The Poet Spiel

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Bad Things/ Good Things

Watching “Private Ryan” on TV was bad
cause those guys that were getting all blowed up
were talking dirty words in the privacy
of your own home.
And that is bad.
People who use dirty words probly
have dirty asses too.
You could just take the blowed-up
hacked-to-pieces bloody body of one of those guys
that used dirty words in “Private Ryan”
and you’d see for yourself he never wiped his ass.

Dirty word people are bad.

Watching breasts on TV is good.
You have to have breasts to have babies
to multiply and replenish your church
to teach about what is bad.
Breasts give men a reason to kill the other guys
so we can win the wars
so then the other guys will want to hurry up
and get the job done
to come back home
to grope the breasts to get inspired
to do the replenishing to make up for
what they have taken away from the earth.
That’s just the way breasts are.
Breasts support war and church populations
and pay for public TV so

watching breasts is good.

The President’s mother has huge breasts
to nestle small children against
when she gives her reading programs.
Breasts are warm.
You should remember this when you hold your gun
so you will off those guys.

You should think of the President’s mother’s tits
when you pull the trigger
because they might be the last tits
you ever think of.

So you can see
you have to have a lot of breasts
on TV these days
if you want to start a lot of wars.

They’re saying the pigs
that showed “Private Ryan” on TV
should have to pay $500,000
to the Federal Communications Commission
for letting dirty words come into the privacy
of your own home
because humans are foolish
and might actually try to do
what these words say
on the floor of their living room
or on their coffee tables or in their cars.

This might make them try to have abortions
if they make too many babies
for the goodie-shoes to pretend they can adopt
to brooders who have too many babies.

But you could lower the draft age real soon instead
and start up a lot more wars
and this would use up the extra little ones you get
from the dirty talking on TV.

This would be a good bad thing.

 

The Poet Spiel is a master at risk taking an uncertain world where, harboring the visceral paranoia that accompanies surveillance at our every turn, we wish everything would turn out ok but we are too often disappointed to find out that it does not. “Bad Things/ Good Things” is from his chapbook, Come Home Cowboy: poems of war, evoking life and times in Bush the Second’s administration.