This is a poem my brother and I wrote while I was going to school in St. Joe in 1993. I had a poetry teacher I couldn’t stand, but who absolutely loved me. So, basically, we wrote this poem to mock the entire art form, my teacher knew it, and he was not really very happy with me for doing it. I think his exact comment was, “The rhyme is cloying.” Well, duh.
You have to start from where you’re at—
Take the highway; watch bugs splat
On your windshield, rat-a-tat-tat.
like an ethereal welcome mat,
that lies above the ozone hat.
About which environmentalists love to chat.
Some days, you hit cats.
others, you’re not so lucky as that.
But only if you start where you’re at.
When you reach St. Joe
(an urban dynamo)
where strawberry sundaes don’t melt so slow,
And poets you know
read Richard Hugo,
not Victor, who I’ve heard, drives a green Yugo.
Then, amigo,
You’ll be aware of that emerald auto,
and it’s pounding staccato.
This city has an angst of its own,
Above the clamor of fiendish traffic,
Above the drone of wailing industry.
For satanic cattle roam the fields,
And quote ribald verses with the power they wield.
Then they shit all over like they’re on deal-a-meal.
Bubba, your uncle, and your sister, his wife,
have invited you over for a fight with a knife.
Though friendly it may be, you politely decline.
“You’ll get used to it,” they say,
As they all run away,
in frantic display
of unseemly trepida-
tion. For above your head,
There glows bright red,
A mushroom cloud, and now you’re dead.
So much for St. Joe, the pundits said.
They wheel you away, though minus your head.
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