The Pub

Ad-libs from a Poem on Pentecostal Living Lollapalooza 08

Joe McHale

It all started with
A cat, the artful
Chest of a reclined
Woman tattooed
With PEACE

And singing songs
Of summer’s
New Mythology;
Her gay heart
And broad hips;
The times
Verisimilitude
Expressed in
Present tense
Jubilees falling
From the ancient
Strings of Greek guitars.

Around a fountain,
Red stone gravel
Lawns and trampled
Streets, the emblems
Of a song’s impurity
Stand before us
Like a stain on wasted
Papers and yellow
Cigarette tongues,
And a feline shadow
Rises with her cliché
Loss of innocence,
Billowing in a row
Like the pillars
Of White Houses,
As a teenage Fad
Peddles battery
After battery
Into Silence,
Reverberating off
Loose snares
And cymbals:
Could we be anything
More than stranger
Faces in a crowd
Of witnesses;
In gardens,
Maybe Eden’s jungle
On a third-world
Island where Earwax
Tastes like bubblegum,
And everywhere
There’s a poet
Feeding music
Through a coconut
Microphone?

Joe McHale is a Senior English Writing major from Wheaton, IL. He hopes to one day become a farmer on a plot of land neighboring Wendell Berry’s and to visit Sri Lanka and Thailand.