JONATHAN REEVE

WHAT MAN IS THIS

what man is this

who survived the extinct species
and the monkeys that throw feces
to fuck up the emperors with his funk soliloquies

who strove to live a life of irony and synchronicity

what man is this
who killed his sea monkeys with bananas
and drank dumbo under the table,
who beat the crap out of Cain with the carcass of Abel,

what man is this
who drew x'es on charlie brown's eyes
to give banality some mortality
who answered in the form of a question and
who knew the answer to the question, is our children educated.

what man is this, who once sold a cow for magic beans and came back with a hen that lays golden eggs and said, this is not a metaphor, muthafucka, even if the beans were ecstasy and the eggs were the impossibility of war in a global free-market economy.

what man is this
who swung into the taverns sayin' gimme a milkshake...no, make it a malt,
who gave the primordial soup a dash of salt

who ran up Broadway shouting COOKIE and shoving nilla wafers in his mouth
who used nanotech prototypes to paint a copy of Déjuner sur l'Herbe on the head of a pin,
who stuck himself repeatedly with diaper pins to prove he was still alive;
who died with eighty-seven species of lice in his dreads,

who was loved so much by the pigeons that they devoured him in his sleep.

what man is this, who made the world safe for democracy and then trampled on democracy

who died trying to save his chicken from drowning and drowned himself

who learned to ride a bike at age three and learned to speak at age four

who misrecognized his friends and thought he recognized strangers
who hopped from city to city fishing in aquariums with elephant tranquilizers,

who often dreamed he was hunting broccoli,
who rolled down all the great hills of the world and pissed in all the great rivers

what man is this
who was dada when it was cool to be surrealist and proletariat when it was cool to be Bolshevik, who built a geodesic dome house in the 70s and sold it in the late 80s.

who came to new york and found a parking spot

who fell into the cultural billabongs and dissolved,
who knew how loud was assimilation and anonymity, and so he named everything he saw...

what man is this, who drank only when the situation demanded it, which was all the time,

who got milk when they told him to got it,

who got elected by promising no new taxes and then raised taxes,

who followed in the footsteps of the greats
and then erased the footprints

who created a golem out of Kraft macaroni and cheese totally by accident,
singin' om mani padme mmmacaroni omm,
and trained it to make supplications before a wall of broken televisions,

what man is this
who passed the doochie on the left hand side,

who never grew tired without first growing angry
who hid the obvious and made public the obscure

who worshiped only a mosquito god in the temple of malaria
and cried when mary tyler moore started dating lou.

who walked home in the wrong direction,

what man is this,
who took everything literally,
who F'ed on the F train, found his homies on the G train, got in line for the Q train,

who rode his stone horse to a pile of crusty sunflowers
who cracked a can of frozen orange juice concentrate and spilled it in the dry ingredients

who carried the carnival to seven digits
who wrote four grapes equals four raisins on the calculus world

who curled up at night with a cactus yelling "icky wicky spicky wee!"

what man is this
who stood between the dark of PT barnum and the light of WC fields

one small step for man, one giant leap for what man is this
jfk, lbj, the cia,
who eats his own tail,
America,
who strung up stale popcorn and dried berries,
and promised to eat them if anybody made him mad,
who fired the liquid poopy cannon at the rebel island,
who set a softshoe down on the grid, who lived the life almost and
never cried like spilled milk

WHAT james dean, albert einstein, charles lindberg, louis armstrong, America,

MAN marilyn monroe, amelia earheart, emma goldman, billie holiday, America,

IS jazz, ganja, the Hindenburg, love, sex, anarchy, humanity, the great war, humanity, crutons, blue plate specials, route 66, empty streets, urban ruins, new York,

all that can be bought and sold,
all that is decaying,
all of anything that is beautiful by being displaced,

whatever we can trample with these boots,
whatever sidewalks we can crack with these roots,
all we were,
all we are,

THIS.

Jonathan Reeve was born in Siberia, in that bubonic-plague- infested summer of 1861 that shall remain frozen in our collective unconsciousnesses as "the summer of floobety hoo-ha." Thanks to his hatweaving skills and a little help from a Siberian snowbunny-turned-mechanic defector, he broke out of jail with a snowmobile cleverly concealed in his birthday cake. The next few years found him arduously building a rudimentary land-bridge to the New World, which eventually led him to New York. Now he studies poetry at NYU and mumbles incoherent things about pop culture and humanity. He is the author of two books on Susan Lucci Press, "Make Your Penny Look Like This" and "The British Are Coming, And They're Very Disappointed In You." Find them at his reading series, Urbana-- Thursday nights at the Bowery Poetry Club.