Norman J. Olson: Two Poems Copyright © 2000 by Norman J. Olson and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 Two Poems Norman J. Olson Walking Along Highway 61 and Thinking about Attending a Reading by an Internet Expert Crocodiles slink through the elephant grass as the screen blinks with vacant idiocy. logon, logoff, logon, logoff The internet is like one of those outfits that calls in the evening after work and tries to sell me credit cards and aluminum siding. Why would anyone voluntarily subject him/herself to that? logon, logoff, logon, logoff Shoplifters lift shops in this capitalist swamp and I saw on the news that the alligator man is being moved to minimum security. Walking along Highway 61, I am logged on to the wind and the noise of the cars that speed by (I guess there are not many walkers anymore). A biting wind rasps my cheeks and dirty snow crunches underfoot. Half the people alive on the planet today, I read recently, have never used a telephone, much less the fucking internet. logon, logoff, logon, logoff I heard that some techno-guy who spun software and thin air into gold is giving a reading at Runimator Bookstore. His empty book supposedly shows that the internet has actually changed the way human beings think--at least, fat, rich, and white skinned human beings who live in Chevrolets and Subarus in the outer Olson 2 Copyright © 2000 by Norman J. Olson and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 ring suburbs of rich and rotting Midwestern towns and drive past me on Highway 61 in the winter. Unsafe Sex in the Suburbs There is no expiation. There is no interdiction. There are only crows roosting in the crabapple tree. The apocalypse turns out to be a cellular problem and the soul is nothing but a bowl of chemical soup. Somebody give Bernini a Martini . . . Neatly trimmed lawns curse the sod that pounds grass up into the naked air. Grass grows best in rotting flesh but fertilizer will do. The raucous birds cry and that is the only benediction the atomic number of carbon has to give. God is pushing a lawnmower across the pellucid sky. Sixteen-year-old girls have saddled up the apocalyptic horses and are riding among the pastel houses. They cannot see that the gene pool has become an oblong swimming pool filled with acid rain, dead cats and chlorine. My hands are shaking even as I type this . . . Cathedrals of bones are floating above the holy Ganges which is desperately polluted. Words fall from my fingers like shit from the asshole of the damned but still, I carry an elephant of awareness on my back. Capitalist birds are gobbling sunlight like they Olson 3 Copyright © 2000 by Norman J. Olson and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087 own a thermonuclear furnace and happy crows are roosting in the twisted blades of the crabapple tree.