My Room

Joe Powning


My room
My haven
My block of peace
In a hectic world

My room
My own personal disaster area
Of piled clothing and blaring music-
A comfortable chaos

My room
My harbor of fantasies
“Gee whiz, Ace, what kinda room is this?”
asked Ace’s detective’s sidekick
“I don’t know,” Ace replied, “but I like it.”

My room
My ongoing rationalization
Joe’s brain: Joe’s room is messy
Joe: What’s new?

My room
My responsibility
The subject of many
“Go clean your’s”

My room
My prison
The subject of many
“Go to your’s”

My room
My cubicle of terror
harborer of nightmares
sinister when dark
shelter of my angst

My room
My haven
My organized chaos
My responsibility
My harbor of fantasy
My prison
My terror
My block of peace
in a hectic world

America

Tony Hoagland


Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

Tony Hoagland, “America” from What Narcissism Means to Me. Copyright © 2003 by Tony Hoagland. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Sims: The Game

Elizabeth Spires

A popular computer game explained by a child


In some ways it's Life Real Life
in some ways Yes in some ways No

You design the people they can be
outgoing nice playful active neat
but you can't make them be everything
if they are neat they will clean up after themselves
(Charisma is when they talk to themselves
in front of a mirror)

Adults never get older & old people can do
anything young people can do
Adults don't have to have jobs they can cheat:
push the rose bud & money appears

Job objects like pizza ovens earn you money
or you can be an extra in a movie a soldier
a doctor an astronaut a human guinea pig

Children get older slowly every day they get a report card
children can live in the house without adults
(a family is anyone who lives in the house with you)

Everyone gets skill points:
for chess painting playing the piano
gardening cooking swimming mechanics
(when you get points a circle above your head
fills up with blue)

& there are goals: not to run out of money not to die
& to buy more stuff for the house
(like a pool table or an Easy Double Sleeper Bed)

Adults can get married but it's hard to get married
You tell them to propose but they can't make the decision
on an empty stomach or they've just eaten
& are too tired

To have a Baby click Yes or No & a baby carriage
rolls up

Everyone has to eat sleep go to the bathroom etc.
if they live alone & don't have friends
they get depressed & begin waving their arms

If you give them Free Will you don't have to
keep track of them
but it's strange what they'll do:
once a player fell asleep under the stairs standing up

& sometimes they go into a bedroom that isn't theirs
& sleep in the wrong bed then you have to tell them:
Wake up! That is not your bed!

If they are mad they stomp on each other or put each other
in wrestling holds but no one gets hurt

There are different ways to die:
you can drown in the pool if you swim laps for 24 hours
(the Disaster Family all drowned in the pool
except the little girl who kept going
to school after they died she was perfect)

& the stove or fireplace or grill
can set the house on fire:
once there was a fire in the kitchen
eight people rushed in
yelling Fire! Fire! & blocked the door
so the firemen couldn't get through
(after that everyone had to study cooking
now there are less accidents)

If you have Free Will you can starve or drown yourself
then you wander around as a ghost
until another player agrees to resurrect you

In some ways it's Life Real Life
in some ways Yes in some ways No

Footsteps to Follow

Kelli Carter


What happened to all the Lone Rangers,
the heroes on white stallions,
the knights in white armor,
who fought for our honor?

Where have all the good guys gone?
Whose footsteps are we to follow now?
Whose shoes are we to fill?

Mine is the voice of this generation---
the voice of a thousand.
Do you hear our unanswered questions?
Or are you so deaf that you cannot hear?

So what happened to you, Lone Ranger?
Each time you don’t answer, a little
part of us dies.

Maybe Dats Youwr Pwoblem Too

by Jim Hall


All my pwoblems
who knows, maybe evwybody's pwoblems
is due to da fact, due to da awful twuth
dat I am SPIDERMAN.

I know, I know. All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all
doze extwa legs in bed. Well, dat's funny yeah.
But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two. Go ahead.

You get doze cwazy calls fwom da
Gubbener askin you to twap some booglar who's
only twying to wip off color T.V. sets.
Now, what do I cawre about T.V. sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of
equipment and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.

Till der he is, some poor dumb color T.V. slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped. So big deal.

You tink when you SPIDERMAN
der's sometin big going to happen to you.
Well, I tell you what. It don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens. Cubbener calls, I go.
Bwing him to powice. Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.

I tink I twy sometin diffunt. I tink I twy
sometin excitin like wacing cawrs. Sometin to make
my heart beat at a difwent wate.
But den you just can't quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN. You SPIDERMAN for life. Fowever. I can't even
buin my suit. It won't buin. It's fwame wesistant.
So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.
So maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.
Nobody can buin der suits, day all fwame wesistent.
Who knows?

You Can't Write a Poem about McDonald's

Ronald Wallace


Noon. Hunger is the only thing
singing in my belly.
I walk through the blossoming cherry trees
on the library mall,
past the young couples coupling,
by the crazy fanatic
screaming doom and salvation
at a sensation-hungry crowd,
to the Lake Street McDonald's.
It is crowded, the lines long and sluggish.
I wait in the greasy air.
All around me people are eating –
the sizzle of conversation,
the salty odor of sweat,
the warm flesh pressing out of
hip huggers and halter tops.
When I finally reach the cash register,
the counter girl is crisp as a pickle,
her fingers thin as french fries,
her face brown as a bun.
Suddenly I understand cannibalism.
As I reach for her,
she breaks into pieces
wrapped neat and packaged for take-out.
I'm thinking, how amazing it is
to live in this country, how easy
it is to be filled.
We leave together, her warm aroma
close at my side.
I walk back through the cherry trees
blossoming up into pies,
the young couple frying in
the hot, oily sun,
the crowd eating up the fanatic,
singing, my ear, my eye, my tongue
fat with the wonder
of this hungry world.

I Can't Forget You

Len Roberts


I Can’t Forget You.
spray-painted high on the overpass,
each letter a good foot long,
and I try to picture the writer
        hanging from a rope
between midnight and dawn
the weight of his love swaying,
        making a trembling
N and G, his mind at work
        with the apostrophe—
        the grammar of loss—
and his resistance to hyperbole,
        no exclamation point
        but a period at the end
that shows a heart not given
        to exaggeration,
a heart that’s direct with a no-
        fooling around approach,
and I wonder if he tested the rope
before tying it to the only tree I can see
        that would bear his weight,
or if he didn’t care about the free-
        fall of thirty or more feet
as he locked his wrist to form such
        straight T’s,
and still managed, dangling, to flex
        for the C and G,
knowing as he did, I’m sure,
the lover would ride this way each day
until she found a way around,
a winding back road with trees
        and roadside
tiger lilies, maybe a stream, a
        white house, white fence,
        a dog in the yard
              miles
from this black-letter, open-book
        in-your-face missing
that the rain or Turnpike road
        crew
will soon wash off.