Skip to content

Baffler Archives: Poems

Columns

Ode To Protest
It’s as if to be real you and I must garner backers without a rib to call our own. We make ripples with daily effort and then suddenly flood the place with anger. Ours is the anger of the lowly, we see life from the knees up. What vision we had on that glorious day, even the ...

The Birthday Party
Trick Dogs and Warthogs are rolling on the lawn of the child’s birthday party the Trick Dog is tame the Warthog is Wild only you wouldn’t know it They mock-fight, bite and yelp for help the Trick Dog runs under a folding chair The Warthog charges at a seven year old boy ...

Tupperware
Each container is an emblem Of rubbery perfection, sealing Leftovers from the ravenous elements, Preserving them for tomorrow or the next day, Depending on a body’s mood. Say the mood is transferred, Inside equals outside, the when overlaps The where. Say the sun slips Softly ...

Yvette Mimieux in Hit Lady
All I remember is she drives a red sports car and wears an ankh around her neck and is instructed by The Company to bump off some union bigwig because he’s scheduled to testify against a Mafioso so she assumes a new identity and starts dating him and naturally he falls madly ...

Christmas Colors, Rochester, New York
1. Driving in circles                Same strip where three neon bagels                 stare across a traffic signal:                 another sign, lit red optician’s spectacles,                 starts us on ...

Bert.
His cosmology major falls like a free compass point through the breakthrough of all emotional life. A puritan background psychically fused with the interdimensional thought-form of Portland to produce a cathode ray capable of power-crazed crop circles—This is the heart of all ...

My Progress On Stilts
Old timer, third-rate Orpheus Lacking even a make-believe Eurydice, A thousand million steps And only now do you notice These ghostly contraptions attached to your feet. You’re like a windmill on toothpicks Don’t go near fire. Don’t try to walk on water. You’re ...

ii sic
I    rony! I    rony! So crows our jocose neologe butt4 wishing he were there known. To get theirs from here is a matter of leer: this is my Tool, my pretty So she proteges and exeges but just all the while pendages his verifile ...

December 3, 2002
January 24, 2013
Beloveds, today the UN commission searched all of the square feet of Hussein’s office in a show of power. When I speak of feet I speak of attacks conceived in Afghanistan, planned in Germany, funded through Dubai, executed in America, using Saudis. I speak of the frozen ...

December 2, 2002
January 24, 2013
As it happens every night beloveds, while we turned in the night sleeping uneasily the world went on without us. While we turned sleeping uneasily at least ten were injured in a bomb blast in Bombay and four killed in Palestine. While we turned sleeping uneasily a warehouse of ...

Park American Dream
January 23, 2013
At the park of unexploded ordnance and by-products of enriching uranium: The everglades do all they can, do your best to recall your ticket and what brought you out of your home. Was it the child or a local celeb? The big pin on his shirt & Bonzo? A miniature greenback with ...