Execution Dream No.2

Scars of Utopia
by Jeffery McDaniel

Suppose there was a thermometer able to measure
contentment. Would you slide it under

your tongue and risk being told you were on par
with a thirteenth century farmer who lost

all his teeth in a game of hide and seek? Would you
be tempted to abandon your portable conscience,

the remote control that lets you choose who you are
for every occasion? I wish we cared more

about how we sounded than how we looked.
Instead of primping before mirrors each morning,

we'd huddle in echo chambers, practicing our scales.
As a kid, I thought the local amputee was dying in
pieces,

that his left arm was leaning against a tree in heaven,
waiting for the rest of him to arrive, as if God

was dismantling him like a jigsaw puzzle, but now
I understand we're all missing something. I wish

there were Band Aids for what you don't know, whisky
breath mints for sober people to fit in at wild parties.

There ought to be a Smithsonian for misfits,
where an insomniac's clammy pillow hangs over

a narcoleptic's drool cup, the teeth of an anorexic
displayed like a white picket fence designed

to keep food from trespassing. I wish the White House
was made out of mood ring rock, reflecting

the health of the nation. And an atheist hour
at every church, and needle exchange programs,

and haystack exchange programs too, and emotional
baggage thrift stores, a Mount Rushmore for assassins.

I'm sick of strip malls and billboards. I dream
of a road lit by people who set themselves on fire,

no asphalt, no rest stops, just a bunch of dead grass
with footprints so deep, like a track meet in wet cement.

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Sometimes I find poetry so beautiful that it consumes for for an entire night and I read the same poem over and over again, trying to remember my favorite lines, and then recite them to anyone who will listen. My roommate, my best friends, and my mother, who is busy chopping vegetables on the other line, and I yell words that mean nothing to her. None of them can see the line breaks or the way the words look together to form what Allen Ginsberg called "the eyeball kick". And they can barely feel what I feel when the words steep from my eyes and then regurgitate themselves out of my throat, a consumption through the eyes and then vomited back up into my mouth, held for a tiny second like a cherry seed held in between my two front teeth.

I want to write poetry about the human condition, and war, and promenades, and America, and I want to write prose that makes people cry, and I want to them to feel each word sliding down their throat as they whisper it to themselves in silence while reading in crowded bus stop or at home in their bed with their cat.

I read about global warming and all I can think about is my skin melting off and dripping like Dali's clocks. All of time held in my pores and then just disentegrating in mid air; evaporating before they can even let the crackled dirt eat at it on the ground. I think about global warming and I think about how we are all just getting hotter. I think about how some people's temperature is just naturally high, I think about fevers. I think about global warming in the sense that we are all rising in farenheit, celcius, and kelvin. I think about global warming as the feeling you get when you have been in the tub for a little too long and steam rises from your body as you slide out of the water and onto the cold tile floor. You're just a walking smoke bomb, a dramatic rise in pollution all around and how you look back at the porceilan container to see the residue you have left in rings around the tub-- and then you count them like you count the years on a tree to see how long you have been soaking in your own acid.