Burroughs for Thanksgiving

 

 

If you teach them in your classroom,

You should invite them for Thanksgiving dinner.

All the writers whose work you require to be read

Would finally have a good meal and company.

 

Autistic Gertrude Stein, squat as Buddha.

With snippy, bitchy Alice at her side

Measuring and commenting on

Your mother’s lace tablecloth.

  

James Joyce, half blind and drinking up

Randy Irish jokes, singing sentimental ballads.

Virginia Woolf with rocks in her pockets

Ready to drown in your pool.

 

Mad Vivian and her sexually repressed banker poet,

Whose friend is that Anti-Semitic Fascist from Italy.

Or worse, the Irish nationalist whose wife talks to the dead

Ouija board, as if her visions will map the afterlife.

  

 

And you haven’t even started with the crazy Americans

Who so love their drugs and guns! From the adding machine

Heir who blew his wife’s brains out playing William Tell,

To the macho sucking on a shotgun in the guest bathroom.

All the drugs, the alcohol, the sexual perversions

Would certainly make for a lively Thanksgiving.

But you know better. You’d be fired from your job

If you ever invited home the writers you teach in school.

[Disposable Poem November 5, 2015]

Dr. Mike