July 2004

 

Electric Vacations

 

What do you offer those

who never had a bigger problem

than juggling ambitions and

pitting one whim against another?

 

Tell me all you know of demographics,

show me your dedicated point of view,

a simple what’s-wrong-with-this-picture

of people thrashing about, caught between

the pie chart spokes of cosmic over-choice.

 

My apologies if you are the wrong people,

if you are the real horse nuzzlers who like

to daydream off-world, outside the laptop.

 

You don’t strike me as the type to

stagger away from the 24/7 pig-pit luau,

hula-hula dream of orgiastic possibilities.

 

You ignore the peevish, the selfish,

And the small minded, while you

let the truth wear you out first, and

you slowly turn over the new leaf

that shakes and sparks the will.

 

Your vacation partner, darkly intertwined

is savoring a delicious irony with the aid of

mankind’s gingery I-told-you-so electrons.

 

Enjoy the smell of going-it-alone, roughing

your austere digs with or without meringues.

 

Look out the wake,

careful the back thrust, 

the pure hell exhaust,

 

lobster people break-out of their shells,

schemers and dreamers alike, cost free,

say they must be drenched in the process,

get lost on vacation hops to poetic gusto,

diving the deepest trenches of the psyche.

photo by Richard Cox

Copyright Jimmy Warner, 2004