Midnight Routine, Part II
It’s a commerical with a man
Talking in mute on the phone, this time.
Someone, I imagine,
With a fetish for outsourcing.
It is no longer enough to call sexy singles.
He phones a call center in India
Just to close his eyes dreamily,
To talk to brown girls overseas about credit cards.
Even sex being outsourced now,
Leaving sexy singles with no rent,
No way to pay for tuition.
He talks to her and eats popcorn.
It’s all he eats now, because
He read once that everything we eat is made of corn
So he knows it doesn’t matter.
He is proud because popcorn is worth zero Weight Watcher’s Points, so he can eat as much popcorn as he wants.
He imagines an inevitable catastrophe
In which some parasite
Destroys American corn as we know it.
An Irish potato famine for us.
An American corn famine,
Like the Irish potato famine,
But billions of dollars more lost.
Thousands of lives more lost.
Hundreds of people you know.
And no more popcorn.
Soon, even corn will be outsourced
To other places.
The last great American good
Will be destroyed
We will not know what to do, but
Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy.
Cry, cry, cry, cry cry.
The thought of producing,
Of creating (corn, art, ideas),
Will be nothing but a distant myth.
Your sex will come from Indian call centers
And your popcorn will come from Chinese Weight Watchers.
I pick up my phone. It’s midnight.
Buy, cry, buy, cry, buy.
I just want to talk to sexy singles tonight.
Midnight Routine, Part I
In my mind’s eye, the midnight routine
Is the static language of one product to another.
I’m thirsty, I’m too anxious to create and instead
A man in mute on TV looks like Ted Stevens.
He tries to sell me something.
I’m surrounded in plastic, most non-recyclable,
My lamp is from Ikea and
My glasses are from the internet.
Probably China, originally, and
I call myself conscious? Are we all pretending?
Do I convince myself like you
Convince yourself that you,
You are a good person because you adopted a cat.
You bought organic dryer sheets, once
And you pay a dollar extra for local tomatoes
But you only buy Vegan shoes because you,
you want to look just like Natalie Portman.
One pair of vegan shoes
To solve the recession.
Wear corn on your feet for one day
To get your father’s job back.
Strap on a man-made cow
To get a clue.
In a Post-American world,
All your plastic will come from China,
And all of China’s America will come from you.
In a Post-American world,
You will be too lazy to grow your own tomatoes
You will never have enough Lycopene again.
In a Post-American world,
What will you do without your Ikea?
I pick up my phone
And I buy whatever Ted Stevens is selling.
