Three Poems
The Ants Go Marching
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
The ants go marching one by one
The little one stops to suck his thumb
And they all go marching
Down, to the ground, to get out, of the rain
I suck my thumb while I sleep. I am dreaming.
My plane crashed in the mountains
of Antarctica, a place that has no ants,
and I had to eat frozen co-pilot.
Passed time thinking warm thoughts.
The ants go marching two by two
When you eat someone you start from their shoes
Crickets are cannibalistic. But no, not ants.
They are always marching in procession.
They respectfully carrying their dead,
each of their careful legs a pall bearer.
The ants go marching three
Father, son, and ghost holy
I wonder where they take them after they die.
I imagine the ant priest giving tiny eulogies
and caskets of hollowed out apple seeds,
or thimble sized piles of lifeless thorax.
The ants go marching four by four
You smell the gas and bang the doors
Before my co-pilot died, he told me, shivering,
of Auschwitz, how, still, it smells of burnt flesh.
I remembered pictures of mountains of bodies
waiting to be burned, and I vomited.
The ants go marching five by five
The engines shut down and the plane took a dive
Ants mate in the air like exploding missiles
The male dies shortly thereafter—
Ejection from the cockpit, a spiraling fireball
toward the ground. There are no survivors.
The ants go marching six by six by six, seven by seven
The female lands and tears off her wings.
I've always thought it curious
that Satan was a fallen angel.
But then again, I've found curious the whole thing.
If there is a God then why God why the Holocaust
If I thought that when I died I'd have eternal paradise
I wouldn't have eaten my fucking co-pilot.
The ants go marching eight by eight
It's raining. The ants are throwing fits.
Despite their swarming battalions,
the bombing ruins them.
If they were people-sized,
They would take over the world.
I've seen them rip off the limbs
of other ants that didn't look like them.
The ants go marching nine by nazi nine
They have planted themselves deep in the trenches—
exoskeleton helments, pincers instead of panzers,
the charismatic queen screaming passionate orders
to all the workers wearing swastikas,
while drones do nothing until it's too late.
They'd like to have you think they'd just hide beneath umbrellas,
dodging puddles two by two
and cursing their wet socks in unison.
I will not be surprised if I awaken underneath a pile of corpses
and before I freeze to death or they burn me,
I will do my damndest to eat my way out.
The ants go marching ten by ten, the little one stops to say, the end
And they all go marching down to the ground to get out of the rain.
She Left A One Cent Tip
We tend to swallow all sorts of strange things—
hallucinogens, semen, anaconda cantaloupe,
weird shit.
When I was five I lie on my dinosaurs bed sheets
and threw pennies up in the air to catch them
in my mouth.
Stupid idea, but I was five. Back off. No teeth
were lost, the worst that occurred was that
I swallowed one.
I've heard since I was a tot, we swallow four spiders a year
while we're asleep. I'm a skeptic,
but daffier has happened,
so, I'd believe if told a daddy long legs crawled in
between one's lips while I they lie open,
unconscious in the sheets.
I was a waiter. Once a customer told me she found a fly
in her soup. Are you kidding me? This only happened
inside television sets.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider
that wiggled and wriggled and jiggled inside her—
she swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
My dad sung this to me on the way to the hospital.
Didn't make sense. What did she swallow
to get the penny?
They x-rayed my belly and found the cent but no spiders.
I knew they were in there, invisible since their skeletons
are on the outside.
Doctor Euphemism told me I needn't swallow anything else,
nature would take its course, his way to say
I'd poop the penny out.
She looked politely up at me and held they fly in the air
by a wing as proof, dangling sickly and dripping
with clam chowder.
I imagined the reticular silk work spun in her esophagus,
the arachnid perched on the uvula, waiting for the prey
to drop from her spoon.
Close your eyes, pinch your nose, just swallow it down,
the spiders will get it. She was petrified.
I fetched her another bowl.
There's A Clown Out There With An M40A3 Rifle
Our bunker is a room full of balloons,
come in, relax, make yourself at home,
but try and stay away from the windows.
We speak in high-pitched helium whispers.
The temperature isn't the problem
it's that goddamned latex humidity.
Our lungs are burning, our heads are light,
and we wear rainbow camouflage.
Have a seat if you can find one,
and good luck retrieving your shoes.
We have some books, if you'd like them
and a couple hard core nudie magazines.
Your concentration might be broken
by an unexpected pop or was that the sniper's shot?