Waste Land
Redux
by A. C. Teeple
(with apologies to T.S.
Eliot)
April is the consumer
month, breeding
Mini-malls out of the
farmland, spawning
Gluttony and desire,
enticing
Cash and plastic with
commercials.
Christmas brought
consumerism,
covering
Earth in glossy circulars,
feeding
on the greed with clipped
coupons.
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February surprised us,
making over
the
Strambergersee
Mall
With an Old Navy; we stopped by
The Limited,
And went on in
fluorescent
light, into
the food court,
And drank coffee, and
talked for an
hour.
Bin gar keine Drohne,
stamm' aus
Levittown,
echt die Vororte. |
And when we were
children, abandoned
at
the day-care,
My sitter, she played a
Barney
tape,
And I was frightened. She
said Caitlin,
Katelyn, purple
Dinosaurs.
And down I
went.
Mom bought me purple
everything,
where was
she?
Barney, much of the
night, when
someone
nuked me ravioli. |
Where are the stores that
died, where
chains grow
Out of this agrarian
wasteland?
Mart of
Sam,
You plan to stay,
Conform, for
you sell only
A heap of plastic tchotchke,
from El Salvador,
And the local stores lost
all business,
the
individual no
relief
And the economy is drained.
Only
A few shadows of a dimming past.
(Remember the shadow of
the dimming
past.)
And I will show you
something different
from either
Your footsteps in the
concrete jungle
behind
you
Or your footsteps at
evening dragging
underneath you
I will show you fear in a
totebag from
Gap. |
Verbraucht weht der
Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein vergessen Kind,
Wo weilest du? |
Ally McBeal, famous
lawyer(ish)
Scarfed a t-bone,
nevertheless
Is known to be the
thinnest woman
in Hollywood,
With a wicked length of
skirt.
Here, became she,
their model,
the starvèd
teenage girl
(Those are toothpicks
that were her
thighs.
Look!) |
Here is Jennifer Aniston
And Courtney
Cox,
The skeletons of sitcoms.
Here are the women who
live on grapes,
and here
is the Scale,
And here is the porcelain
Goddess, and
this is the
Laxative
Which is swift,
is
something she
counts as
"breakfast,"
Which she is forbidden to
eat. I
do not find
their Beauty.
Fear
weight by vomit.
I see crowds of
people, walking around in
a ring.
Thank you, come again.
If you see dear Miss Twiggy,
Tell her I'm size ten
myself:
One really should eat
these days.
"You gave me Hilfiger
first a year
ago;
They called me the
Hilfiger Girl." |
Yet, when we came back,
late, from the
Hilfiger
display,
Your arms full, and your
wallet barren,
I could
not
speak, and my
eyes failed,
I was neither
Living nor dead, and I
Knew nothing.
Watching Dawson on TV,
The insipid...
Oed' und leer das Queer. |
Unreal City;
Under the grey smog of
auto exhaust,
A crowd flowed over to
Abercrombie,
so many.
Sighs, short and
infrequent,
were
exhaled.
And each man clutched
his chinos before
his
chest.
Flowed through the racks
and through
The Line
To where The Attendant
worked the credit-card
machine |
With a dead sound on the
laser stroke
of tag.
There I saw one I knew,
and I stopped
her, crying:
"Heather!
You who were with me in art class!
That speech you gave
about corporate
takeovers,
Have you lost your mind?
You are shopping
here?
Or have you been forced
to slave here?
O tell me The Man has
not forced your
labour
hence,
And minumum wage lured
you here!
You! Hypocrite lecteur!
mon sembable
- mon
soeur! |
| background
design (thanks, Krys!) by
fey arte of fairies |
|