Day 14

Challenge: Drop a little mad lib bomb into a famous song or poem and see what happens.

The Burial of our Heads (in Digital Sand)

“Unreal and totally shitty — I had not thought the internet could screw so many.”

— T. S. Helliot
April is a stupid month, leading
would-be poets out of their doldrums, fixing
pandemic boredom with invented desires, blurring
“literature” with spring’s regurgitated pain.
Winter swallowed us, digested us inside, converting
our shared insanity into the internet’s snow, energizing
our shitty lives with freeze-dried fantasies.
Summer should terrify us, swelling over the airwaves,
a tsunami of mutually assured destruction; soon we’ll shut up again,
go back to sterile silence, impose another worldwide quarantine,
and smoke dope, watch YouTube, emotional junk food.

I’m not a zombie, I’m no one, a true American.

And when we were young, unconscious of crime, we played
hide and seek in city streets after dark, not yet
afraid of each other. We yelled, Olly olly oxen free,
called each other slut and whore without meaning what we meant, 
built forts, set fires, threw dirt bombs at passing cars.
Now we hide from each other online and don't want to be found.

What memories still grab us? What twisted trees grow
out of this intellectual wreckage? Children of TV,
we cannot say, or guess, because we know only
an infinity of copied images, pixilated suns heating
galaxies of cartoon planets, where there’s no relief
from the dry stones of anorexic imaginations. Only ---

there’s the illusion of community in this digital box,
(Join the illusion, come in to this digital box),
and it will rewrite you into someone different from either
that lonely little girl who hid when no one bothered to find her
or the lonely old witch creeping up now to eat the last of her youth —
it will offer you oblivion in a sprinkle of binary dust.