

a place where a magic transformation happens.

And nobody asks about how the poor turd feels —

What if it's like a trail of tears for turds?

Such a brutal species we are. There's no dignity left,

but maybe we can get better. We can get our

machines to pay more attention, to calcualte

outcomes faster than the mind can imagine.

All those previous human limitations can be

overcome. We can finally stop eating altogether

and the human project can go on and on.

We can invent AI to help with abstinence and enjoy

the ever after without any urge or impulse to

serve as inconvenience. The future can be bug free,

carefully planned, masterfully implemented —

and that should take a load off. Whew!

Just now everything seems to be in good working

condition. The pipes are clear, and damn,

don't I feel about five pounds lighter.

Ode to the Urinal Cake

Ambulatory and able we careen down

the aisle of sport drinks only to learn later

the new flavor of Gatorade reminds us of

urinal cakes. The slow but sad disappearance

of them in all the lesser rest rooms means

another marker from the past is gone.

The sweet odor of naphthalene mixed with

benzene variant provided comfort.

We knew the best minds in chemistry were

working to end the stench of perpetual pissing.

Unfortunately, the cakes were also linked to cancer.

Luckily, it's easy to forget this complication

as the memory of aiming for them resurfaces,

the pink lozenges sublimating through

public spaces where men commune to make

their offering to the god of modern plumbing.

As my health fades, no doubt I can

blame it on standing too close to them,

just as I can describe my winces as

responses to watching the strong think

they dominate the weak. This bag of

bacteria and salts I slosh around in

goes about its private leaks into

unsanitary places. The world is dirtied

into submission. Everything alive throws

water on the situation, abusing each

flare up along the way with another round

of abuses. It is not fair that urinal cakes

have been led to the brink of extinction.

It is not fair they still fight back at

the cellular level, interfering with our

instinctive rhythms as we stand and

wonder now at the urinals how

we are piddling our lives away.