Time Goes Boom By Jay Passer

Time goes by

People get married

Bombs detonate

Babies are born

Vapes

Cars

Guns

assembled by robots in factories by night

Arrests made

Anthills stepped on by sex-crazed atheists 

Spirits ascending up

Souls descending down

The spiral staircase of yin and yang and

vice versa

From pigment, to paint, to

daguerreotype 

To film, then video

Newspeak digitized

Pigeon shit droppings on your hot dog bun

Kids quit playing doctor

play lemmings instead

Shopping mall land mines

Ghetto grenades

99% of the time

I stay out of it

leaving spoken word to the

comfortably deranged

Ice Capades, fire breathers 

State funerals, peasant baptisms

the Circus of ancient Rome was no picnic at the park

Severed arms and heads by the cartful

Legs chewed off by tigers

Say

It’s your birthday 

turkey day, 

or Dia de Los Muertos

D-Day

D-Day?

Like when your country is invaded by hostile armed forces?

Featured in black-and-white footage

so you can’t smell the fear

I stay

out of it

Auction house incest

Deforestation parades

What occurs to me naturally 

could vaporize an elephant 

Say minds could be read

I’d instantly be institutionalized 

Here comes Fed Ex

Can you sign for this?

Sure thing

Say

Can I fuck your daughter?

It’s a date

Cars speed by

Helicopters overhead

Aliens combing the Earth for priceless resources 

Sewers operating unconsciously

Oceans with indigestion

Landfills brimming, toilet tissue optional 

Dumbass, d’ya think

you actually wash 

your own hands?

Ever consider

maybe you're just watching them

wash each other?

The poetry and prose of Jay Passer has appeared in print and online periodicals, magazines and anthologies, in subterranean basements and men's room stalls, cave walls and space shuttles, since 1988. He is the author of 15 collections of words, symbols, diatribes, missives, isms, schisms, rain drizzles and blood fizzles. A cook by trade, he's also dabbled in daubs, photo-montage, reverse Feng shui; while failing at mortician's apprentice, news butcher, and criminal savant. Passer's most recent chap, Son of Alcatraz, was released in February of 2024 from Alien Buddha Press, and is available on Amazon.