Channeling
the Zeitgeist
by E.W. Wilder
Channeling the zeitgeist of mid '80s puffed-hair poof, Bean Newton
in “Artisans Go Belly Up at 12 O'Clock” uses the irony of
a lowbrow speaker revealing his own angst to lament the death of highbrow
culture. It's both act of post-modernism and screed against it, both
jeremiad and laundry list.
Found, interestingly enough, under a pile of Newton's literal dirty
laundry shortly after his death, the poem has never been legible until
now, when a grant from the Downy Teddy Bears for Learning Foundation
allowed for the scrap of paper to be CAT-scanned.
Special thanks to Purewater University's Advanced Medical Claims Training
Program for their access to the required technology.
Artisans Go Belly Up at 12 O'clock
by Bean Newton
Was it so wrong to wish Rhonda dead?
Was it so evil in the adolescent sum time
to wander off without a socket
to my name and in only a Starsky
& Hutch t-shirt and a bad case of acne and a switch-
blade that's really a comb? I was tough
in my black leather blazer and my zipped-up shoes.
Was it really so outré to spy on the feather-
haired Farrah Foxette across the alley as she slunk
home after a drunken farthouse hooten-orgy? So vul-
nerable, she looked, there on the deck, bra=less and small-
boobed, nipples perked out to the cold? I could have then,
but I didn't.
Who regrets the nerve
of children to recount their fathers stoned on Cutty
Sark and 8-tracks of Gordon Lightfoot on the chrome
Nakamichi and the old KLH speakers, one with a woofer
blown? The matters of fact we survived. Was it so false
of us to lust after Camaros and KISS posters and to wish
raunchy Rhonda dead?
