Tony Medina

Broke Escape from New York

& Crucible

Broke Escape from New York

In New Yawk

The sun has asthma

And the wheezing ain’t easy

One bird says to another,

“Who you callin’ a pigeon, bitch?”

And the bus exhaust fumes

Are jealous of the Canada air

Stealing its shine

It’s apocalyptic shit like dis

That makes me glad I

Married a mask at a quiet

Unassuming

Out-of-state ceremony

And my exile wasn’t wasted

Writhing on the ground

Like a breakdancer

With no cardboard or linoleum

Just a bum lung and busted knee

Kicking and twitching and slobbering

Talmbout, “I KAHNT BRIIFF

I KAHNT BRIIFFF!!!!”

Crucible

What joy to dash along sun-splashed streets with

French bread clutched underarm like a football

Passed pied pipers playing their flutes till the cows

Come home to roost or roast like puns of mixed metaphors

Only to arrive home to find your mum raise a

Rolling pin to your drunk dad’s skull—a world of hate

Between them—riding their marriage of heaven &

Hell till the wheels come off or until a flatfoot copper

Catches you stiff as a lamppost tied in knots—the curve—

The nerve of such flighty space creatures with no sense

Of humor or humanity but bent TV antennas for brains, might as well

Put wheels on your heels & roll off into the sunset like an

Abandoned dream that caught a flat tire or ran out of gas

O, aren’t we all just Darwinian monkeys, bespeckled Bonobo, thinking

We’re so smart with cars on our shoulders in a Sisyphean

Herculean Superman nightmare parading around like chefs

Of the future all dressed in white like Muslim Santeros drinking

Mama’s milk from a bottle as the rest of the world stands idle,

License plate on its ass waiting for our closeup like Norma Desmond

Only to be upstaged by a fat-ass climate change bee—of course it stings

Like a dog you house & feed whose poop you scoop only to have it

Bogart your bookshelves forcing you to eat prefab TV dinners like white

People in the 1950s thinking they’re hip for sending Jesus out in an

Uber to get their pizza—when it’s not even Super Bowl time

But Revelations—where dopey cubicled Willy Loman rejects turn

Into pouty fish floating upstream like spent sperm or that scene in

Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston finds out he’s not in

Kansas anymore—or on another planet—but New Yawk

What the fuck did they expect when they stole all this land from

People who fed them housed them & taught them to wipe their ass

Now you know what it means to be belly-up like a dead fish

In an oil spill waiting to be gutted