There are too many people in the world.

A baseball star hits home runs and breaks records,
then breaks his bat.
He tips his hat and the grand game ends in a tie,
puts on his suit after a shower,
shows the crowds his smile,
then is whisked away into a limo.

The vanguard follows.

They take him to the new Titanic,
and he sits back
and welcomes the chill of the icebergs as the boat leaves the pier.

Into a microphone, he whispers a greater good, for all to hear:
"Look at what I've left behind."

The bar is thronged by people and thrown astray
as they press to hear the press
introduce the sacraments of a newborn Jesus (in a baseball cap)
on television.

Lucifer takes a table with some angels, and before they close the doors,
God damns everything and joins them for fellowship and fries.

I pick up a knocked-over ashtray and muse over the entrails of a cigarette.

A simple doomsday scenario.

Pt.I
At a fancy restaurant
People eat
Shitting heartache under the table

I’d rather wait in the hay
Watching the goats grow,
The Devil go by and
The soft sentimental ponies dying

I’d rather
The moon drink up all the shine.

The first part of a multi-part deal.

Home, home on the range

We bring cerebral landmines and exploding minds.
We are pleased to aim, though no accuracy is required.
Shake the sad sniper's hand,
the forlorn fellow with a pointless collection of bones,
who sits on an inornate throne of bush and camouflage.
"My sight is broken."
His sight is broken, and he doesn't have the range.
"I don't have the range to hit them before they hit the fallow fields,
the workers."
They look so downcast as they harvest the shrapnel patch,
and one bends over to pick up his hand to pick more fruit of the turmoil-- which tills and churns the soil-- and his torso falls off.
He looks up and laughs with a mouthful of dirt, discombobulated.
"No, no. This isn't home at all."
The dysfunctional overlord drives them on with nary a shot
or vodka.
The artist crumples up the paper, but it doesn't have the range
to reach the trashcan--
"No good. Maybe next season."
-- and the worker can't help but feel incomplete.

It's crap. I know.

Icarus enters the restaurant with dirty shades.
It is a shady, seedy place;
hardly eponymous or agricultural.
I blow up balloons and ask him of
flight and failure and Grecian urns,
and the Manager runs out from the furnace
with stormclouds over his head
and shouts that my pay's been cut to a minimum.
Keep the casualties to a minimum, I am told.
"Icarus, let's get smoothies, before
the sun emerges, surges, then singes you."
He is a smooth talker.
He coaxes me into standing guard at the bar
--Icarus puts on his sunglass--
and bears away with the barmaiden (waitress).
I pull up the filthy blinds to watch
them go and grope and grab each other
by his car, but they pull away.
Icarus forgets his wings, so I
try them on myself, gathering
enough balloons to find the proper altitude.
I cannot fly.