Want it easy
like a ball of yarn, easy
like a Minute Rice, cheap mac and cheese easy
like Lionel Ritchie on a Sunday mornin', easy
like every Wal Mart at every intersection of every town of every
every.
And there are other places to shop, I hear
rumors there used to be one on 49th down
the street from that one Wal Mart
and across the street from that other
and this place tried to sell bread and batteries and all and also
sundaes and malts and man was it expensive, some things cost like
3,
4 bucks; And no socks, no stovetops,
no VHS video tapes for eighty-eight cents,
2 liters Coke for a buck, no, sir they
sold Brawny paper towels for 2 freaking dollars a roll,
they didn't have blue jeans and vitamin C imported
from exotic lands like
the Orient.
That's "Made in China" if you ain't payin'
attention, ain't payin' for big words and concepts like,
well, I'd mention em here
but then this poem
might ask a higher price, cost a couple more cents an hour just
to listen
to, market forces blow
the winds up my kilt as this poem might try to unionize,
say it's got the right to health care when
I
am a shopper
of one.
Because saves us dollars every day
that Jorge or Xiang or
whoever the ghost is loading pallets of your TP and TV's onto a
truck
wherever,
it saves us dollars, gets us more stuff
when he can't afford a flush toilet because it's survival of the
bootstraps
and bucket-shitter aughta just find a better job if it upsets him,
right?
But listen to me, this is Land of the
Free,
it's gotta be something
else, it's gotta be
scientific, gotta be a huge experimentation,
NASA, CIA, NSA, maybe some agency we ain't even heard of yet
thinkin' if you can build
the exact same building
at every intersection
of every block of every town of every state of every every,
then maybe you
could walk in
to an Omaha store,
pay nineteen ninety-seven for a Easter Sweetheart Gift Basket
and walk out the door to San Diego
or West Des Moines or North Platte or Fargo, scootin' across the
cosmos in
snap of a wallet,
every city basically wearin' the same t-shirt, inhalin' Tacoma and
exhaling Dubuque so that it wouldn't matter
what city were you born in, wouldn't matter
where you pay rent on an apartment in, it'd all be the same
warm story, same Cup O Soup-mixed up little world
where the neighbors all grin
and shut their doors
as the key
refuses to fit
in what you thought
was your
front door.