Alan Kaufman

Alan Kaufman (akpoem@aol.com) writes that his most recent book is

Who Are We?, a collection of poetry, with poems forthcoming in Identity

Lessons:Learning American Style (Penguin Books) and appear in Aloud:Voices

From The Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt).

Chow Down Poem Food

I want to get laid, so I might as well eat. But what will I eat today?

My stomach is overhanging my belt like a tongue with a drooling belly button/

I want to eat a Whopper raw, crack open a pack of Orio's/pour sauce down my

throat straight from the pan, wolf down mashed potatoes

Yeah, I like that word:wolf . Also, the expression:

scarf , as in: scarf down three steaks.

And these days I've noticed a new waddle in my step/ Tip the scales at three

hundred pounds and climbing

I've used up the notches in my belt

My sports jacket's tight under the pits

I can't walk out of stores with clothes no more

Instead, now the tailor regards me with cold, clinical eyes of disgust, like a

doctor, and says in a curt voice: "Step up here", and leads me to a small

scaffolding before a mirror, and loops a tape measure around my torso like a

noose, and hangs my waistline from the belt until dead.

Holy Goodyear blimp Batman! I've gotten fat!

When I go to the zoo in my Bermuda shorts and plod past cages

lapping at ices I hear the lions snort: "What a beast!"

I'm what tourists now go to see! I can't cage my appetite!

Hey, I'm food-abusing! I'm on a fast food spree!

I'll have : three big Macs, two whoppers with cheese, one super burrito, one

chicken burrito, four tortillas,two extra large servings of fries, a fish

sandwich,three cherry pies, and a part time high school age slave

labor worker from an oppressed third world country, sandwiched between two

juicy sesame seed buns with special hot sauce and a cherry tomato popped into

her mouth, and don't forget the napkins and straw!

Yeah,

I'm orally fixated; can't stop thinking of food.

I use to like having sex and going to movies

and things like that!

Now, I just want to lie in bed nibbling Stella Doro breakfast treats

and snackin' on Gerber vanilla custard baby foods

Gosh, I'm jones'n for Tapioca!

I live at the sizzler!

I've got a shrimp tail growing out of my ass!

My hero is Hoss Cartwright!

Pass the peas pass the butter pass the rolls pass the ketchup

pass the roast beef pass the homeless pass the grits pass the congress pass

the string beans pass the breadline pass the junta pass the diamonds

pass the oil pass the dead baby pass the bayonet pass the burning cross dead

jew black puerto rican hot dogs barbecue sauce

Hey, I'm h u n g r y! Take my order!

Let's go to the Third World supermarket and buy up a few countries worth of

natural resources and eat that shit down and hey, I'm still hungry!

Lets jump in the car and go to the big mens shop and the large womens

department and buy a few pairs of briefs made from circus tents and bras

stitched from parachutes and commando jump over troubled parts of our country

and squash the poor to death!

Hey, I'm getting big as a house and I like it!

I'm Mother Goose, only, instead of a shoe I live up my own ass!

And make sausage from my spleen!

Try it, you'll like it!

Because I'm the behemoth of American appetite

and I'm comin to your town soon,

a Pillsbury doughboy out of control

in an ss republican party fascist uniform

lookin to set up shop as human beef manufacturer

hey I'm comin to make chopped meat out of you

I'm grindin up that garlic and that paprika

and greasin up the frying pan with hate

and I'm gonna pop you in there one vote at a time

because I'm hungry for human food

I'm a government of by and for Jeffrey Dahmer

A genocidal cannibal kind of guy

With hefty chompers and thunder thighs of Texas good

old boy rollickin political picnics, cutting deals with

the chicken breasts and corn cobs

and polyunsaturates of clogged financial arteries

and genocidal foreign policies

And when the universe spreads its big cheeks

with a sky-rumbling lightening jagged crack

of ominous ass and the gas clouds of cosmic indigestion rumble

with atomic war, or more likely the economic ruin of an overboiled

spaghetti-insufficient ruffage diet,

with a Brooklyn cheer, an audible raspberry, I will be born

A fart In The Dark New American

swelling the savage belly of life with a tongue thrust from inflated cheek

pouches and eyes popped enthusiastic

and a long, loud trickle of bpppppppppppppph! erupting uninterrupted from the

clapped together half-moons mighty clashing cymbals of my posterior, with my

eyes squeezed shut in transcendental American trance

Inscrutable milk-product of a non-dairy meat-based culture

A yogurt virus in the beef plant of sloppy glistening glyceridic gunk stuck to

the blood-soaked meat packing plant workers' rubber yellow Wellington

boots/ Though in the end its all gristle ain't it?

The mothers milk and the calf boiled in it

The harrowing slaughter of anything tender

and the dull deadly torture of our own offspring

To be boiled alive in mothers breast milk

A big Mac and milk shake to go

An egg salad with mayo on rye

A Ronald Reagan on David Dukes with

a side order of Newt Gingrich

America, cosmic kosherization might help you

but you want to kill your Jews!

America, only soul can save you but

you want to kill your Blacks!

America, you're your own face

reddening with rage

And pretty soon I guess you'll put on the uniform

and hop out on one leg thrust into a jackboot,

the other barefoot, a kind of Herman Goering Jackie Gleason

ready to pow zoom batter the Alice wife of your love

into a gas chamber, and whip the defecating Norton naked kids

of thrown bodies into pits,

and tattoo the Trixie forearms of moo moo Brooklyn

for a handful of ash! O, mourn fat man fascist.

What are you crazy, or what?

I'm throwing up on you now, regurgitating your robbed soul

Down on my knees in the racetrack jockey stalls as pure puke

of Buchenwaldian war rooms and oval offices

My weight jumped to four hundred plus

as I ride astride the skeletal nag

of apocalypse

whipping its bony flanks down the last stretch

of human skulls-paved track

and toga wrapped Americans cheer me on to the new Rome.

Yeah, I'm pounding that stretch hooves spitting dirt

past nuclear submarine hoagie-infested coastal

cancerous sparkling reefs fluorescent

with atomic spill, and sunrays diarrhetic

splatting through the ozone toilet hole,

and billions of dolphins cods mermaids

roiling the waves belly up dead tuna

and no shrimp cocktail for us folks no more,

and the next thing to go is blind beef don't ya know

pampas-broiled Argentina style

on the death squad plains of the pampas-sero,

and veal calve babies sledgehammered

skulls crushed

on the congress floor

they eat brains raw

and the next thing to go

is them vegetables

biogenetical malformed death spinach

from labs CIA

and then the FBI cracks down on racially

impure juice orange

and also finally thank god

on turnips not of white christian origin,

and the only good american, I say, is a fat american

layered blubber belly wheelbarrowed

lumbering in a beet sugar

daze through the cholesterol inferno

And I think that by eating all this food

I don't have to believe in life,

and I think that by eating all this food

I don't have to help the poor,

and I think that by eating all this food

I can really hate myself, and you, and

be the big mountain me beef stew moron

that I think of myself

dressed in newborn blue pink

and waiting like a trapped caveman to thaw

out of my glacier of civilization rampage

with fat dollop tears of joy down my brainless dreamless face

and a Barney Rubble baseball bat

brain bashing its way to Armageddon

through Gazan suburbs of corpulence

with an ice cream cone stuck unicorn in the middle

of my forehead,

because Ronald MacDonald is Jesus Christ!

***

Alan Kaufman