Puppets (poem)

PUPPETS

window screens

into the exonerated,

Hollywood plays the boys and girls,
wire arms and legs, recyclable innocence
(the agent mamas and network papas,
scrubs for the pipelines
to the fountain
of scalpels)
and youth
that speak

stories about stories for our bedtime entertainment

for our children's containment.

one of those standard guide-to-life boxes
to educate, inform, (seduce, induce, reduce…) with a tap, tap

(side note: man-manipulated polymers of that multi-purpose opiate)

this is sad. this is funny. laugh, hilarious.
this is attractive. sneer; this is less than desirable.
this is love: pant and steal, I say: this is love.

the ultimate
parent
spouse
companion. in a box

the talk and talkers
all so life-size. how giant they must be,

the ventriloquists they are Geppetto
has created
a monster, he must have smoked a pipe or two
before a towhead angel (impersonator: wings and paper maces
topped with stars are every story writer's cop-out)
emerged (nothing but a capricious

twinkle in that belt buckle)

old man and his
credulous clown-son

Geppetto. were you dreaming?

Pinocchio. just the beginning.

now,

Geppetto is
the donkey's end.

and the lonely, meaningless, thirsty senior citizen,
mad in his
gray moo-stache, mad in his what-you-see-is-what-you-get spectacles
proudly humbled, self-serving-good-intentioned

toy maker.
in your room of Rube Goldberg clocks.

Pinocchio. Pinocchio, his boy (everybody's boy).

Geppetto, your buyers, even the regulars and the millionaires,
just like you and your boy.
just like you and your boy.

weave spin synthesize,
your little miracle tangled now, in millions of strings.

encrypt duplicate,

a renaissance dark age
of technology. back into the drafts
in the corridors,
stone glass caterwauls
with singed
breath

as I shamelessly sit, pressing,
my notebook computer.

Pinocchio is dead, Geppetto.

Geppetto, your ghost chaser is

dead.