It’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, for starters,
high and flat like a crushed bird in the sky,
broken accordion song spewing from rips in the fiber
and always at the worst moment, like a fart during sex
it somehow manages to destroy everything
from the bottom up. And I want to take it outside and kill it,
I want to wrap it in metal and sell it to foreign countries
who will only turn around and drop it on us, again.
It’s the soundtrack to nightmares, its honking cough
as if a goose were choking on a squeeze horn, and when I think of it
the chambers of my brain swell with zen concentration,
I seek a rain of cherry blossoms in a vain attempt
at digging it out of my head like a tiger tonguing a squeak-bug
from the red roof of its palate and all my gray matter vibrates
like electric cottage cheese even when I try to understand,
even when I take a quiet moment to remember it’s merely
a human sound, there it is again, the knife point of it jabbing in my side
like a rusted, helmet-jammed bayonet, the distant hum of a radio
playing it, it, it, a terrible song a thousand times a day
and it’s squawking in the jungle trees and jibbering like a baboon
and it’s escaping from the punctured lungs of a soldier
and it’s sitting quietly in the back of the room during peace talks
where people are designing treaties to make it cease
and it’s there again, popping up like a disease, like a hornet
like guerilla revolution against civilized society while
all of mankind is left on its knees muttering pleas for it to stop.
