Timbuktu

Arctic winds slash infinities across this geography quiz.
Believing I'd still have that streptococcus, I didn't study.
Christmas is coming: icicles dangle their frozen syntax
down the urban eaves like Nebraska's peninsular claw
etching a boot on the Euphrates River. Sorry, I'm an MTV
fanatic. Daily, Mom threatens to launch me to Timbuktu,
God help her! I guess this will go down on my permanent
high school record, that rectangle of spiteful sentences
iced over like the towering Alps of Delaware, the sinister
jack-in-the-box of Alaska. This TV-show crisis in Iraq
keeps me in constant jitters. I refuse to lace a bullet strap,
loop it across my slumped shoulders as a boom-box radio
mangles "Black Dog" as though my boys in Zep were on
Norway's seventh moon. Versailles, the capital of Vietnam
(or is it The Netherlands?), whips us with a giant jungle tail.
Protons burst & flare over harbors silent as these wine-dark
questions, i.e. #9: What U.S. state begins with the letter 'J'?
"Russia" (it's a choice). My belly is rumbling like Hawai'i:
strings of volcanoes blooming from the Baltic. Goofy crash
test dummies slam & die inside my black lungs, coughing
up blood as red as the Red Sea! Oh well, I amuse myself.
Violently Mr. Morschauser glares at me as though I'm Eve
whipping Adam with his extra rib as our vengeful God
x's out the great Library at Alexandria. Try some Prozac,
you fool. Out the window, the Gobi teems with baobab,
zebra stripes, & nibbled skeletons of the Schenectady PTA.

Copyright © 2007 Mike Dockins All rights reserved
from New Zoo Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission