The Great Wall of Wabash


Even with a small army of animators
at my disposal I’m unsure how car bombs fit
into my weight loss plan. The pitch corrector
is clearly out of order this morning -—
I’m off-key, my curveball is flat, and my sit-com
tenders received a red light. Doctor Tanguy
believes that all my woes began in the egg
foo yung I ate as a boy: Beansprouts cause
cow loss and gigantism! Who knew? I thought
my blather was caused by my family -—
a company of puppets equipped with gears
to change their facial expressions. I finish
my granola just in time to hear my bell toll.
I pull down the periscope and see scads
scabbing the union picket lines. Time to boil
the oil. Time to catapult the plague-rats.
Time to hook my daily bread. As Doctor Koch
(sounds like knuckle sandwich) always says:
you are as you are because if you were
I would not exist to say: you are as you are
because if you were I would not exist
to say…. After I finish transforming
my consciousness it’s time to eat fish-sticks.
I toss the little packets of tartar sauce
at the Mongols climbing the wall creepers.
The sun is cheerful. The air is hygienic
to the eye. Woodpeckers are making short work
of our last elm tree. Their music reminds me
of mother, working her jaw, blinking one lid:
Yes? No? Raise the floorboards and feed your uncles?
It’s time to loosen my cummerbund. I phone
Doctor Gorky. It’s time to foreshadow.

-Peter J. Shippy (three candles)

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