BIG LETTERS FOR OLD PEOPLE


Tirades and Lectures: Alice's Restaurant


This is not a tirade or a lecture,
it is simply a thing not to be liked
much like tirades and/or lectures.

It has a basis in everything I know
that you don’t know and some
of what you know that I don’t.

First, I am very angry at having been
sent to the bottom of the page
in Reader’s Digest, the one
with big letters for Old People.

Secondly, I am going to feed my dog
and while I am feeding that dog
I’m thinking of Israel, the Mogen David
and a curious thing called Niggis.
That’s what you don’t know.
You also don’t know about trocars
in the same way I know about them
having handed them over
with innocent face and all.

There are conspiracies and plans,
most of all there are knowledges
built around the fundamental axis
of irregularity:

Eye closures, car accidents,
things that CHANGE US,
like a piddly article in the READER’S DIGEST
On some old bag’s nightstand.

Niggis, for what it’s worth involves
a surly noise at six a.m. in which
I look out to find my favorite dog friend,
BUSH, what a name to give a dog!
Find him being tormented by a young muslim woman
with two children, on her way back
from the dumpster down the street:
It’s Alice’s Restaurant you know.

Her concern is to put enough sticks
into the eye of the dog so the satanic
force called his saliva
won’t ruin her pretty religious countenance.

I ask her: “What in the HELL are you doing?
Wa salaam wa' alaikum?”

She looks up from under a head scarf
belligerent and points to the kids half-a-block-away
already, and the dog INSIDE
the purely impenetrable fence.

No wonder dogs hate us and no wonder
muslims hate dogs
but I don’t and I’m on my way up now
to feed my muslima Jewel:
Translates to Johara
in an Old Testament Way in our language,
the language of Niggeritis
I’ve counseled one or two people on recently.

So, Guthrie points at me and asks:
"What in TARNATION are you doing?"

I answer: When you see the photo of the naked men
flanked by German Shepherds inside Abu Gharaib,
when you look at that remember Niggis.
It’s not really about the Draft or the Sixties,
In fact it’s probably so far out of your realm
that you can almost JUSTIFY it.

Kind of like the READER’S DIGEST
justifies a lot of what it has to say about:
eye closures and car accidents,
the alarming irregularity of it all,
the alarming heroics of defending things
you fail to understand,
or undermining them with belligerent
mind boggling simplicity.

Personally, I enjoy it and would subscribe
if my heart was really into it.