Read And Your Dreams Will Be Made into Songs that Sell Burgers and Cars Page 1
And Your Dreams Will Be Made into Songs that Sell Burgers and Cars
Nathaniel S. Rounds
Fowlpox Press
©MMXII Nathaniel S. Rounds
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9879561-6-3
Contents:
Paper strip punched with holes.
After swallowing a harmonica you can bite down on this paper
And it will produce Bach’s Minuet in G major
Good Evening Wal-Mart Shoppers: Three Poems1
Five Minutes to Ten
Poco sings mopy a cappella
About crazy love
Like college kids in cowboy hats
And Brett Dennen’s entire catalogue is spilling over
Annie Lennox exclaiming that there must be an angel
And the old crone from Infants is ordering a blue vested kid
To put security devices on her breast pumps
Which he won’t do as he is busy texting on a cell phone
While some bespectacled eight year old named Saul David
Is inviting other eight years olds to join him in electronics
From a cell phone on display
He then proceeds to activate the camera
And record a speech regarding organizer-as-pariah
Which leads to affirmation
Served up as applause by a hundred peers
And the government shall be upon his shoulder
Like a radio
We Invite You to the Front of the Store
Chicken Nugget Cup Cake is veering through the aisles of Wal-Mart
With her track pant thighs engulfing the whining scooter beneath her
And if her driving is a little precarious it’s really not her fault
What with the RC cola in one hand and a moon pie in the other
And the morphine working its magic on her broken back
But her mind is a mess and she tries to pick the stack base display of
Spatulas and Brillo boxes from the made-for-television dramas
Unfolding in her mind like the one about that woman who looked so
Much like Pat Benatar and who loves sports and wants her son to be a
Track star but her son wants to join the New York Theatre Ballet
And when the guidance counselor from her son’s school calls her
Into his office to level with her about her son’s future
There’s this tension as the camera cuts closer and closer
To each actor and the guidance counselor says something about
“Your son’s future path will deviate from your dreams for him.”
“I know that,” says the mom, and her profile really does have
That Pat Benatar thing going on and then the guidance counselor
Played by Christopher Walken because he needed the money
At the time says her son has to listen to his own heart
And the camera closes in on the Pat Benatar lookalike as Mom
With her tears coming down her face and Roxette’s Listen to Your Heart
Starts up in the background as Walken says “ Your son. Will go.
To medical school. He will be a near-sighted proctologist.
He’ll have a practice in Des Moines. His condo will be in Vermont.
He will take up skiing. And drinking. And. He will write a bad novel.
It’s about a young musical prodigy. He leaves Julliard. You see.
He lost. His hands. While carving. A turkey. “
The mother shakes her head. She sniffles. “Nobody’s going to read that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Walken. “He must listen. To. His heart.”
And by now Chicken Nugget Cupcake has narrowly missed the spatulas
And Brillo Box display but smashes right into the large box of five dollar movies
And the movie that falls into her scooter basket next to the six pairs of diabetic
Socks is “Move the Rock” starring Christopher Walker and Blair Tefkin who had
To wear makeup to look older. And as the store manager leans over her and says
“ma’am, ma’am, ma’am” he takes on this Lord Buckley appearance only with wings
And he evokes a jazz mass which unstitches the facades of those waddling masses
Hunched over their carts and they become enraptured in a shared gale of laughter
That rises into the air like so many soap bubbles in the cool, cool water
We Are Now Closed for the Evening
“Do you have Dark Spirit Apocalypse:
Eat the Children IV
With the bonus Guillotine
For Sony Kill Kube?” asks the four year old
Peering over the cash counter
“Yeh,” coughs the acne-riddled apple
On a stick in the blue vest
“And can I pay for the 100 rounds of 9mm?”
“Yeh,” coughs the apple
“Need ID though.”
The kid produces a baseball card
With a Del Monte banana sticker
And some felt tip marker trickery
Transforming it into a driver’s licence
For a thirty-eight year old
“And the tall boy,” says the kid
“That’s eigh’y-six nine’y-theven,” says the apple
“Izat on your Wal-Mar’ Mas’card?”
The kid slaps his jacket pocket
“Got a bag of good flake.”
The apple sniffs and nods eagerly
And as he hands the bags to the kid
Leans down to whisper:
“Meet ya’t the bathroom by Site to Store.”
Courtly Love
Chivalry isn’t dead
It’s just in remission
Like a cockroach sleeping
There beneath the stove
In Hell’s Kitchen
And I will gladly open the door for you
While you speed through
Eyes closed to my empty gesture
I will carry your books home
Even though nobody reads books
These days and
I will gladly send a bottle of wine
To your table
Even though you hate wine
And this week only
I will offer you my protection
Even though your dwarf me
With those high stiletto heels
Because despite the common consensus
Chivalry isn’t dead
It’s just a coat we sometimes shed
To avoid the heat
Blitz Chess Blues
C’mon, Chloe, so wild and shy
Sideshow Horace is playing your head
In the Mixolydian mode
I mean it’s in and out of your cerebrum’s grasp
This glib love caught in a paper bag
And he wants to win
Your gullible heart
And cook it with some garlic on the barbecue
Because in the end, Basho had it all wrong—
Poets want to be fat and well compensated
In the here and now
Tusk Formed From Hair
Seymour Schull
An Asperger syndrome-ridden plesiosaur
Bought three zucca gourds that weighed 57-63 lbs
From the gourd lady
Who lived in a one room shack in Herring Cove
Seymour glued them and painted them
To resemble systemic narwhal triplets
; Complete with spiraled spikes
And he named them Napoleans I, II, and III
At night they engaged in
Cocktail conversations in Inukitut
Which was punctuated by electric lights for eyes
Blinking over camper trailer porch underneath the pines
And he would describe them in infinite detail
To Landra Sweeney the gourd lady
Who would listen without looking up from her garden
In the winter she came to him on snow shoes
Bearing a blanket and a tin of tuna
They ate the tuna on crackers
And talked about places they would like to go
The kindred friendship led to matrimony
Of the most understated kind
One ring and one bracelet
And a plate of fishcakes
With the notary public serving as justice of the peace
And dandelions and apple trees
As maids of honour and best men
While Seymour mended nets by the dock
And retrieved traps and buoys for a dollar apiece
He made sure to save money for three gold rings
To place on the tusks of Napoleans I, II, and III
At anniversary time
And Landra would make them cocoa
While Seymour related in great detail
Their wedding day and the number of clouds
That had marked the blue sky
And how the clouds were cumulus
And the wind speed was twenty km/h
And there was no rainfall
And Landra wore her hair in braids with
Elastics and
A black dress with two white stripes
At the bottom
And they both wore knitted caps
And a few all season folk sat in beach chairs
They both laughed recalling
Landra’s mother falling asleep mid-ceremony
But she was eighty-six at the time
And so they forgave her
After their forty-sixth anniversary
By which time Landra could not be bothered
To grow gourds or dry them and paint them
And Seymour was too crippled to mend anything
They took Napoleans I, II, and III
Landra watched from the shore
While Seymour pulled the narwhal triplets
Further and further out to sea
With their electric lights blinking in the dusk
And when Seymour returned to shore
Coughing and muttering
Landra gave him brandy from a flask
And they told old jokes and fell asleep
To the sight of three gold-and-light decorated narwhals
Bobbing out with the tide
Lunatic Sidecar (Curling Hair Outwards)
א [ʼA′leph]
A rapid hubris inhabits
Baruch Bascom Lamar Chasdai
And of his intellect we may say
It is a hash[ed] up bird brain
His formative education being
A blood-red View-master and a coffee can
Topped up in 3-D slide reels
Baruch’s mother
Big Imah Sally Waters
Took a correspondence course
In holistic hairdressing
Using the homeless and the infirm
As her lab rats
Streaking their hair and covering their heads
In wigs and fezzes made from natural fibers
Boy Baruch took into his mind and heart
Three dimensional stills from popular movies
And tourist destinations
His body was a temple in which nothing
Dared to dwell
Except deliria papers and pleiad repairs
And a sorrow unaccounted for
By angels and seraphs of light
Baruch managed through a social worker
To gain an introduction through special education
Into the world of mankind
And later gained a scholarship
To attend the Mount Sinai School of Medicine
He completed his MD/PHD
But it wasn’t enough
He hated modern medicine
Or anything involving touching sick people
And retreated to a single room apartment
Which he covered with pictures in luminous colours
Of brides and grooms flying with foul and fiddlers
Over ghettos from the old country
He tried to speak of these things
But something squeezed his voice box
Making his words and ideas sound like
Breath from a man on his death bed
But he rises to party
In your favorite era
And he digs the chicks
But not the ones you think
He paints the children of mother hens
Indigo and blood, blood red
Then sends them to the ceiling
To revile his life and his expectations
The chicks party South Pole dirt on his eyes
And mouth
They leave him choking and blind
Somehow the seeker doesn’t seem to mind
He is patient that way
You pull the blanket over his window
To match his beat box broken eyes
Don’t despise the dead
Break bread with the wise
But you whine instead
Ah, play the game, nesikhati
Suck it up and play
ב [Behth]
Baruch just reclined in the shade of drawn curtain
When Big Imah needed to buy scissors and curlers
And textbooks and dye
It was a Sabbath before Sabbath
It was a suffering for a right cause
And Baruch made sure his mother had what she needed
Like a father rather than a son
And the mind dies with the stomach, sonny
The heart weeps one final drop
And the mind goes to Gehinnom in a lunatic sidecar
And papa never shows his dirty face
And we shall never speak of him
Lest Yahweh Adonai frown a deep frown
And feel sorrow such as never felt by man
And we choke on charcoal and lead and bad faith
The tobacco smoke and peeling paint of the forgotten
And we cannot lift them from this rented tomb
For who would ask a seven-year-old boy
Who spends summer in darkness
To triumph over forces that exiled his people
From the holy land
Into Spain and into Germany
Then to an Ellis Island of the mind
But always a hovel and a grind
Always a shameful shadow
Of the Eden left behind
ג [Gi′mel]
And Baruch came to write in the 1980’s
From the third floor of 68 Great George Street
In Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
Because it was a cheap sublet
Although the toilet steamed when flushed
And the roof leaked when depressed
Baruch transcribed the psalms
Of Bartolomeo Schnozzola
The great proboscis monkey with a pot belly
And a nose that aided his musical bent
But he secured a codex in this dropout scrub
Who had taken a bus to Canada
And in Bartolomeo
Baruch found a father
They mutually published each other’s echo poems
From their misogynist independent press
And would take sojourns by bus to states
To receive psychobilly haircuts from Big Imah
Who shared a basement with a Russian dentist
Who had been the second Halakhic Jewish cosmonaut
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br /> And who had lost his licence to perform dentistry
After using paper clips in root canals
And stainless steel posts in paper billing files
And there were many things that Baruch did
Which
Were they were all written down
Would give the New York City White Pages
A good run for the money
Nathaniel S. Rounds wanted to be a hair dresser, but optioned out
as he felt that as a bald man, people would find it hypocritical. He tried
portrait photography, but hated telling people they looked great when they clearly did not.
So he opted to be a television sales guy by day, since everyone watches TV, whether they
are funny-looking or not, and then resumed writing, as no one really seemed to mind.