Don't bother me -- Final End

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Date Posted: 23:03:48 04/25/03 Fri
Author: Drummond
Subject: Don't bother me

Normally, I don't like political poetry. But as didactic as this one is, it's pretty good as poetry goes. At least I think so. It's about apathy and disconnection.

Strawberries
Published in Zyzzyva, Winter, 1987

By Eric Chock

Leave me alone
I'm just an ordinary man
who loves strawberries
I love to grab the green fuzziness
in my gathered fingertips
and dip the seedy point in sour cream
and brown sugar
and into my waiting lips
Mmmmmm, that's a sweet kiss worth
repeating all night,
just an ordinary man loving
his strawberries.
And I don't want to have to think
who picked them with
what brown illegal alien fingers,
back bent under the California sun
that used to belong to his forefathers anyway.
I don't wanna know that the price of cream
is American decadence that the rest of the world
would never dream of spending,
or that sugar is giving me an insulin rush
or that the strawberries were sprayed with EDB
causing me cancer.
I don't wanna know these things
so don't bother me!
I'm just an ordinary man
who loves strawberries that come to me
past striking cashiers at Safeway,
that come to me in green plastic baskets
that will not decompose, but will fill the air
with toxic fumes as they're incinerated
in the city dump polluting Hawaii's air and ocean,
plastic containers are a petroleum by-product
that the Arabs are processing
to enable their rich to buy the homes
of movie stars in Beverly Hills,
to buy whole hotels in Miami
or L.A. or New York,
while the rest of their people in poverty pray,
bowing their foreheads to the ancient ground
while all the oil flows out of the deserts
to America to grease the great machine
that grows the strawberries that I love,
sent by diesel trucks to the coast,
and by jet to Hawaii
where I can sit in my bed
and enjoy the pleasures of an ordinary man,
kissing that sweet kiss all night long,
without a care in the world.

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Replies:

Re: Holy 'Franken Food!' -- The Serpent, 00:36:45 04/28/03 Mon
- Nothing wrong with political poetry -- Drummond, 00:25:48 04/29/03 Tue
  - Re: Interesting. -- The Serpent, 20:25:09 05/01/03 Thu