Burma Shave Bequests

image borrowed from bing

Burma Shave Bequests

“All media exist to invest our lives with

artificial perceptions & arbitrary values.”

--Marshall McLuhan

Robert Frost don’t know a thing about me

or my roads--but certainly he did understand

your spirit & your heart, as poets must,

as they wander too often lost, taking

notes during the chaos, joys, wars,

tragedies & celebrations. 

A man recently while walking a beach on

Vancouver Island, found a 106 year old bottle

with a paper message inside, and he refused

to open it--knowing that when today’s air

touches 1906 paper, something tragic could

occur, as words might fade, & the writer

could lose the spider’s thread tether to this world. 

Miss New York was overheard saying that the present

Miss America was “fat as fuck”--allowing some of the

vitriol & ugliness to mushroom up through the mystery

of almost perfect bodies packaging imperfect minds,

exposing both the best & worst of our dreams,

simultaneously as New CMA star Casey Musgraves revealed

that she was still resentful (smile) about losing the Miss

Tater-Tot beauty pageant when she was ten years old--

reinforcing the rancor one feels about the arbitrary course

of success, watching a performer under 30 tasting of

Luck while it is still fresh & steaming, fearing 

that it may go cold before she can wholly consume it,

or it consumes her. 

What if God were one of us, just a slob like one of us?--

question many in lesson, still ignorant about the facts,

not realizing that He/She/it has always been present

within our personal viscera, invisible but extant,

smaller than a nano-virus yet bigger than a cosmos,

while transcending & disdaining those who strive

to transform it to rules of order within the countless

factions of religious realm. 

How you murdered your family means nothing to me

as your mouth moves across my body--because

inevitably eros trumps empathy, orgasm drowns

rationale, breasts are better than burdens, 

and certainly your silken legs wrapped around

my butt like a tender vise, momentarily blinds

me to politics, godheads, jehadists, insults,

massacres, migraines, & dust mites,

because the temporal reality of intense coitus,

while we are functioning together as one entity,

passionately reconnects us to genesis,

and provides a beautiful blindness

to every sort of shit storm. 

There’s a crow flying, black & ragged, tree to tree,

& now he is diving down to pick up something shiny--

perhaps a new element covered in extraterrestrial symbols,

perhaps a piece of chrome off a Corvette,

perhaps an inner gum wrapper wadded into a ball,

perhaps that message from the bottle

as it oxidizes, slaying the message,

banishing the messenger. 

Glenn Buttkus

September 2013

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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