I will be a walking talking poet

- we're all afraid, and everybody knows it

but we don't have to be afraid anymore

-mewithoutYou, Torches Together

We needs poems like beatdowns, like
beatnik streets: Dylan street,
and Dean street,
and even Kerouac street, too.
I am afraid.

On Dylan street
the smell of tuna-fish wafts past the hobos playing checkers
into the jellyfish corporate hazy afternoons of dawn.
I parade vehemently sideways, left of the bullshit, right of the
simultaneous corporate factories,
controlled in a Frankensteinian way,
headed towards nowhere.

In stacks of brick and concrete,
my name shines rapier sharp and
diamond quick through the hearts
of corporate theives waving moneylikesticks
aimlessly oblivious of the things they hit,
hiring up another man just to see him quit,
waiting
for the four-o-clock train and a heavy lunch.

I will be a walking, talking poet, and
I will see my verse in the way people stare
Open-eyed, closed mouthed, head's turned
everywhere I go, blinkers in the alley and afternoon breakfasts
in the afternoons.

I bite mayonnaise teeth into liquorish gums
waiting for my nine-to-five princess to come.
A man in a suit picks delicatessen trash bags
from the sick-mouthed end of a golden trash compactor.
Behind a Hilton a goldfished guest stays,
next to an oppressed freeway,
You are afraid.

We spread our deceit ever-forest green
and our lies as red as blood cells on the floor.
I put on sunglasses for dawn, and stretch
playlisted hands into dead-mouth pockets.
Can you speak, teeth? Breathe deep of this
only-free-once air.

In the city streets trees bloom expectantly,
Stretching towards their brothers in the country
But the leaves fall and die, just past second street
and we are left in the center with a question,
"Why?"

Find meaning like quarters and dimes in the sidewalk grates,
put them together and what do you have? Not enough.

I will be a walking talking poet.

I bite, sympathetically, into my orchestra
toned McSymphony of sandwiches, and check
my reputation in the mirror next to last days lunch.

We need poems like orange juice poured

into wounds and acid rain on the roofs
of houses owned by fair weather friends.
We need poems like the blood of demons
poured onto sacrificial alters for the daily news,
photographed and video-taped victoriously,
disseminated via brochure, and cable anchor,
and gossip over the back fence, too.
We are afraid.