The Man Who Knows Just What Is Going Down

1.

He is twitching

Cringing

Crying

Grinding enamel almost down to fangs

As he observes the passing nocturnal things

And listens for the plot,

Each fragment of alien thought

Is not beyond his sight,

So his eyes don’t blink all night

Uncomfortable until the breaking dawn

Is the man who knows just what is going down.

2.

The children in their children masks

Are calling him to task

For never wanting to play

When he walks through the park each day.

He smells their breath

Peanut butter

Jelly

Rats

Flesh

Stinking, toadlike, greedy and unwashed

Seeking the chance to suckle blood and milk

If he is fool enough to stop and talk

And they know just as he does why he has to run,

It’s a coward that knows just what is going down.

3.

The shatterers

The hiders of small things

The trippers

Droppers

Rolex stoppers

Can hide behind the protons of each atom of hydrogen

And jump out when they’re needed most.

They wave him

While pissing battery acid into his oatmeal.

They say “don’t you tell, man, don’t you tell

We gotta make sure that things don’t work too well.

If you treasure your alarm clock, Xanax, Gameboy

You’d better not,

Cause all the badass boys who run this town

Don’t care if you know just what is going down!”

4.

The president is made of dogfood

Banana peels

Motor Oil

And Commodore 64 motherboards.

He points, as he shrieks

(You know he only points and shrieks):

“The earth is declaring war on all of you

Especially the man who knows just what is going down.”

5.

Trembling under a churchpew

Rolling around in his filth

He shrieks (like the president shrieks):

“Christ has come and come and come and gone

I know cause I know just what is going down.”

6.

The purpose of names and faces fade

In the paranoid Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade,

Specifics of who was shot and who survived

All seem to be sloppily contrived.

There are no different items on the news

And there’s plastique in everybody’s shoes.

The flood is here and we float to see and drown

He warned us

He knew just what was going down.