Live and Unplugged
by John Kendall Hawkins
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When Quinn the Quantum gets here
everyone will jump up naked as happy duckrabbits
speaking auction gibberish English
and forever mading plans for the future that's passed gas.
Imagine the hivemind fun to be had
picking the brain of the cell-folk next to you,
and so on, thinking the one-and-many song,
Hairyclitoris's swimmy rooster coming home to roost.
.
We hated the human body's resilience and corruption.
We hated that it hosted zillions of parasites who saw us as Amazon forests.
We hated the lonely nights in the nursing homes suffering the loss of relevance and muscle mass.
We hated the body's arbitrariness.
We hated Black people because they stood out in our dark
with their phosphorescent teeth so f*cking bright
we created racism to prophylact our terror of soul.
We hated the body's decomposition and pointlessness --
the ins and outs of food and thoughts at last flushed down the black hole,
our asses, pantaloons down, sticking over the edge of the event horizon,
plopping paradigms like no tomorrow. And god help the constipated.
We hated zoos where chimpanzees spat at us and lewded with bananas.
We hated being alive, twitch switches of decision-making, always wondering
what might have been behind the door after we picked the curtain --
the monkey's paw or the hated in-law or maybe that wet dream 'squaw' --
super silly us, eyelashes of coquettish insurrections, always in need.
.
If it's not nostalgia well give me another name for it,
Joan Baez asked Dylan in that song about rusted diamonds,
like some old quim 'eskimo' who long ago got that man out of her hair --
I mean the old Doris Day number, not the Ben Stiller pomade vehicle Bobby D frowned on. Not with my daughter.
The off-grid revolutionaries of the future will be rounded up, one by one,
and be made to live forever, moving from cloned body to cloned body
for eternity in a digital diaspora, diagrammatically fringed to the outer Venns.
Me, I'll be fuckin dead, laughing my ass off, now, ahead,
unless, of course, I'm already on my latest iteration awaiting that grand epiphany
to fall on me like a honky tonkin piano from above defenestrated from a Rachmaninoff concerto, closing in,
the glass tinkling on the sidewalk, a delayed ironic glissando from Toon heaven, as the Serge works his magic. The message is the massage.
.
You'd think I'd know by know to keep quiet about the wilder things
in the dark in the light in the middle of June of a late summer's eve
with cliched stars lit up like those that grandpa looked up at in bed, on his back, phosphorescent
pasties, star-stuffed skies, chronic constellations, art imitating life, and he'd say,
if you asked, If you're not a little wacky today, there's something wronnng with you,
and you'd walk away all duckrabbit shook up inside, stirred
like some autistic Dibs in search of a self, thinking aloud the abstract
prologue to Growing Up Absurd, borrowed
from the cellmate next to you in the hive
and you, like a probiscuous virus, unsure, unsure, crying out to heaven,
Am I Alive?!
