Counting Teeth

image borrowed from  mark kerstetter

Counting Teeth


You were over six feet tall
but never made it to 99,
a man, a dynamo. I read that
you cried, wanted to be held like a child.
You helped bring yourself down,
but they killed you,
there can be no doubt.

The dead kill the living
throughout history, mere ripples
on the surface of placid humanity.
It’s all written in a zombie novel somewhere,
soon to be seen in a local movie theater,
soon to be eaten with the dust
of fallen suns,
mixed with shit and scum,
casually tossed in the fan.

The imaginary is taken for real,
and the real for fake,
and one day the real Borg will completely
replace the lost links
in the dead databases of today’s categories.
Complete connection will be complete
disconnection to the past,
and no Wild will compare
to the Lost that will prevail.

And it’s all good, you say, roll
over the concrete expanse skim-coated over
the ancient wilds of mind best
forgotten, you’re truly alive now.

But it’s not all good to me.
I don’t fit into the plan.
Call me luddite or philistine,
it little matters which, the result is the same:
a fall into the margins
where the last cries are
mashed with Baboon Blue
and Bengal Tiger Red to become
the grey of last year’s color.

I won’t plug into you.
You won’t fuck my mind.
I won’t work for you, won’t run
your tired treadmills
with my Flintstone feet.
All my avatar cutouts are sodden
in the rain that rolls down glass facades
and cheeks alike, over distended bellies,
pepper-sprayed makeshift tents, this year’s model
and the quivering gunman’s hand.

I’m tired running to stay out
of your race, of proving I’ve nothing
to prove, of putting out like a shameless whore,
birthing babies no one wants
as mountain meadows cover over
yet again with wildflowers.

Stand up and take notice:
your loves me loves me not mentality
has as much place in that field
as your poetic ooze in your
sector of the grid. One foot in,
one foot out, until your ability to write
the autobiography never written
—the one, justified—
is bitten off with your last
counting tooth
in your last
steak.


Mark Kerstetter

Posted over on his site the Bricoleur
Listed as #10 over on dVerse Poets