Untitled (She Screamed) - October 25, 2022 at Volume Two
Channel: Poetry for Cowards
Date: 2022-11-02

She screamed
Crippled babies cried
Larcenists surrendered their tools
Dreams began to decrypt
And a flat disc-shaped cloud hovered over
A small town in Rhode Island.

She screamed
And tessituras broke boundaries
Crop-dusters wobbled from the turbulence.
A little man in a tuxedo smiled
In the finish on his brand new car.

Countless landfills erupted and
Newspapers from 1941 reassembled
out of the filth to assert their truths
that war was coming out of the looming crisis in Europe. 
Egg-cartons on Super Stop & Shop shelves birthed chicks
The seas boiled and
rendered titanium useless in the manufacture of nuclear submarines.

Two tons of potted plants rose in rebellion and
Took root and spread across a million kitchen counters through 
suburban towns along the Connecticut shoreline.
Jungles formed on I-95.
The Lake Saltonstall Bridge was completed, retroactively,
on schedule. It built itself and forced the lake to suffer its imposition.

Water tasted good.
Coca-Cola turned to tar,
and fossils of early man were found in a 
Ford dealership lot in Pittsburgh,
making it impossible for Ted Forsythe to close the deal
on an ‘86 Tempo he stole from the condo complex 
his mother lives in. The smooth curves of the sedan melted 
into the cracks of the side lot, fusing with the impatient black earth.

A lot of people complained of liver spots.
Kidney stones broke up,
And we all called up our puppy loves.
And we all read palms and slaughtered chickens.

Pavement warped into half-pipes and a
Nation of fourteen-year-old Sk8ters from
1988 wearing Thrasher t-shirts and listening to Dokken
 were temporally misplaced.

Tuna-noodle casserole exploded on papered walls adorned with 
famous New England barques and schooners.

Infant shit was found in cans of Play-Dough
And Michelle played with it, anyway.

Cuneiform became the nation’s official language
to prevent the scream from infesting the sacred Word.
Signs on Route 80 reflected the change.
BMWs smacked into Mercedes in 
Illiterate confusion.

Sound-barriers broke, ribs shattered from shaking.
Thunder was a #1 Billboard Hit
For seventeen straight weeks.

Her choral score had no breath marks
The tune contained no melody or harmony
Counterpoint and musical composition became obsolete
Oscilloscopes found twelve-thousand distinct waves merged
In her chalkboard scraping wail.

Ithaca, New York was purged by the reincarnate
Legions of slaughtered mystic shamans.
Spirit bears carved glorious trenches out of 
Shopping plazas and the Great Snakes
Slithered into Cayuga’s precious gorges.

Twenty-seven thousand bathtubs in the town of 
Guilford were simultaneously turned on and
forgotten.  Over a period of eight months
The town gently flooded and disappeared
and no one could remember what happened 
or if anyone really lived there
and no one went in to check.

The Saab corporation closed its doors.  An artery rendered useless.

Thirty-eight miles away, her sound waves had no decay, and 
reached them. The sonic vibrations still strong
like the shock wave of the twenty-second atom bomb.
It tingled parts of their bodies so sensitive and reactive 
that a mob of indentured servants were compelled to cry out in 
The bottle-shaped wail of Absolut rapture, and paste their 
images on the inside back cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Shrill peasants from 1847 were invited to
Dine at the White House.

They declined, walked over to Café Lafayette in Madison
and torched it after dessert.

Her screams reminded Nietzsche to fear God.
Hitler read Kaddish.

In the Yucatan, Mayan pyramids animated,
Revealing giant factories that produced quaint souvenirs.

The stained glass of catholic churches bleached and turned transparent
AND WE SAT, KNELT, STOOD, SAT, KNELT, STOOD, SAT, KNELT

She screamed like every nightmare
Every chill up my spine
Every unholy chasm 
That called out from it,

“Brian.  Brian.
This is your father
Now open this door.”

(1997)