Stillborn Summer

My friends and I were
late 70s Scooby-Doo teens.
Hanna-Barbera themselves
couldn't have made us
any flatter, running past
the same lamp, table and
window over and over,
and Jimmy Carter smoking his
peanut-filled reefers on
covers of fat magazines.

Yes, I'm aware that
black babies in city slums
ate boiled rats for breakfast,
while we were privileged,
over-indulged and spoiled,
our bald little bellies
stuffed with Barbie dolls
and Big Jim action figures,
swallowing every sweet processed
promise of love spoon-fed
by our picture-tube parents.
Bloated like famine in Biafra,
placidly consuming all that STUFF
and shitting out a sticky stream
of market-targeted ticker-tapeworms,
each one taking with it
a little more flesh and substance.

It's true that things could have
been much much worse.
I don't want to minimize
the many varieties of human suffering,
but maybe some struggle for survival
would have awakened us from our
air-conditioned McDonaldland somnambulism.

We needed an adequate map of the landscape
and all we got were mathematics
and Mary Tyler Moore.
We needed wisdom and guidance
from our elders and they were
too busy rubbing their heads
and patting their tummies.

And the drugs...
Oh my goodness-the drugs.
Drugs drugs drugs.

Oh how we sucked out
every last drop
of canned laughter
from that wonderful candy.
Like a lover that fucks you
twelve ways til next Tuesday
then stands you up and
screws your best friend
behind your back,
we were co-dependant
with those cute little
red, blue and yellow pills,
all that glittering white powder
and rich, creamy smoke.

Drugs were the supermodel seducers
in the ultimate uber-infomercial,
offering tantalizing protruberences
and ecstatically curved surfaces,
but when the plastic panties fell to the floor
the molded crotches were not
anatomically correct
and our creativity went wasted
on the bathroom tiles.

Drugs were the sour breasts
that fed industrial-spilled milk;
the retarded trailer-park mother
whose greasy potato-chip love
left us full of visible holes,
mechanical toys with missing parts,
banging cymbals and beating drums
in crazy spastic circles.

So many of my friends
found their way into locked rooms
to sit slobbering in soiled diapers.
Crippled and straightjacketed,
I see them sometimes still
at the local grocery buying beer,
hair like straw bleached dry
of color and moisture,
strung bitter from ear to shoulder,
the fallow field of scalp exposed above,
thick eyes like scratched dirty glass
with their child-anger,
now an old man, on the other side,
still beating and pleading
with one feeble fist.

David W. Aronson
May, 2002