Nausea

Bean Newton

Issue 8 * Spring 2002

It was once said of the Bean poems that "[they] remind one a bit of Existential Nausea." To this, their defender said, "Well, isn't that the point?" Indeed, upon the re-discovery of this particular poem in the files of the editor, all such suspicions along these lines are confirmed. The poem speaks for itself, but the sentiment speaks for everyone. -- E.W. Wilder

Nausea

All of these: the lights bombarding to green to yellow to red to the acrid rain from the Chemlawn truck that turns the grass green, grass green
The cats fighting on the bed-this is nausea. The red light the blue light, the one fish the two fish . . .Q. A large container of the angostura bitters? A. Nausea.
In the form of carnival rides and new new sheetrock smelling slightly of nicotine, that new new drywall, mud caking on, filling in the gaps between the city and the burb; the jagged edges of green hanging on like that last scrap of flesh from a botched amputation, nauseating truckloads of diesel chicken; flash-frozen diesel fish, cold as the waters the were extruded out of; the bread truck baked golden brown, a big loaf of nausea; abbreviated horn-blasts; the kid with the booming Acura; a failure to mean as the head talks nausea, blue because of bad color; Bosnia on a small, red map are nausea all. Hallmark-but I needn't even mention the flesh-pink glitter-souled nausea. Cheap rhyme and elevator hip-hop pop piped through the rusty wires into no-smell office cut-pile beautiful, the building always new, the song always recycled chucked-up vertiginous off-ramp-on-ramp skyway skyline viewpoint nausea over Colorado Springs, Colorado. It's all trick, baby, trick from the gold-plated Dayton rims to the bed that spins a calliope Tejano tune stomach-churn. Salena, the Three Tenors, and a choking of Celine Dion (and it's not what you're thinking) am nausea also.
I've seen the best mines of my generation broke down beaten for the sake of a dime, a tee-spot, a crack rock a bag as white as white arm black and blue tattoos, the flag, a tiger, a broken cross. Lightening seethes across the heady waves of heavenly nausea, counterpoint to flashing ak-ak and the drone of a hundred B-17s. Baldhead, barbed wire and brass knuckle nausea, road-rash and crotch-rocket nausea, robot nausea, monster-truck nausea, sport ute nausea, nouvelle cuisine nausea, plastic-princess and Price Is Right nausea, broke the blasted elevator pump. The elevator pump is broken! The blasted, blasted elevator pump has seized its last! Don't look down, lady-you won't like what you see! And he stunk and yelled in three coats and two pair of pants and a duffel full of wadded-up plastic bags, and I thought, since "mainstreaming"-well, maybe this guy got mainstreamed too. I'd finally found another tortured soul who could see through the miasma, that pall of smog. But no, he too only knew that tightening of the gut, that temple-spinning, the sweats and the migrainous head that overflow the gastric juices.