And Your Dreams Will Be Made into Songs that Sell Burgers and Cars Read online



  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

&nbsp
; 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
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.