What Do You Want?

for Phillip Deitch

 

What do you want?

do you want 3.2 pedigreed dogs and
a 19% mortgage on
20 acres of poisoned dirt?

what do you want?

do you want a guidebook to
the finer pay toilets of the Greater Bay Area?
a correspondence school course in
how to commit murder 14 ways with
ordinary household appliances?
the Great American Suicide Note?

what do you want?

a backstage pass to a celebrity funeral?
3 shell corporations in the Cayman Islands to
launder the cash from your
investments in edible underwear?
a blonde with electronically stabilized tits who
moans an command and
secretes her own lip gloss?

what are you into?

are you a highway fatality buff?
do you collect rock star fingerprints?
are you a weekend sewer diver?

do you like to

tie your partner to a golf cart
and fuck on the 19th hole?

do you like to

pour shaved ice over her body and
get cold together?

rent a mask made of scars and
go dancing under the new moon while
sucking on each other’s mirrored sunglasses?

do you want to

have different car for every day of the week and
never drive them except to executions?

do you want

a summer home made out of the bones and teeth of
everyone you ever fired from your
plastic toy factory?

do you want to

write a 3 minute song with 12 hooks per second
that makes everyone who hears it
fall asleep for 15 minutes?

what do you want?

do you want to

make the homeless wear yellow stars?

do you want to

explain to them that
protein is not as important as
a proper attitude?

believe to the bottom of your soul that
your children should go to Iraq and
choke to death on poison gas so that
it will cost 10¢ a gallon less to
go to the 7-11 tomorrow to
get some Tampons and a
glazed donut?

what do you need?

do you need a 17th bedroom with a picture window
overlooking a crematorium puffing out the ashes of
everyone ever run over by the
poisoned dollar and android handshakes and
the busted flush of Christian compassion?

do you need to forget everything you ever learned in school
except how much you hated it?

do you need to
pass your next vacation in the nuthouse with a
300 pound genius who never bathes
screaming into your ear about how
Jesus stole his best lines and
he can build an interstellar vehicle out of
toothpicks and razor blades and
if you’ll only look into his eyes for 30 seconds
he might put in a good word for you when
the 4 horsemen show up on the last day of Spring with
mud on their boots offering friendship and cyanide?

or do you need to
hold the road like a tire that’s
all punctures

dreaming without pause of a
downhill grade and

do you need to sell the electronic blonde to the Martians
and invest your money in hopeless prayer because it’s
the only sure thing and
for the sake of God and whatever else comes to mind
stop believing in anything except whatever
burns brighter than terror
that can never be counted on
that is the only way home

Aus: Die anmutige Kurve eines Marschflugkörpers. poetenladen 2008
(Pray Like the Hunted. Zeitgeist-Press 1992)

David Lerner    27.06.2008