"Squirrel," A Weird Catastrophe Poem
SquirrelI was sitting at a duck pond in Oregon at the epicenter of liberal living. Here is the house of the green party. Black lives matter here and so do safe spaces and nasty women. I marched with the resistance people as they kicked their boots down and they painted their bodies bright and beautiful colors and we waved signs and sang in unison. The hundreds of us gathered in the park and listened to the speakers, young and old, crying their earnest cries Later, I sat at the duck pond and an aging, dirty man with a funny hat and a Charles Manson voice came to say hello to his feathered friends and to share some bread with them. He said his name was Squirrel. He said his ducks were named Bully, Sneaker, and Daffy. “Be nice, ducks,” he said, tearing off large chunks from the loaf and seeing to it that each duck was fed fairly. Squirrel told me that the cops harass him. “I can’t sleep anywhere.” Squirrel said that he wanted a girlfriend. “All these young hippies get all the ladies. It’s because they have weed.” Squirrel told me he was down on his luck. “They don’t like me in the jail. They always send me back.” Squirrel told me he was looking for a job. “I’m living in the back of a Mexican restaurant and doing dishes for 4 dollars an hour. I should go down there with a .45 and point it at the guy’s head and tell him to give me a job.” We love music here. We love dancing and food and art and theatre and education and finer things and beer and marijuana and kittens and historical revisionism with a fringe on top and wearing farm-animal masks and dancing about. But we don’t love the poor. They exist. Everywhere. They’re feeding ducks. Watering the earth. Scraping. Eking. Going mad. It gets shittier the more you go along. They’re looking for a way out. “I should go down there with a .45 and point it at the guy’s head.” And yet finer educated people are still bewildered when the country votes against decency.
