BELLY FLOP
by roibeard Ui-neill

I
Nietzsche said the stomach was the reason
man didn't readily take himself for a god.
The Russians said every country
was 3 meals away from a revolution.

Aphorisms & cautionary proverbs
don't stick to the ribs during times of want.
However one man's butter is another man's bullets.

II
The Sufis described coffee as the drink of reason.
The law of supply & demand made short work of that.

His trembling hand pours a cup to the rim.
He's been told each bushel of Bornean beans
shakes orangutans our of their canopy –
peaceful wise-men-of-the-forest
swept out of sight, out of mind,
on the first caffeine rush.

III
Black '47,
a fungus again invaded Ireland's fields,
tramped the humble spud to a rotten mash.
Corn, wheat, beef, found its way to the docks,
sailed across the sea to feed absentee landlords.
Indigenous millions were left no recourse
but coffin ships & starvation, many groaning
their last ghost through grass-stained mouths.

IV
The more things change...
He refuses to waste a Btu,
imbibes his sake at room temperature.
It calms the apprehension knotting his guts.
The world on his plasma screen is hungry –
the price or rice encourages its hoarding,
& he gapes at tortilla riots south of the border,
he gawps at bread riots across the land of the pharaohs,
he gasps at the speculators who've
profited from the measure
of a man's misery...

Progress in the greenhouse?
Cleaner, ethanol-burning automobiles
& fewer well-fed sapiens to drive them...
...towards the cliff coming up fast.

V
What to do when alternatives become biohazards?
Every dawn, a global band of omnivores
puts a carbon footprint to the apocalypse.
Every dusk, unreasonable hominids keep making
the babies who'll go to war over the last lump of coal,
the last dented tin of sardines, a final cup of rusty water.

VI
& the supernatural everyman expected to pull
the monkey's fat out of the fire has skipped the solar system,
his pockets stuffed with disappeared honeybees.

MOUNTING MEAT
by spiel

i just don't care about the daily
hundreds and hundreds of...

how can i care about another hundred casualties
piles and piles mounting up in pounds of
dead meat on their streets
i don't care if the meat is theirs or ours
i don't care if it is men or women
chickens or children or donkeys

same as i don't care about the heaps
of pounds of burgers dispensed
by mcdonald's in one year or twenty years or fifty
i am certain it must be in the billions by now
but i will say this
at least in return for its primetime space
that fast-meat giant puts out real exchange
to show off its meat

only it's we who have to cough out the billions
for the tens upon tens of thousands of pounds of bloody
somewhat skinned and oft-times conveniently partially boned
and much too often so blown-to-bits-it-can't-be-shown
raw man-meat voraciously consumed by our t.v.s
to teach us not to care
where our consumption dare not matter anymore

and it does seem that it is working
because i do not care

but i do wonder
might the fluid nature of blood plasma
become more frightening
in the last days when we all cave to wal-mart
each of us squeezed into its aisles there and hacking
out bucks for a high-wired much wider so much flatter
new plasma t.v.

or might that fluidity become even more delicious
more and more
thus suspending the red of its reds
even more extravagantly than ever before
like gloss lipstick on the whore we have not yet dreamed
because she can only be seen IF one is wide-awake
as she torpedoes thru our home front door

AT THE SPA
by John Grey

Women drift off toward the Turkish bath.
I sit quietly in a cane chair,
in a white dressing gown, sip carrot juice.

Don't we know that life ends badly?
Immortality apparently is nothing more
than the right minerals plugging the pores.

Or the taste of some unlovely vegetable,
squeezed into a liquid, so thin and gruelly
even a baby could lap it up.

People insist that I will leave this place
feeling a new man, but that's as preposterous
as angels splashing in the swimming pool.

This is a kind of culture that ought to disappear,
be buried under its marble walls. Let future
archeologists ponder mud-caked face cream.

They'll never know it was to keep the wrinkle,
the sag of jaw, from the door. That's our civilization.
Bottles and balms. No youth more ancient.