[Newspoetry] I'm gonna Win This Contest!!!!!

[Sam Markewich 2]

Soft Manhood Threatens Re-Elected Mayor of San Francisco
by associated poet Sam "The Right Man for The Wrong Job" Markewich
dateline 16 February 2000

Today, Willie Brown, you made it off rich with all that mumbo jumbo. 
Riffraff selling scabied insiders headlines to your city.  
Yes, you could watch the immaculate barbarian take on the supple flesh
of your flopping jello-belly.  
But, when you stuck your hand in the pocket to produce a fiver you
pulled out a dripping ladle of green bile in its stead.  

Your soft money just got softer pal.  

Robert Blye said it years ago -- 
The man who eats yogurt is the soft man.  
He's got no hair.  
He is the flaccid wallet, 
the wimpish sissy fussing over an avalanche rolling ever towards manhood
at a vapidly alarming rate,
threatening to hold back history's great climax.  
His currency is soft.  
The company he keeps is soft.  
It does not incorporate the primal scream of the homeless hairy man who
roams through the concrete asphalt wood pushing a shopping cart, 
yoked like sorely crippled oxen ploughing themselves 
under with psychotic speed and drudgery.  

The man without a home.
His sanctuary is his poetics.
If he can't afford poetics let him live without spirit.
Let him live elsewhere than here.  
Unclean, 
primal, 
beating on drum, 
hair on chest, 
hair on face, 
hair everywhere -- 
even his cilia count -- 
unkempt --
brutal,
hard.  

Riveting creature, smells the way a man should smell.  
Collective unconscious spreading out into exponential fungus under
bulging toenails, 
a brilliant, upwardly twisted mandala 
forcing destiny's pain into malignant footsteps towards the wood.  

There are no dirty streets hewn from the fluff of marzipan rhetoric. 
No chocolate coated cherry truths.  
ONLY the blind can lead the blind.  
For only they turn sight inside, deep, deep, deep down.  
And swallow.
There is nothing soft there where it goes.  
No.  
Not in a man.
Not where he touches.  
Only the hard-boned, hard-wired, hard-edged pizzicato . . . 
"Grunt."  

If you, yes, you now, would come upon this news, would a poem not arise,
not a stone hurled with the mute wind of the arrow of primitives
towards your head?
lay you out and knock you dead with the weight of its tone, the ebb and
flow of its direct, penetrating, virility?
the pointed ontology of its metaphysics? 
and the protruding teleology of its epistemologically bold-printed bald
head, a crucible moving at flaming speed towards the four corners of
this great paper trapezoid the profound fathers called America?  
Because America needs not a poem but a leader?

She will tell you in breathy tones, through the famed four winds, the
forcefields of the ancient wisdom which protect home from the phallus
more than Monroe's doctrine ever could.  

No yogurt.  
No organ meat.  
No quivering fish.
Nothing, do you hear me, nothing soft.  
Icebergs.
A cold and mordant mausoleum, sanctuary to the dead.

Yes, when today you made it off richer in the hundreds of thousands,
Mayor Brown, no one knew the dogs you wolfed down one right after the
other seethed with maggots like so many unheard of weights of conscience
swallowed in choked peristaltic gulps, 
the deadened sound of rock-firm sanity pounding, pounding forever, muted
against itself.  

As the lining burned into ulcers, 
exposed, the mush of your insides mingled with the four humors.  Maggots
crawled everywhere beneath, coddled your skin into heatful lust.  
No longer holding back, your manhood threatened before the company that
keeps you nestled 'neath its wing, 
you sucked the soft feces up into your anus, vomited up diarrhea
uncontrollably for months.  

Last gasp for sanity,
and there are dollar signs in your city now, 
as drifting off to sleep you awaken,
a nightmarish sweat trapped between a line of verse and the business
district.  
Into your armpit a single dollar bill falls with silent discretion and
turns to you with a Masonic secret and malignant affability.
The whites of your eyes role back into the fever.
You know no longer insides from out.
Has your constituency failed you?
Into your pockets grows a flaccid mennace.  
The primitive warrior returns.
Does this softness threaten your manhood? 
You gulp down a stone, sprout stubble and resolve the castration complex
once and for all by adding butter to both sides of the bread.