Zombie Jamboree


1

                (cf. *Enderby*, Anthony Burgess)

After long silence, Enderby's muse
returns.  Her dictations,
however, are peculiarly tentative,
soft and self-interrupted,
a babyish scolding.
He struggles, mumbling.

It's his fault.  He drove her away
that time she appeared
nude and golden
in his bed in Tangiers, and said,
in her harsh way, "When I give
I give big.  Darling."  And he 
( - you wonder, reading a Brit,
how sex ever arises
beneath that glum impacted wit)

could only visualize,
as if from above, his white pulpy buttocks,

and gibbered "no no no,"

and she, amused, rose
and dressed and, patting
his hand on the way out,
said: "Minor poet."

(It isn't the greatest novel
but it contains the whole point of fiction.)


2

An incredible snafu leaves
Bush completely on his own
one wintry afternoon in Europe.
Back home, heads roll.  Back home goes to Def-Con III.
The Premier or Prime Minister or whatever
of Europe stands with Bush on the steps
of his palace and peers,
embarrassed, about, and offers
the use of his own Executive Guard
and limo.  
The President shakes him off and decides to walk.
He knows the American Embassy
is just a short distance up
this boulevard.  He's pissed 
but unafraid.  Perhaps 
being used to his unobtrusive Secret Service
makes their absence less evident.  Or 
he draws on his deep personal faith 
in Jesus.  That's what it is.  
He enjoys walking,
the chill air, the weird pompous buildings.
He encounters Europeans.  They
wear leather coats and zebra shirts and feathers in their hats,
which conceal implanted antennas.
(When they aren't chattering to each other,
they appear to be talking to themselves.)
They recognize and surround him.
They remonstrate and gesture.
Cheney, back home, is moved to a safe location.
Bush knows what they might want to rag him about -
.  Iraq
.  the Kyoto Treaty
.  Palestinians -
but he doesn't speak European.
Despite their noise they seem to bear
some strange metaphysical weight
that isolates them from each other.  Also,
they're smoking, which slows them down.
Bush wonders if he's in danger.
The thin lips twist
mirthlessly; he squares his shoulders.  
He recalls that he has been born again
and is justified in the Lord.  But
the crowd parts, enfeebled
perhaps by that; perhaps
by that metaphysical weight.
The backwash of adrenaline leaves
the President melancholy,
and, nearing the Embassy,
he looks up at the sky -
unsure if the lights he sees
are the white bellies of birds,
the Pleiades, or an airstrike.


3

It was after the Great Society
but before the Conservative Revolution.
If he thought about it at all,
Nixon's aim was to gut our department
through overburdening and underfunding -
taking credit for our benign
programs while they survived
and for cutting them when they failed.
Meanwhile I pretended life was meaningful,
with an adding machine that took up half my desk.
In the space that remained, I set up my pad
and phoned the firms on my roster.
"Is this Dick Grinder Inc.?"  "Yes!"
"Is this Bert Blender, Financial Officer?"  "Yes!!"
(That plump, delighted voice 
which never asked my name.)  "Bert,
we're calling about the people 
we've sent.  How's Lateesha?"  "Fine."
"How is LaTonya doing?"  "Not
so fine … we had to let her go.
I'll mail you the paperwork."  "What seemed 
to be the problem?"  
"I think she said something about her babies
who went to live with her cousin,
but the cousin's boyfriend shot
her boyfriend, and Mama
(I'm not sure whose mama) bitch-slapped
the cousin, and someone ran out of the house,
and the boyfriend's cousin couldn't
make bail, and then the plumbing blew up
because somebody flushed a diaper - "  By
now we were helplessly giggling
but I said, "Now Bert,
we need to feel our employers
understand the needs of our placements."
"I do!  I'm very sympathetic,"
he cried, and went on to tell
how he often sat on the stairs
(which no one used) in his building
and thought about the Bomb
and cried, and how he couldn't
rely on any support,
not only at the office;
and continued this way for some time. 
I doodled and muttered,
"I know you're trying to run a business,"
and agreed to review LaTonya 
at some future date.
Then I finished the form and inserted it
in a binder down the hall.
Whatever became of those binders?
By now, they rest in the landfill
beneath all our cities
with every human sigh.


4

The traffic moves, revealing
what stopped it:
four - now five - police cars
surrounding a nondescript Accord.
Is it drugs?  The car
itself?  Stolen,
or chased down after speeding?
or something unimaginable …

The driver invisible,
the cops not yet emerged,
there are only the flashing lights, 
the five cars and the one.

They are like - here comes the metaphor -
a herd of postgraduates parsing Derrida.


5

As the sun sets over Haight-Ashbury,
Bill and Connie return with munchies.
They shriek their adventures, their near escapes,
as we throw ourselves on the chips.
It takes them a while
to return to our state
of various undress
across the two joined mattresses and floor.
We are all most interested in Connie's
progress, but
she wanders topless to the window
and loses herself in what she sees.
And Sam loses himself
obsessing about which political grouplets
will converge tomorrow on the city
to march against the War.
Some lose themselves in the music,
some in the lights on the ceiling.
I babble about creativity,
always, always about creativity,
the vision I have not found,
the one I imagine I've found …
And so, another opportunity
for sex until oblivion
is only partly seized.
But Connie does not return
from the window, and, gradually,
I get up to join her.
Beneath the moon, the diner is closed.  The dealers
have vanished from the alleys.  Even
the mad, discharged soldier
has left our corner.
But the street from end to end is filled
with the grey people of the future.
Both terrible and silly
they make their nothing noises,
back to back and belly to belly.