Long ago, perhaps even before birth,
a hack writer installed his Juan Corona
in my middle ear. The typewriter’s clacking keys fill
gaps in my knowledge and crowd out understanding.
He casts me as a romantic lead. The dirty blonde
sitting across my breakfast table wears an expression
sour as grapefruit juice. Her plaid robe’s careless fold opens
to a roadmap of varicose veins on lumpy thighs.
I stare out the window through gaps
in the fence’s white wooden slats
and hope to glimpse the woman meant for me –
the right one, the nude sunbather whose breasts float
like Nuryev’s grand jeté.
During my drive to work, Congressman
Lavrenti Beria squawks on the radio news.
I recognize coded orders from his cabal
of crypto fascists to their brainwashed zombie hoards.
A villain in a tan Ford Bronco reveals himself
by lumbering into my lane. I become an action hero.
The script calls for a fight in a parking lot.
After escalating insults and provocations
I’m supposed to bury his head in the asphalt
with a slick Steven Segal iriminage.
But I’m too late for work. I sneak in the back door
as my boss’ shaved head and high-collared cape
recede around the corner. If he’d caught me, the Evil Sargon
would have banished me to planet Telcom’s underground mines,
where I’d scrape plutonium from rock walls with bleeding fingers
while choking on thorium dust. Until the revolution
I can only further Sargon’s maniacal plans for world domination.
I limit the damage by leaving before 5:00.
The hack has entertained me for so long that I mistake his voice
for my own. Desperate to end my oppression
I see force as the only option.
Host of the Gelato Poetry Series, author of the poetry collection Words of Power Dances of Freedom, and an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual, Jon Wesick has published over three hundred poems in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Pearl, and Slipstream. He has also published nearly a hundred short stories. One was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. One of his poems won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists contest. Another had a link on the Car Talk website.
In Between Hangovers 