Scuttled poem—
was called “Golf Cart”
Something about
Golf Cart Stage
Imperialism
ditched
in a pond.
Poem kicked off with
the cringe quatrain:
“All aboard!
here we go—
uh, little bit of a
puddle, here”
Poem sputtered out
at the next quatrain:
“Legs up!
everybody, um
—jump!
paddle, paddle”
Scuttled poem—
gurgling, still.
It’s going to be okay.
There were no odes to doorlessness
nor hymns to windowless wondrousness.
There could have been tortured metaphors
with straining semaphores
to Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali,
Nigeria, Benin, and Chad.
There could have been paeans
to the latest French designs:
Le Grand Lisse, Le Magnifique Lent
L’ incroyablement Silencioux.
There could have been cold-eyed contrasts
to Russian knockoffs like
Velikiy Slavianskiy Sekret Amfibianoidov
“Great Slav Stealth Amphibianoid”
But scuttled poems
make for dubious intel
despite
encrypted lines like:
The verdant fields
in front
are unfolding
The withered fields
behind
are fast fading
It’s—okay—
or, not okay—
either way
There is no breezy way
of jumping out.
What remains is
not a red wheelbarrow
in the rain
but a Golf Cart
in the muck
with its last say—
as we walk away.